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Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.
2024 has been such an exciting year for adaptations. Wicked is a big one coming out next month that everyone is buzzing about. This year has also seen adaptations of favorites like Pachinko, Heartstopper, and many more. But with so many options in theaters and to stream at home, there are some fantastic adaptations that have flown under the radar. Here are three great book-to-screen adaptations that you might have missed. Best of all, they’re all available to stream now!
We’re right in the middle of Halloween season, which means your displays probably need a little refreshing! Whether you’re looking for picture books, YA horror, or queer gothic, we’ve got you covered with these creepy, eerie, and shudder-inducing reading lists from Book Riot and beyond!
October continues to be one of the heaviest-hitting months for new book releases of the year. Understandably, publishers want to avoid November—both so books don’t get lost in election coverage and so titles are out before holiday shopping season. That means that this is yet another very exciting week in new releases.
For one thing, we have the surprise fourth book in the Southern Reach trilogy series by Jeff VanderMeer! Fans of Annihilation will be eager to return to Area X. Speaking of worlds we’d like to return to, The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke is also out today, which is set in the same world as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell! It’s just a little bit shorter than the original: it’s 64 pages versus Jonathan Strange‘s 864 pages. But that’s not all!
If you want to read more about the genre, Emma Allmann’s essay “What is Magical Realism?” is a great place to start. But here, I’m interested in a specific phenomenon: feminist magical realist books. It’s an interesting trend, albeit not a new one, and it makes for some powerful reading.
The books on this list range from mostly realism with smatterings of magic to magic-infused realism that’s not a far cry from fantasy. Whatever you’re looking for, I hope you find it here!
I’m continuing the Halloween theme this month by recommending some queer books about ghosts—but that doesn’t necessarily mean horror. I’m fascinated by the way ghosts can be used in stories to mean all sorts of things. There are the usual hauntings, but ghosts don’t have to be the thing that goes bump in the night. They can be the hero of the story or even the love interest. (Looking at you, Cemetery Boys.)
So, for this round-up of queer ghost stories, I tried to represent a range of ghosts. We have a ghost main character, controlling ghosts, a ghost co-worker, a ghost sanctuary, ghost animals, and ghosts as grief.
