October 21, 2026 View Online | Join All Access | Listen We’re thrilled to announce that Zero to Well-Read has won two Signal Awards! The podcast—part book club, part English class—took home silver for Best New Podcast and bronze for Arts & Culture. If you’ve listened, watched, or shared the show: thank you! If you’ve…
Halloween is definitely in the air. There are pumpkins and mums aplenty, alongside creative home decorations of spiderwebs, skeletons (I unabashedly love both those 12-foot ones and the groundbreakers!), and black cats galore. This is the first year that my own daughter has had plenty of opinions about what she likes, piping up as she…
No matter how hard you try to convince some readers that they are not obligated to read every book that was ever once designated a “classic,” there are some people who just really want to read books that a culture decided everyone has to read at least once. Or maybe they want to read these…
As the trees on the mountains yellow and redden, most mornings feel chilly enough to pull on an indie bookstore sweatshirt before pitter-pattering to the kitchen to fix a latte. With autumn’s arrival, my reading habits—like the foliage—shift in notable ways. I reevaluate reading goals. I consider what subjects or genres or vibes I hope…
Who doesn’t love a great inheritance story? Whether characters are bequeathed money, companies, property, etc., we enjoy finding out who got what. It’s like a mystery-within-a-mystery when you have to wait along with the characters to find out who got everything, like in Crooked House by Agatha Christie. Then there’s The Westing Game by Ellen…
There’s a reason so much horror these days is set in the past: nothing is quite as creepy as the unfamiliar and unknown. For so much of human history, we’ve worked on hunches and guesswork to explain the world around us. Out of this guesswork grew the myths we all know and love today about…
Today’s Featured Book Deals $1.99 Playworld by Adam Ross Get This Deal $1.99 Julia Song Is Undateable by Susan Lee Get This Deal $2.99 The Young Will Remember by Eve J. Chung Get This Deal $1.99 The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee Get This Deal $2.99 Thornbird by E. Kennedy Get This Deal $1.99…
We’re thrilled to announce that Zero to Well-Read has won two Signal Awards! The podcast, which is part book club, part English class, took home silver for Best New Podcast and bronze for Arts & Culture. In each episode, hosts Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky present a deep dive into a classic or cultural significant…
Barnes & Noble quietly released its picks for the Best Books of 2026—so quietly that most of us missed it. I went through all 17 categories, from Fiction to Business Books to eBook Series, to highlight the queer books included. These are just the titles I recognized as having queer content. Unfortunately, I don’t yet…
When people hear that a book was challenged in a school library, they usually picture one of two endings: the book gets pulled, or the book stays. Pulled is the headline. Stays sounds like nothing happened at all. I’m a high school librarian in Virginia, and I can tell you that “stays” is rarely that…