Booklist Reader

Published by Booklist, an imprint of the American Library Association. Booklist Reader features diverse book and audiobook recommendations, for readers and listeners of all ages. Filled with high-interest, themed lists that showcase books for your family or book discussion group.

From the Editor & Publisher

Booklist Reader

Library Workers as First Responders

Banned Books & The First Amendment • These books illuminate the issues at stake in this time of escalating book challenges. Each attests to the long history of book banning, censorship, and other attacks on our First Amendment rights and valiant efforts to fight back. An essential aspect of the battle to protect our freedom of access to books and our freedom to read is awareness of the law and how it has been threatened and defended. These works, including excellent reference titles, present the facts and offer frontline testimony. Our hope is that by being well-informed, we, the readers, will be empowered.

Native American Fiction • Native American fiction writers explore the traumas and repercussions of conquest, genocidal violence, and attempted cultural erasure as well as resistance, resilience, and renewal in dramatic tales featuring compelling characters and complex situations, courage and wonder.

Vanessa Lillie • Vanessa Lillie is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the author of the best-selling suspense novels Little Voices and For the Best. With fifteen years of marketing and communications experience, Vanessa hosts a weekly Instagram Live event with crime fiction authors and was a columnist for the Providence Journal. She lives on Narragansett Island in Rhode Island.

Food Books • It happens every day, over and over: we have to eat. It’s a pleasure and a privilege as the most outstanding food books from the last year show through lenses practical, historical, and aspirational.

Cookbooks That Are Always in Season • Folks have been cooking and eating in-season foods for as long as there’s been folks. Renewed interest in eating sustainably and its positive effects on ourselves and our environment inspired a raft of recent cookbooks that focus on seasonal eating, by way of either their organization or recipe labeling.

Comics Cookbooks • Images are an essential part of learning a new recipe, and while the vast majority of cookbooks feature photography, illustrations, especially in the form of comics, can be a particularly effective visual aid: comics can incorporate instructive diagrams, highlight key actions or techniques, and distill directions down to their essential components, all in an approachable, inviting package.

Adult • Get your hands on these hotly anticipated books, all out this month.

November 2023 • The Top Ten Adult Fiction and Nonfiction Chosen Monthly by America’s Library Staff

November 2023 HALL OF FAME TITLES • The LibraryReads Hall of Fame designation honors authors who have had multiple titles appear on the monthly list since 2013. As of the October 2018 list, when an author’s third title places on a monthly list via library staff votes, the author moves into our Hall of Fame.

Celebrating Native American Heritage Month

PBS Feature

Erin Bennett on Audiobook Narration • Erin Bennett is an audiobook narrator and actress whom you might recognize as the voice of Elin Hilderbrand’s books. She spoke with Booklist about the SAG AFTRA strike and the implications that it might have on audiobook narration.

Indigenous Narrators • As contemporary stories from Native American and First Nations authors become more widely available for all readers, so do narrations of these titles by voice actors with Indigenous heritage. The following narrators are Booklist reviewer favorites. With more narrations every year, we can’t wait...