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

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

Biographies • Activists, musicians, writers, and a Roman empress are all riveting subjects in these exceptional biographies.

Memoirs • From algebra to the arts, the dirt beneath our feet to the outermost universe, grief to hardearned wisdom, these ten outstanding memoirs take readers just about everywhere.

Hip-Hop Biographies & Memoirs • Hip-Hop celebrated its fiftieth anniversary on August 11, 2023, marking the day in the Bronx in 1973 when music changed forever during a backto-school party as Clive Campbell, best known as DJ Kool Herc, used two turntables to create a continuously looping beat, launching nothing less than an artistic and cultural revolution. The books below tell the stories of outstanding hiphop innovators and their consciousness-raising achievements.

Leah Redmond Chang • Leah Redmond Chang writes biography and literary nonfiction, with a focus on women’s history. Her books draw on her extensive research in the archives and in rare book libraries. A former tenured professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University, she has also been an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London. She lives with her husband and three children in Washington, DC.

The Apartment, by Ana Menéndez • In The Apartment, winner of the 2023 Booklist top fiction award, Ana Menéndez tells the stories of successive tenants living in 2B in The Helena, an art deco apartment building in South Miami Beach that is hurried to completion in 1942 to house military personnel. The apartment becomes a stage on which lives are enacted decade by decade over 70 years as the city changes around it and tenants, ranging from a military bride to a concert pianist, political exiles, a Vietnam War veteran, green-card seekers, and ghosts, cope with complex feelings and predicaments. Menéndez’s episodic, apartment-centric novel is richly evocative in its time span and touches of magic realism, a fresh addition to a long line of profound apartment-building stories. Below are some other captivating variations.

Atlas Variations • Paging through an atlas is to have a world, or even the cosmos, at your fingertips as maps, illustrations, tables, charts, and other infographics track the lay of the land or the heavens, recount history, and look to the future. The atlases below visualize all sorts of terrains and forces at work upon them, from wildlife to culture, conquest, and climate change, each a vehicle for illuminating armchair explorations.

January 2024 • The Top Ten Adult Fiction and Nonfiction Chosen Monthly by America’s Library Staff

January 2024 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.

Documentaries for Armchair Travel • Armchair travelers can find sweeping vistas, intimate personal stories, and deep cultural resonance in these recent documentaries, featured in Booklist’s Documentary Preview. Ask your library about DVD or streaming database options for viewing.

Biographies & Memoirs on Audio • “Read by the author” are four words you’ll see a lot of on this list of standout memoirs and biographies featuring actors, authors, athletes, and more.

Happy New...