News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Bookish News
- Amicus Briefs Filed in Texas ‘Book Sexual Rating’ Law Appeals Case (Shelf Awareness)
- Most Parent Trust, Respect, and Feel Safe With Librarians: Book Censorship News, Dec. 1, 2023 (Book Riot) Lots of links to book censorhip stories in this one.
- Romance Bookstore Under the Cover Opens in Kansas City, Mo. (Shelf Awareness)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- Booker judge admits it’s nearly impossible to read ALL the books. (Literary Hub)
- The Bestseller List is Broken (Danika Ellis, The Deep Dive [a Book Riot Substack]) Note: you’ll have to subscribe to The Deep Dive read this, but you can sign up for the free version.
- A Primer for Protecting and Supporting Bookstores (Publishers Weekly)
- Corrupted Bloodlines and the Gothic Ancestry of The Empire Strikes Back (Tor.com)
FaRoAdvent – Free Fantasy Romance Tales
Want a free fantasy romance tale each day between now and Dec. 24? Sign up for FaRoAdvent, and every day, you’ll get a link to download a short story or novella. December 1 was a stand-alone novella from Amanda Bouchet. Stephanie Burgis is also participating, which is how I heard about it. You’ll need to download some of the books from BookFunnel; the Amanda Bouchet novella had links to download straight from several ebook retailers, including Amazon’s Kindle store.
One caveat: Lisette Marshall’s short story for Dec. 2, which I downloaded as a Kindle EPUB from BookFunnel, was 1MB in size, so be forewarned that some of the stories may take up an unexpected amount of room for their length.
Free Fiction Online
- “Four Words Written On My Skin” (Jenn Reese, Uncanny)
- “Five Functions of Your Bionosaur” (Rachael K. Jones, Small Wonders)
- “The Year Without Sunshine” (Naomi Kritzer, Uncanny)
Book Lists
- Book Riot’s 25 Best Christmas Books of All Time, from picture books to adult. Gotta say, I think they left out some classics. Not one version of The Night Before Christmas? Not a single Jan Brett title? And how they could leave out Dylan Thomas’s marvelous A Child’s Christmas in Wales is beyond me. But there are a lot here that I haven’t read, that will be worth checking out.
- Best Romance Novels of 2023 (Washington Post) (behind paywall if you have used up your free articles for the month)
Bookish Quote
