Riot Headline Book Riot’s 2025 Read Harder Challenge

Michelle Anne Schingler

Michelle Anne Schingler, a former librarian and Hebrew school teacher, is the managing editor at Foreword Reviews. Her days are books, books, books; she knows how lucky that makes her.  Twitter: @mschingler

A Morning At the Decatur Book Festival

What do you do if given only a few hours to explore a book festival? 600 authors, blocks of booths, ...

Riot Round-Up: The Best Books We Read In August

We asked our contributors to share the best book they read this month. We’ve got fiction, nonfiction, YA, and much, ...

No One Wants To Read A “Healthy” Love Story

I am vehemently anti-Fifty Shades of Grey. From my perspective, Christian Grey is a bully whose approaches to sex reek of ...

I Only Read (Non)Fiction: On Breaking Out of Your Reading Bubble

Dear Fellow Readers: What’s with the inclination to limit ourselves to one half of the library? Let’s recalibrate the way ...

How Dewey Do: Head-Scratching Library Categorizations

Let’s dispense with niceties first: in praise of Melvil Dewey’s book classification system, the convenience of being able to locate one ...

Astral Projection And Other Ways I Imitated My Childhood Reading

Lie down in some quiet spot outside, where you can concentrate. Close your eyes. Your spine should be directly parallel ...

So You Want to Ban A Book: A Mad Libs Petition

It happens to the best of us: we need to alert authorities to the presence of a dangerous book among ...

Bibliomancy: Finding Direction in Random Lines of Books

Here’s a quirk that, though not unique to the South, gets amplified in the Bible Belt: the decision to trust ...

When Your Book Club Asks Too Much of You

Fellow book clubbers: is saying “absolutely not!” to a group selection verboten, or just in poor taste? My question conceals ...

The Secret Bookish Life of FRIENDS’ Rachel Green

A persistent untruth: cool girls don’t read. Having never been a cool girl myself, that lie did not affect me ...