You asked (for a return of our super-soft OG hoodies), and we are answering.

In celebration of Book Riot’s 15th anniversary coming up on October 1, we’re bringing our original hoodies out of the vault.

This is a truly limited run, no shenanigans. Preorder yours by September 8, and you’ll have it in your hot little hands in time for cozy reading season.

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You’ve probably come across the term “webtoon” on the internet at some point. Maybe you learned that one of your favorite K-dramas started out as a webtoon. But what is a webtoon, exactly, and when did the format get so popular? We have a primer for that. 

A webtoon is a type of webcomic that is designed to be read on a digital device. 

Today, there are lots of places to read webtoons (Lezhin, Tapas, Tappytoon, Manta), though Never Webtoon remains the largest platform by far. 

Read more on the history of webtoons and get recommendations in our webtoons 101 primer.

No one could deliver a line quite like Tim Curry. Given the material and chance, he would growl, snarl, sneer, and smirk his way through anything. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this made for singular audiobook listening when Curry was on the mic. Here are a few highlights to remember him by:

We’ve been covering the most popular Libby checkouts for a while, and one thing that’s clear is that they are very much influenced by things like bestselling trends, popular book club picks, and more. In other words, the books popular on Libby mirror what’s popular in the book world at large.

So, it makes sense to assume that any list sanctioned by BookTok, with its more than 80 million posts, would drive up checkouts on Libby for specific titles.

Below is a look at some of the books on TikTok’s 2026 Summer Reading List and the percent their checkout numbers changed on Libby from April 2026 to July 2026:

The most interesting thing about these numbers is that some of the books that garner the most attention on BookTok (romances, basically) either increased the least after the announcement of the Summer Reading List (Alchemised by SenLinYu, which went viral on TikTok last year), or decreased by a lot (The Abby Jimenez title). 

I’m curious to see if these numbers represent a developing pattern. Are the BookTok darlings changing? Is interest moving towards historical and dystopian fiction, for example? Or, is this just a one-off thing that is particular to the Libby-BookTok intersection? Time will tell. —EE

Are you playing along with Libro.fm’s audiobook listening challenge? One of the tasks is to read a book by a South West Asian and/or North African author. Here are three we recommend!

—VD

John Manuel Arias is the author of Crocodilopolis, out this week from Bloomsbury. Below, he recommends three must-read Costa Rican writers.

Costa Rica is often described as lush—one pictures its forests housing 5% of the world’s biodiversity: orchids, monkeys, reefs with resplendent fish. But its literature is just as sprawling, as full of life as any tropical landscape. Publishers like La Universidad de Costa Rica or La Editorial de Costa Rica keep Costa Rica’s rich literary legacy thriving. Costa Rica’s National Book Festival graces San José on the final Saturday of August. When one needs a beach read, Costa Rica is the place to go. Here are some writers to get you started. 

Yolanda Oreamuno was an author far ahead of her time. Of her beauty, it was said the sun stopped to gaze at her; yet her first and only novel contains large, imposing shadows, cast by Costa Rica’s inescapable patriarchy in the 1940’s. La ruta de su evasion (Her Way Out) documents a family under the violent rule of its despot patriarch—two sons fighting against their own replication of their father’s bitterness, and his wife, ill and bedridden, staring down death: the only way out of her loveless, brutal marriage. Revolutionary and illogically gorgeous, Her Way Out is a feminist tome that has inspired Costa Rican women for generations. 

Yolanda Oreamuno sadly died at the age of 40, in the Mexico City home of her best friend and legendary poet Eunice Odio. Odio was neither of her time nor ahead of it—her poetry exists outside of our understanding of it, a world both expansive and tenderly interior. In her four-party collection El tránsito del fuego (The Fire’s Journey), Odio creates the world anew in an epic mythology, complete with gods, destruction, and an elemental fury that has made her work cult classics. 

Traveling farther south to the province of Limón, Quince Duncan still graces the pages of Costa Rica. He is known as the first Afro-Caribbean writer to publish in Spanish in Costa Rica. With an impressive bibliography of 14 books over the past 50 years, including Los cuatro espejos (The Four Mirrors) to Las raíces vivientes (Living Roots), Duncan transformed and continues transforming the literary landscape of Costa Rica, focusing on Black characters and their experiences throughout the country, but especially in the rich culture and history of Limón.

Did you know? When Winterson’s evangelical mother found her reading books other than one of the six approved books in their home, she burned them.

Children of Blood and Bone is in the news for its adaptation—check out our 2018 interview with Tomi Adeyemi.

Gay hockey saves libraries, and you can too.

Dating is hard enough. Don’t lie about reading.

Don’t miss the trailer for the adaptation of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood.

Get a first look at Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Vanessa Diaz, Jeff O’Neal, Erica Ezeifedi, and Danika Ellis. Thanks to Danika Ellis for copy editing.

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