Brooklyn's librarians have spoken-and they've delivered a reading list with more range than the G train on a good day. The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) has unveiled its 100 favorite books of 2025, a staff-curated mix of fiction, poetry, memoir, kids' picks and wonderfully odd gems that prove librarians remain the city's most reliable tastemakers.
Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children's author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his own real-ale brewery and was even once a columnist for this newspaper, beginning one piece in 2011 like this: In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare.
Theo Chang is thrilled his family adopted a new cat, but the cat is less thrilled about his new home. Can Theo find a way to befriend the kitty before his family gives up and takes him back to the shelter? Both sweetly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, with black-and-white illustrations by Pura Belpré Honor artist Kat Fajardo, Theo Chang welcomes readers into Mrs. Z's class where friendship and fun rule the school.
"Her voice is as familiar to me as my own," says Theo Downes-Le Guin, youngest child of hugely influential Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin. "That voice is inside my head while I'm reading." Most aren't so fortunate, even if they feel at home in Le Guin's Earthsea and Hainish universes. Before her death in 2018, Le Guin was unanimously regarded as the leading light of American science fiction.
As a child, McKinnon had loved books about slightly oddball characters, like those found in Roald Dahl books. Her favorite heroine was Pippi Longstocking, whom she played in a kindergarten performance. She loved the character so much that she would show up at school for years in a full-on Pippi costume, complete with pipe cleaners in her hair to mimic the heroine's iconic protruding red pigtails.
Some people text, some e-mail, but there's almost nothing better than getting an actual letter in the mail, especially if it's a letter poem. "A letter poem is when you're addressing someone else," explains poet Joyce Sidman. "The way I write them, you're starting out saying, 'This is why I'm writing to you. This is why I'm intrigued by you. And these are the things I want to know about you.'"
When Beverly Cleary's fictional Henry Huggins made his debut in 1950, he was a third grader whose "hair looked like a scrubbing brush and most of his grown-up front teeth were in." He was also bored. Apart from having his tonsils out and falling out of a cherry tree, "nothing much happened to Henry." But pretty soon after we meet him, by page three in fact, Henry comes upon a scrawny mutt who stares at him eating an ice cream cone and the adventures begin.
If you're looking for new bedtime stories to read to your kids, you may want to check out Stephen King's latest book. Yes, normally that would be a pretty terrible recommendation, but the horror novelist's new book is for children--and anyone who loves classic fairy tales. On Tuesday, HarperCollins published reimagined version of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel.
There are no guilty pleasures in childhood. It is only as an adult that I feel a certain sheepishness when recalling one of my favorite picture books, "Ann Likes Red," by Dorothy Z. Seymour, which was originally published in 1965. Wedged between the vaunted volumes of Gorey and Scarry, "Ann Likes Red" stuck out both literally, for its squat stature, and literarily, for its hazy lesson in self-assertion.
To mark 70 years since Kay Thompson's beloved children's character first took up residence in the "room on the tippy-top floor," the Plaza Hotel is hosting a free, two-day celebration packed with sugary treats, scavenger hunts and serious nostalgia.
