Former President Barack Obama will have a new project on his plate during the final stretch of the midterm elections: talking about books. 
The 65-year-old announced this week that he’s launching a six-episode Audible <a href="https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/president-barack-obama-to-host-a-great-book-on-audible?srsltid=AfmBOopP848zJuv-3RMZ-_qAIvpbux4zovLmEB18P8BdLCViebY7wH6P">podcast</a> on September 24, less than six weeks before voters head to the polls in November. The announcement comes as Democrats battle for control of Congress, and Obama remains an influential campaign surrogate and fundraiser for the party.
“At a time when fewer people are able to sit down with a book, it’s important to remember the joy and power that can come from reading. And some books don’t just tell a story — they change the way we see the world,” Obama <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Db3QizRuKvM/">said</a>. “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America.”
Titled “A Great Book With Barack Obama,” the podcast will explore six books that helped shape the former president&#8217;s leftist worldview: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. 
Each episode will feature Obama discussing one of the books with a guest to “explore why they resonate, how they can shape our understanding of ourselves and each other, and why literature matters now more than ever.”
“I hope listeners will be inspired to discover or rediscover books that change the way they see themselves and the world,” Obama said in an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Db3QizRuKvM/">Instagram post.</a> 
The timing puts the podcast&#8217;s launch squarely in the home stretch of the midterm campaign, as Obama continues to play a pivotal role in Democratic politics, picking up the phone to help heal wounds left by divisive primaries and hosting fundraisers ahead of November.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/el-sayed-shrugs-off-hasan-pikers-9-11-comments?author=Jacob+Wheeler&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=10&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=El-Sayed+Shrugs+Off+Hasan+Piker%E2%80%99s+9%2F11+Comments">The Daily Wire </a>previously reported that Obama personally called Michigan Senate Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed following his narrow victory over establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI). Obama did not endorse either candidate in the race.
Obama is also expected to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-to-headline-dem-gerrymandering-fundraiser-in-posh-marthas-vineyard?author=Drew+Berkemeyer&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Obama+To+Headline+Dem+Gerrymandering+Fundraiser+In+Posh+Martha%E2%80%99s+Vineyard">headline a Democratic fundraiser</a> later this month on Martha’s Vineyard to benefit the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), as Democrats continue to grapple with financial challenges at the national level.
The event, hosted by former Attorney General Eric Holder, will feature “dinner and a discussion” with the former president, according to an invitation first obtained by <a href="https://punchbowl.news/article/campaigns/obama-ndrc/">Punchbowl News</a>.

Former President Obama Joins NYC Mayor Mamdani On A Visit To Child Care Center

During Midterm Home Stretch, Barack Obama Will Launch New Podcast… About Books

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In 1999 there was a popular song that I learned all the words to when I was way too young to know what I was actually saying. The chorus to “What Would You Do?” by the band City High included a line that said, “What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor ‘cause he’s hungry / and the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money?” 
At the time I didn’t think much about the message behind the pop song. But I can’t say the same holds true after slogging through 656 pages of Kathryn Stockett’s latest historical fiction release, “The Calamity Club.” This was the author’s highly anticipated follow-up to her runaway hit in 2009, “The Help.”
Stockett used way more words to say essentially the same thing as the brilliant lyricists behind “What Would You Do?” The entire book is a defense, and an unrealistic portrayal, of “ethical” prostitution that’s as predictable as it is exhausting. The author tries to convince the reader that having sex for money is fine if it’s for a good cause. 
The extra-long book, which is currently holding strong at #2 on the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-and-e-book-fiction/">bestseller list</a> in the fiction category, was most certainly a calamity. It was also sorely lacking an editor — not to mention a reality check.
It’s interesting how the book’s description doesn’t explicitly mention the gist of the novel, which paints prostitution in a sympathetic light. I can’t say I’m privy to the marketing agenda of publisher Spiegel &amp; Grau, but my guess is that the team was intentionally vague to attract a larger audience. Even in the age of OnlyFans, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-onlyfans-success-story-thats-missing-a-dark-reality">explicitly glorifying sex work</a> is a hard sell for most readers.
“In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high,” the book’s synopsis <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228820257-the-calamity-club">says</a>. 
The wokest among us will call it female empowerment, of course. But what’s even more baffling is how Stockett tried to convince the reader that the female characters would line up to sell sex for quick cash and, even worse, that this was all inevitable. 
The action takes place in 1933 as the Great Depression wreaks havoc on the nation. Stockett repeatedly mentions well-to-do families who lose everything, including the millionaires down the road and the main characters themselves, who are hoodwinked by a lying husband/son who is both terrible at investing and secretly gay. 
Women have the right to vote but lack the ability to purchase mass quantities of condoms without being shamed or outright denied. The implication is clear: These women are oppressed, and their only recourse is to sell their bodies for money. What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor? What would you do if you were about to lose your childhood home? Your daughter? Your sanity?
There is pushback from the main character, the wise spinster sister Birdie, who is painted as being more clever and level-headed than anyone else in the book. But eventually she caves to the pressures of Charlie, who was previously arrested and thrown in prison for solicitation, or possibly just for speaking to a black man, it’s not exactly clear which. Charlie thinks a short-term brothel is the answer to all their problems. And she has enough life experience to put it all together.
Spoilers ahead. The main conflict in the book is financial, but it’s also about sex-based discrimination. The women are painted as being resourceful, but they are also products of their time and therefore unable to earn living wages on their own. Given that the men in their lives are useless, they are forced to take matters into their own hands. Which, in this case, means resorting to the world’s oldest profession.
Charlie becomes the madam of the temporary brothel, and Birdie is her skeptical accomplice. They are always one step ahead of getting caught: by the police, by the homeowner whose mansion they are using to entertain customers, and by the overtly religious busybody in town, Garnett Pittman, the hypocritical chairlady of the local orphan asylum who becomes president of the Anti-Vice League for the state of Mississippi.
It’s worth spending some time on the novel&#8217;s primary antagonist. Garnett is cartoonishly evil and is the one who pulled strings to have Charlie sterilized and institutionalized to protect Garnett&#8217;s husband&#8217;s secret — that he fathered the now 11-year-old Meg during a one-night stand when Charlie was 17. Garnett punishes Meg at the orphanage for her parentage and conspires to keep her mother locked away forever.
Modern fiction is chock-full of hypocritical Christian characters just like Garnett. It’s almost a given that once devout Christianity is mentioned, that person will be one of the bad guys. Meanwhile, the true virtuous people are always the ones questioning religion, questioning authority, and generally ditching traditional moral virtues for a “do what I want” existence.
It sounds a lot like the modern day progressive party, come to think of it.
Stockett says during the “Author’s Note” section at the end of the book that she was inspired to write the story because of a law passed in 1928 that allowed the sterilization of women deemed to be “imbeciles,” including “promiscuous women.” She felt compelled to speak out against these atrocities, but instead of arguing against eugenics, she wrote a book that essentially says short-term prostitution is a great way to solve financial hardship.
One of the downfalls of the book is that the brothel never gets busted. The homeowner, a well-to-do older woman who would ostensibly not agree to her family home being turned into a house of ill-repute, goes along with the plan after she figures out what’s going on. So do the maids and Birdie’s bank manager boyfriend. This kind of behavior from all the main characters would be far-fetched in 2026 and feels even more so in the mid-1930s.
As a reader, it feels like the whole 600-plus page story is barreling toward disaster. But then in the end there’s just nothing. The women make a lot of money. The homeowner pays off the mortgage and keeps her home. Charlie gets her daughter back. The cops bust a different, more corrupt brothel instead. The women involved get in, get out, and then move on to live the rest of their lives completely unscathed by their actions. 
As popular as it was, “The Help” became controversial because it centered on a white savior narrative, marginalizing the voices of black domestic workers, as the critics said. “The Calamity Club” has so far been embraced by mainstream critics because it does none of that. Instead, it presents a problem and provides a solution that’s free from legal or moral consequences, despite how ludicrous that is in the real world. 
But why would the critics take issue? They’re a lot more scandalized by racial narratives than they are by prostitution for a good cause.
Last year, OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain went viral for <a href="https://x.com/sophieraiin/status/1932540900749758841?lang=en">chastising Bonnie Blue</a>, a pornographic film actress, for “the trauma she’s causing herself and so many women.” Rain was upset that Blue’s stunts of sleeping with thousands of men in a single day were turning her profession into a laughingstock and said her antics meant it was “no longer about female empowerment.”
Rain’s issue is not realizing that being a little bit of a porn star is not possible, just like Stockett’s version of prostitution doesn’t make it morally acceptable. It doesn’t matter if the women only slept with men for money for a short time. It doesn’t matter that they paid off their debts. In this book, the ends do not in fact justify the means. 
Blue’s antics do the world a favor because they are honest. Her line of &#8220;work&#8221; is gross and seedy and should be seen as such. Stockett is never able to make a case for “ethical prostitution” any better than a vegetarian can justify ordering Big Macs from a McDonald’s drive-thru. 
“The Calamity Club” is moral relativism at its finest, which is probably why the leftists are fawning over it. 
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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This Bestseller Turns Prostitution Into ‘Female Empowerment’

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Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of &#8220;Pride and Prejudice,&#8221; which is due for <a href="https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/pride-and-prejudice-cast-photos-release-date-news">release by Netflix</a> this fall. Certainly, this most beloved of Austen’s novels — about first impressions and their limitations, as experienced by protagonist Elizabeth Bennet and her eventual husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy — offers plenty of food for thought about love and marriage. But the truth is that many of Austen’s precepts in &#8220;Pride and Prejudice&#8221; apply narrowly to her own time and make only a clumsy transfer to ours. 
In Regency England, with its system of primogeniture, nearly all women needed husbands to achieve any measure of independence or financial security. To remain unmarried was, for most women, to exist on the charity begrudged them by male relatives (as the Dashwood sisters and their mother do at the start of Austen’s &#8220;Sense and Sensibility&#8221;). This is why Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend in &#8220;Pride and Prejudice,&#8221; marries the insipid, detestable, self-important Mr. Collins. Such a storyline is inherently dated. Today, of course, Mr. Collins would either shape up or become an “incel.” 
That’s partly because 21st-century women in first-world nations are, by and large, fortunate enough to be in the position of the final Austen heroine who debuted within the author’s lifetime: the financially independent heiress Emma who declares near the beginning of Austen’s eponymous novel that she will never marry. 
So, if we’re going to search for modern lessons about marriage in Austen’s 19th-century corpus, we would do well to focus our attention on &#8220;Emma.&#8221; Austen’s depiction of a woman who eschews marriage because she does not need to be a wife for material reasons is as prescient and prophetic as it is unflattering. 
The lessons Emma learns — that she is not as capacious, insightful, or charitable as she would like to believe and that her ostensibly disinterested conception of romance and marriage is shallow, self-important, and transactional — are ones that many of today’s young women desperately need. 
What makes a man husband material?
To pay attention to dating discourse today is to recognize that, for a host of reasons, young men and young women are increasingly <a href="https://www.research-live.com/article/features/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613">fed up with</a> one another. Fewer and fewer Americans are <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/state-of-our-unions-2026-the-dating-recession">dating</a>, <a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/">marrying</a>, or <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-sex-recession-the-share-of-americans-having-regular-sex-keeps-dropping">having sex</a>. 
Apparently, the battle of the sexes has become something of a cold war. 
Males’ <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/author/elizabeth-grace-matthew">extended adolescence</a> and failures to launch no doubt play a central role here. So does the reactionary misogyny evinced by the so-called “manosphere,” where disgruntled <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/yelling-at-ambitious-young-women?r=1g6s4d&amp;utm_medium=ios&amp;triedRedirect=true">young men</a> pine for the days when the Charlotte Lucases were compelled to marry the Mr. Collinses against their own inclination. I am not discounting either of these left-coded explanations for falling rates of coupling up; there is truth in them. 
That said, many college-educated women’s disdain for non-college-educated men in particular has less to do with those men’s failure to grow up than it does with their failure to conform to left-coded elite pretensions and pass various ideological litmus tests. Thus, our ever-increasing political polarization both reflects and serves to perpetuate the growing gulf between the sexes, as more young women attend college and veer hard Left while more young men eschew college and lean Right. In this context, of course, fewer young men seem, to many young women, like plausible life partners. 
Austen has no brief for this kind of female arrogance. 
When Emma manipulates her less fortunate friend Harriet into rejecting a marriage proposal from an honorable farmer (and persuades her that she is in love with a smarmy clergyman instead), she does so out of nothing but self-important prejudice. Emma is sure that a man who works with his hands (and is ignorant of some of the finer manners she is accustomed to in gentlemen of her own class) could never be <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/07/lifestyle/nyc-womens-insanely-high-dating-standards-are-screwing-them-over-expert/">good enough</a> for her friend. Of course, Emma’s unwarranted meddling nearly wrecks Harriet’s happiness. Meanwhile, Austen throws her heroine’s myopia and solipsism into sharp and unforgiving relief. And, indeed, Emma learns some humility and gains some valuable perspective. 
Unfortunately, many of today’s <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/bridget-jones-25-dating-young-women/">similarly situated women</a> seem determined to put incomplete, infantile notions of what makes a marriageable man ahead of both their own and others’ well-being. 
Is marriage just another transactional negotiation?
Emma’s perennial insistence that she has no interest in marriage herself falls by the wayside when her former governess’ stepson comes to town. Frank Churchill is dashing and intriguing. His admiration and love would be a feather in Emma’s cap. That fact, more than anything about Frank himself, piques her interest — until she learns that Frank is flirting with her only to maintain the secrecy of his engagement to someone else. 
Emma’s shallow interest in romance as self-aggrandizement finds its modern echo in popular videos from internet influencers who declare that they won’t date men who don’t get them an <a href="https://cheezburger.com/46295557/new-york-woman-demands-first-date-order-an-uber-to-pick-her-up-sparks-debate-when-he-refuses">Uber on the first date</a> or <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/07/02/lifestyle/womans-money-relationship-opinion-divides-because-youre-a-man/">reflexively pay</a> for luxury versions of everything. That is, they won’t deign to date a man unless he essentially portends and embodies a full-life “upgrade.”
As if the upgrade to being a married couple weren’t enough. Which, to these sorts of women, it isn’t. 
When women relied on marriage for financial security, independent wealth like Emma’s obviated the presumed need for nuptial partnership. Now that nearly every young woman earns (or could earn) an income to support herself, marriage writ large has become a want (or not) rather than a need.
Do today’s women want the right thing? Too many of them, it seems, do not. 
Emma’s ultimate partnership with her neighbor Mr. Knightley is as fine a portrayal of the egalitarian, companionate marriage as one could hope to see. Both must admit a degree of fault in how they thought about the romances of others. 
Only, unlike in the case of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, the greater fault — and therefore, the greater need for character growth — lies with the woman. Emma learns that marriage is not only a vehicle for the upward mobility of which she has no need, but a context for the happy embrace of the holistic responsibility to which she is called.
&#8220;Pride and Prejudice&#8221; may be the Austen novel we want. But more than ever, &#8220;Emma&#8221; is the one we need.
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about">on Substack</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Jane Austen’s Most Uncomfortable Lesson For Modern Women

Was a public school counselor in Oregon participating in hate speech when he displayed two kids&#8217; books about the gender binary? That&#8217;s what a federal appeals court ruled last month.
The court determined Roderick E. Theis II violated hate speech legislation by showcasing the books “He is He” and &#8220;She is She.” It also ruled that displaying these books, which affirm the gender binary, was not protected under the First Amendment.
In the wake of the unreasonable ruling, the books&#8217; coauthor, Ryan Bomberger, spoke to The Daily Wire about the case and the work conservative Christians must do to save the country. He didn&#8217;t hold back.
The gender binary isn&#8217;t evil
Bomberger said “He is He” and “She is She,” which he cowrote with his wife Bethany, are rooted in love.
“We wanted to take this insane pronoun issue and just make something that spoke truth about the human condition and celebrate what it means to be a boy, and celebrate what it means to be a girl,” he said. “It celebrates motherhood, fatherhood, the means by which all of us exist. So, what&#8217;s more inclusive than a book that speaks to the &#8230; heterosexual self-identity of more than 90% of Americans? How is that not inclusive?”
Bomberger rejects the idea that the books could be seen as harmful in any way. 
“The books are so beautifully illustrated. They are diverse. As someone myself, I&#8217;m mixed white, black, part Asian, part Native American. I&#8217;m a mixture of all things,” he said. “It&#8217;s laughable that the school sees these books as being hostile in any way, shape, or form.” 
The school district isn&#8217;t just being unreasonable here. It&#8217;s hypocritical. Bomberger pointed out that many of the teachers showcased BLM or LGBT propaganda, which he called “highly discriminatory against the nuclear family, against fatherhood, against black conservatives” and “anti-science,” respectively.
“What&#8217;s laughable to me is this is the same school district that pushes things like &#8216;How To Be An Anti-Racist,&#8217; which has an animus toward white people, [and says] in fact, the only way to deal with past discrimination is present discrimination,” Bomberger said. “So that book violates Oregon&#8217;s law.”
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Battling in court
The fact that a scuffle over his commonsense books made it to court, he says, was by design. Reports said Theis, who worked for the InterMountain Education Service District for over 15 years, was fired after a teacher recorded him showing the books to some eighth graders. Bomberger says that the whole situation was a setup.
“There was one complaint from a teacher who only saw the covers. This teacher never even read the books — only saw the covers and objected to the covers,” Bomberger explained. “That teacher is the one that set up the two 8th graders who came and insisted on reading the books. It was not genuine interest. It was set up. That was the teacher that actually recorded the whole interaction, where Rod allowed them because they kept pressing him to read the books.”
Bomberger expressed sorrow about the recent ruling, arguing that it will set a bad precedent in the West Coast.
“My hope is that Alliance Defending Freedom does appeal it,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They have a very strong case.”
Though Theis’ appeal was rejected by the court, ADF lawyers have <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/fired-school-counselor-loses-again-after-free-speech-fight-over-gender-themed-books-his-office">promised</a> to “continue to defend Rod’s First Amendment freedom to express his views like other employees.”
Bomberger said the lower court misunderstood the case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not stop a football coach from kneeling midfield to say a quiet prayer.
“They said that [Kennedy’s prayer] was a private, personal thing. It wasn&#8217;t private. It was very public,” Bomberger said. “It was during his duty and his role. So simply based upon that, I think they have a case and the fact that the First Amendment doesn&#8217;t get stripped from government employees when they walk onto taxpayer-funded property.”
When woke fights back
Bomberger also argued that the recent case shows that wokism is not dead, but simply has been rebranded, hiding in the shadows while it grows stronger.
“We need to be forever vigilant about where this stuff goes,” Bomberger said. “The public school system is so deeply rooted in ideologies that are anti-American, that are anti-science, and certainly in many cases that are anti-truth. So, we have to be aware that this is not something that&#8217;s going away anytime soon.”
The Left’s goal is to fake outrage, foster ignorance, and silence dissension, Bomberger said.
“Well, honestly, we hear the phrase all the time: &#8216;Ignorance is bliss,&#8217; and apparently, it&#8217;s a goal. It&#8217;s a virtue of the woke Left,” Bomberger said. “They want to pretend that they are in some sort of fascist society where they can&#8217;t get [their favorite] books.”
While Democrats hand-wring about book bans, they don&#8217;t seem to care when librarians make explicit material available to kids.
“They&#8217;re feigning outrage about fake book banning, but [they&#8217;re fine] when it comes to completely inappropriate content for children that is sexually explicit, that is violent and violent and gory, I mean the list goes on and on,” he said. “But it&#8217;s perfectly fine if it could be categorized as a diversity book — diversity being LGBTQ/DEI.”
Bomberger ended by calling on his fellow Christians to stand up and not be afraid to speak the truth.
“The most important thing, as a Christian, I see this first and foremost as a spiritual battle, not just this book battle, but the battle for objective truth,” Bomberger said. “First of all, don&#8217;t despair. There is always hope, but we have to be vigilant. We cannot leave the major influence of our children up to &#8230; the education establishment. We can&#8217;t leave it up to Hollywood, and we often do.”
“We&#8217;re called to love every human being, not every human doing,&#8221; he added. &#8220;So as Christians, we have to see the world differently, and we have to react differently.”
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How This Conservative Author Is Fighting A Real Book Ban

banned books

LGBT

Maybe it’s just that I’m planning a mid-August vacation this year, but it seems to me that a lot of people are waiting until the final month of summer to hit the beach, hop a flight, or just delete Slack and spend a week pretending to be an unbothered billionaire.
If you’re among the many planning a late summer getaway — or if you’re just hoping to get those Goodreads numbers up before football season completely nukes your nights and weekends — here are nine books to keep you busy.
Daikon by Samuel Hawley
What if the Allies planned to drop a third nuclear bomb on Japan? What if the plane carrying that bomb crashed somewhere in Japan and the bomb didn’t detonate? That’s the premise of Hawley’s novel, one of the most exciting books of 2025. “Daikon” largely tells the story of Keizo Kan, a physicist whose wife and daughter have been lost to Imperial Japan’s increasingly futile war efforts. Blending military history, science, and suspense, “Daikon” is the kind of page-turner begging to be tossed on a sandy towel.
Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
I’m genuinely shocked this book isn’t at the top of everyone’s list. Imagine if “The Devil Wears Prada” had a baby with “Gossip Girl,” and that baby then grew up to work in journalism and go through alcohol-induced psychosis. “Workhorse” tells the story of Clo Harmon, a striving editorial assistant at a prominent New York fashion magazine, who falls into the orbit of her wealthy desk mate, Davis Lawrence. Palmer, a former Vogue editor and Manhattan socialite, paints a darkly funny picture of New York’s literati in this exceptional debut, equal parts shocking and delightful.
The Last Kings Of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman
You didn’t think this list would be just fiction, did you? Come on now! Kaufman explores two centuries of history through the interlocking stories of the Kadoories and the Sassoons — two Iraqi Jewish families who sought new opportunities on the Chinese frontier and, in the process, helped create Shanghai and Hong Kong and, in many ways, laid the foundation for our globalized world. “The Last Kings Of Shanghai” takes readers through the tumult of the Opium War and the glamour of the Roaring Twenties, climaxing in the stunning tale of how the rival families joined forces to save 18,000 Jews from the Nazis.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead earned critical acclaim for “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” two novels dealing with the African American experience in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South, respectively. Those are fine books, but a bit too serious for the lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer. So save them for the winter and instead reach for “Harlem Shuffle,” the first in Whitehead’s now-complete Harlem Trilogy. Ray Carney is a furniture salesman and family man whose part-time work fencing stolen goods has left him “bent, not crooked.” Things bend further when Ray’s scheming cousin Freddy enlists his help in robbing the nicest hotel uptown. Turn the AC down, and you’ll feel transported to the steaming Harlem of the 1960s.
Hope I Get Old Before I Die by David Hepworth
This is one of the coolest books I’ve ever read. Hepworth sets out to answer the question that many of us have pondered in passing: How did we wind up with this glut of aging rock stars, and are they even having any fun? Weaving history and pop-culture criticism together with ample British wit, Hepworth explains exactly how rock and roll and the music industry evolved and shaped each other, and how the end result — impossibly priced arena rock concerts headlined by septuagenarians — both explains and shapes the state of our society. 
A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
Can you have a reading list without a Tom Wolfe book? Not in this house. You can’t go wrong with anything the white-suited wonder wrote, but this is his best novel. Don’t let the 742-page doorstop deter you: You’ll fly through this portrait of late-90s Atlanta, a satirical odyssey that weaves together politics, class, race, and college sports. Charlie Croker is the titular man in full, an aging football star and struggling businessman who’s found himself on the wrong end of a collector’s notice. His attempt to claw his way back to the black puts him at odds with the social-climbing Raymond Peepgrass, the downtrodden Stoic Conrad Hensley, and plenty of other colorful characters. Bonus: The Netflix adaptation is pretty good.
In The Shadow Of The Sword by Tom Holland
As with the aforementioned Tom, you’d be safe plucking any of Mr. Holland’s volumes off the shelf. A popular historian who doesn’t neglect actual history, Holland has written excellent books on the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. But this volume, on the rise of Islam, is, if not his best, then his most original. Using careful textual analysis, Holland casts doubt on the standard account of the rise of Islam, questioning the accuracy of Muhammad’s story while showing how early Muslims expanded their religion through war and conquest. It’s like the nonfiction “Satanic Verses.” It’s actually pretty crazy he doesn’t have a fatwa against him.
Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
A recently divorced Manhattan doctor is navigating dating apps, parenthood, and professional neuroses when his wife disappears. Dazzlingly written, funny, and occasionally shocking, Brodesser-Akner’s debut is a probing portrait of modern life that doesn&#8217;t pull punches with its protagonists. You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, you’ll be glad you don’t live in New York. If you like it, skip the Hulu adaptation starring Jesse Eisenberg — fine, but not worth it — and pick up Brodesser-Akner’s truly deranged but breathtakingly brilliant second novel, “Long Island Compromise.”
Football by Chuck Klosterman
I can’t really describe this book because Klosterman’s writing defies description. If you’ve read him, you know what I mean. If you haven&#8217;t, you should rectify that as soon as possible. He is insanely smart and incredibly droll, and he thinks differently from anyone else in the world. This book, his latest, is a love letter to the American game, an encomium to TV broadcasts, college ball, all-star quarterbacks, and more. Pull this one out when the heat and humidity get really oppressive, and you find yourself yearning for a crisp weekend with football on TV.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Nine Books To Bring On Your Late Summer Vacation

Former Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) says she is stepping away from electoral politics after two failed statewide campaigns, announcing that she is &#8220;done for now&#8221; with campaigning — and instead plans to focus on becoming a book influencer on social media.
&#8220;I’m done for now with politics and campaigning,&#8221; Porter said in a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Da1Lp0dxPFs/">video</a> posted to Instagram last week. &#8220;Stay tuned for book recommendations, book ideas and author content.&#8221;
The former California congresswoman has rebranded one of her Instagram accounts as &#8220;Katie Porter Turns the Page,&#8221; complete with the hashtag &#8220;#Bookstagram,&#8221; saying she plans to devote the page to book recommendations, author interviews, and literary discussions.
Porter later told the <a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article316551216.html">Sacramento Bee</a> that she is &#8220;closing the door&#8221; on running for office. &#8220;I am closing the door on being a candidate,&#8221; Porter said. &#8220;I cannot foresee that path back.&#8221;
Porter first rose to national prominence after flipping a Republican-held Orange County congressional district in 2018. A former student and protégé of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), she became known on Capitol Hill for using a whiteboard during congressional hearings to grill executives from major banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other corporations.
Rather than seek re-election to the House in 2024, Porter launched a bid for the Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She finished a distant third in California&#8217;s all-party primary behind eventual winner Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, failing to advance to the general election.
She then entered California&#8217;s gubernatorial race but fared even worse, finishing fifth in this year&#8217;s primary with less than 5% of the vote after initially polling as one of the leading Democratic contenders. Porter&#8217;s gubernatorial campaign was dogged by questions surrounding her temperament after reports highlighted allegations of abusive treatment toward staff members.
During the campaign, a video obtained by <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/08/katie-porter-tears-into-staffer-new-video-00598942">Politico</a> showed Porter screaming at an aide during a virtual event while serving in Congress. &#8220;Get out of my f*cking shot!&#8221; Porter <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-spins-her-profane-rant-against-staffer-into-campaign-ad">shouted</a> after a staffer briefly appeared on camera before attempting to correct one of her statements.
The incident followed earlier allegations that Porter had berated staff members, including reports that she blamed one employee for contracting COVID-19 in 2022, while she was still in the House.
Porter later apologized for the outburst shown in the leaked video but argued that criticism of her demeanor reflected a double standard applied to female candidates.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what I could have said or done other than be a man,&#8221; Porter told the Sacramento Bee. &#8220;We&#8217;ve also seen it is not hard to come up with female candidates for whom the term temperament has been used.&#8221;
Despite stepping away from campaigning, Porter said she still plans to remain involved in public policy debates and civic education while focusing much of her public attention on books. &#8220;It’s partly a reference to a new chapter in my life, to change, but also to something I do a lot, which is turn the page when I’m reading,&#8221; Porter said of her new social media venture.

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Katie Porter Puts Politics On Hold To Focus On ‘Bookstagram’

California

influencer

Katie Porter

Sexism

My preteen daughter came home from day camp the other day complaining about some of the girls in her bunk. She used an interesting phrase I had never heard before, calling them &#8220;phone kids.&#8221; They were children who, even without their phones in hand, seemed wired differently.
It was a fascinating and surprisingly astute observation, and one I was reminded of while reading a chilling cover story in the August <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2vjDB3Nm2eMR35ATnnPit0">issue</a> of The Atlantic. In &#8220;The End of Reading Is Here,&#8221; staff writer Rose Horowitch chronicles not just how reading for pleasure and schoolwork has fallen off a cliff since the advent of smartphones and social media, but how those changes are rewiring our brains.
Horowitch writes, &#8220;Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn&#8217;t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn&#8217;t illiterate. It&#8217;s postliterate.&#8221;
It was that idea of rewiring that made me think back to my daughter&#8217;s remark about &#8220;phone kids&#8221; and wonder whether they really are different.
Over the course of nine years, I gave birth to six babies. What people say about &#8220;pregnancy brain&#8221; and &#8220;baby brain&#8221; is real, and for the better part of a decade, it felt as though my own brain had turned to mush. When <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Youth-Innocence-Indoctrinating-Generation/dp/B0BWNQYLHQ">my book</a> with The Daily Wire came out, I was two months postpartum, with a toddler and a sleepwalking preschooler at home. During one interview, I went spectacularly viral when my brain simply stopped working. Asked a basic question about the central premise of the very book I had written, I completely blanked.
Over the past year, as my youngest turned two, I decided it was finally time to pull myself out of that dreamlike fog and force myself to become a reader again. I recognized in myself many of the habits Horowitch described and didn&#8217;t want to become a phone zombie. As a homeschooling mother, I realized — to my embarrassment — that my children were better read than I had been for nearly a decade.
I made one obvious mistake at the outset. I tried to catch up with my preteens by diving straight into a difficult translation of Plutarch — a bit like deciding to run a marathon after spending 10 years on the couch.
No, what I needed was a couch-to-5K program, but for reading.
It turns out the experts agree. Horowitch writes, &#8220;Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you&#8217;re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.&#8221;
The first place I turned was, somewhat counterintuitively, the internet. More specifically, my friend Brielle Persun, a lifestyle and bookish <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bybrielleann/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.instagram.com/bybrielleann/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1iT-8PW2fvOGzSVGMEDVyR">content</a> creator. Following her introduced me to an entire ecosystem of readers reviewing and discussing books. Before long, I found several creators whose tastes aligned with mine. If they loved &#8220;East of Eden&#8221; and &#8220;One Hundred Years of Solitude&#8221; as much as I did, I figured I could trust their recommendations on everything else.
&#8220;One of my favorite things about BookTok and online reading communities is how they&#8217;ve made reading feel social again and, honestly, made reading cool again,&#8221; Persun told me. &#8220;The internet has introduced millions of people to books they may have never discovered otherwise, while creating spaces where readers can connect, discuss, and genuinely celebrate stories together. As a creator, I&#8217;ve watched books spark conversations, friendships, and even help people through difficult seasons of life. It&#8217;s a reminder that reading has always connected people, and the internet has simply made that connection more accessible and exciting than ever.&#8221;
Social media doesn&#8217;t just spread book recommendations; it helps sell books, too. Josh Centers, publisher of <a href="https://chapter.house/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://chapter.house/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1FsRhX42KCb1CCqoGs02io">Chapter House</a>, which produces beautifully designed editions of classic works for the next generation, told me, &#8220;Despite its many evils, social media has been an essential channel for spreading the word about our books. We have been blessed with many thousands of followers, but we ultimately want our accounts to be off-ramps. If someone sees one of our posts and closes the app to go read to their children, that post did its job.&#8221;
It&#8217;s no surprise, though, that the biggest breakthrough in rebuilding my reading habit came from disconnecting entirely.
On the Jewish Sabbath, known as Shabbat or Shabbos, my phone is off. As my children have grown older, those quiet hours have increasingly become time I can spend reading for myself instead of rereading Dr. Seuss and &#8220;Go, Dog. Go!&#8221; to my children for the hundredth time.
The inspiration for spending the Sabbath reading came from my friend David Bashevkin, who <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-sabbath-is-a-chance-to-read-again-d64c3af2" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-sabbath-is-a-chance-to-read-again-d64c3af2&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0r8cDMVgyB0I2__09zLY-F">started</a> an online community called &#8220;Shabbos Reads,&#8221; where people share on social media what they read over the Sabbath. The goal, Bashevkin told me, is to advertise &#8220;both the beauty of Shabbos and the beauty of reading, that I think go hand-in-hand. In the Internet world, we&#8217;re always trying to maximize efficiency. But what Shabbos and reading are trying to train our minds and hearts to do is to sit with long-form ideas, thoughts, and experiences and let them unfold in our lives.&#8221;
During the week, I set aside screen-free moments as well. When I&#8217;m putting my younger two sons to bed, I leave my phone out of their bedroom. When I&#8217;m sitting in their room for 20 minutes waiting for them to fall asleep (and policing their horseplay), I sit with my hardest reading: a <a href="https://www.ou.org/nach-yomi-starts-again-in-february-2026/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ou.org/nach-yomi-starts-again-in-february-2026/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1EYic44sufdPE5wuzeQ50e">daily</a> Bible study and my frenemy, Plutarch. These short bursts of harder reading help with my stamina for the material that is more uphill than a mere novel.
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Several months into this experiment, I&#8217;m happy to report that I&#8217;m well on my way to a 5K. Maybe I&#8217;m still riding a scooter toward the finish line, but after finding a more accessible translation of Plutarch, I may even be able to call myself a reader again.
***
Bethany Mandel (<a href="https://x.com/bethanyshondark" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@bethanyshondark</a>) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author, with Karol Markowicz, of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.”
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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The Habit Quietly Stealing A Generation’s Ability To Think

Internet

Smartphones

Move over, Leonardo Da Vinci. There’s a new Renaissance humanist on the block — at least, <a href="https://x.com/eve_bouff/status/2075978772629835994">according</a> to the internet. You might know her as the global pop star Dua Lipa, and she wants you to read banned books.
This past week, the &#8220;Levitating&#8221; singer <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DaX7tuJjAKN/?img_index=6">unveiled</a> her new “Manifesto Library” in Portugal, which features hundreds of books she claims were once banned or otherwise controversial. Posing with a copy of Margaret Atwood’s &#8220;The Handmaid’s Tale,&#8221; a book that has now <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/margaret-atwood-handsmaids-tale-new-memoir-60-minutes/">sold</a> more than 10 million copies worldwide, she tells her 650K+ “Book Club” followers that her initiative opens up “conversations around censorship, resistance and the importance of preserving voices that challenge power and refuse to be silenced.” 
There’s only one problem. None of the books in her library were ever “banned” or &#8220;censored&#8221; in the first place. 
Among the <a href="https://vogueadria.com/dua-lipa-banned-books-library/">other titles</a> in Dua Lipa’s library are George Orwell’s &#8220;1984,&#8221; a book that has <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-does-george-orwells-1984-mean-in-2024-180984468/">sold</a> over 30 million copies as of 2024, and J.D. Salinger’s &#8220;The Catcher in the Rye,&#8221; a novel that is read in virtually every single high school English class across the country. I don’t necessarily disagree with Dua Lipa that we all should read these great books, but calling &#8220;1984&#8243; and &#8220;The Catcher in the Rye&#8221; “banned” books is like calling &#8220;Game of Thrones,&#8221; one of the world’s most widely watched TV shows, a “banned” show.
As I <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison/status/2076800465040195947">pointed out</a> the other day on X, you can call anything a “banned book” as long as it was removed from an elementary school library that one time in 1978. 
That hasn’t stopped the political Left from co-opting the term “banned books” to create an imaginary controversy around censorship. Slapping the label onto virtually any novel with a remotely political bent, the Left frequently pretends conservatives are responsible for instituting Nazi-era book bans and for silencing leftist voices. Walk into any indie bookstore in a blue state, for instance, and you’ll immediately be met with a “banned books” display featuring carefully curated titles promoting a certain political agenda. One such <a href="https://x.com/TheMuppetPastor/status/2077019394907996560/photo/1">display</a> making the rounds on X contains Frantz Fanon’s &#8220;Black Skin, White Masks&#8221; (a far-leftist call to violence against “colonizers”), Sally Rooney’s &#8220;Normal People&#8221; (a novel she herself has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1S5bOdJq3U">called</a> “Marxist propaganda”), and Maia Kobabe’s &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; (I will let that one speak for itself). 
Nor is the “banned books” trend a recent invention. Back in 2023, for example, the American Library Association referred to an effort to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries as a demand to “censor library books.” These books, meanwhile (the aforementioned &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; among them), contained “graphic depictions of how children can masturbate,” as well as “cartoons of homosexual activity,” according to a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/library-group-frames-removal-of-graphic-sexual-content-from-school-libraries-as-record-number-of-book-bans">report</a>. And while these titles were removed from certain school libraries, they remain widely available for purchase on Amazon or your local bookstore.  
One can only conclude that the “banned books” trend is nothing more than a convenient way for leftists to promote books with certain ideological messages over others. 
Because the same people crying so vehemently about “banned books” when the books promote leftist ideologies are the very people quietly banning conservative-leaning books from ever hitting our shelves in the first place. 
You can lament the removal of &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; from an elementary school library all you want, but the fact is that the novel continues to enjoy mainstream institutional backing. The same goes for Sally Rooney’s Marxist BDSM fantasy &#8220;Normal People&#8221; and Caro Claire Burke’s &#8220;Yesteryear,&#8221; the internet&#8217;s latest literary fad <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-new-book-that-treats-traditional-wives-like-the-enemy">attacking</a> conservative Christian “tradwives.” Other recent celebrated titles include Pulitzer Prize finalist &#8220;Stag Dance,&#8221; which <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_Dance_(novel)">depicts</a> a “Vegas transfeminine gathering” and NPR’s best book of the year &#8220;Bellies,&#8221; a trans romance that everyone’s favorite celebrity Elliot Page has <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1335490884?lv=shuf&amp;channelId=500&amp;plpRedirect=mhFallback">called</a> “smart, hilarious, and deeply moving.”
I am not here to argue that these books shouldn’t be published in the first place. But it is undeniable that the publishing industry consciously prioritizes far-leftist stories, creating a homogenous reading culture in which contemporary fiction has become synonymous with far-leftist ideology. 
Don’t believe me? Publishing professions can tell you themselves. 
Before a book reaches the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble, it must first go through several stages of the editorial process, the first of which entails the procurement of representation from a literary agent. While several non-fiction literary agencies still (thankfully) devote themselves to conservative authors — someone has to publish Ben Shapiro, after all — the fiction world has become so ideologically captured by the “banned books” mob that it is now virtually impossible to get a book with a more “traditional” message published in the first place. I’m not even talking about books with overtly Christian themes or Zionist protagonists, though those are most certainly no-gos. Literary agents now explicitly <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/claire-draper/">declare</a> that they will not even consider “dated ideals of partnership or relationship.”
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How come the &#8220;banned books&#8221; advocates are the same people making these lists that effectively ban certain books&#8230;? <a href="https://t.co/aW3JNcnxFP">pic.twitter.com/aW3JNcnxFP</a>
— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison/status/2077410105797071155?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2026</a></blockquote>
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I don’t speak leftist very well, but I’m pretty sure that means that this agent won’t look at a book that positively depicts marriage between a man and a woman. 
One could argue that if these were just the preferences of a single agent, then we wouldn&#8217;t have a problem on our hands. But when an entire literary establishment begins declining certain morals and themes, then an entire publishing institution effectively institutes a soft ban on certain books. 
Indeed, other agents <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/thais-afonso/">decline</a> to review “copaganda,” “protagonists who are <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/rebecca-matte/">aligned</a> with American police or military,” or even “<a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/caitlin-white/">morality stories</a>.” Meanwhile, one independent press <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/samiha-hoque/">warns</a> that book submissions “must have a Muslim protagonist,” while a children’s editor at Hachette <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/erika-turner/">requests</a> books that “center marginalized voices, especially related to queer women and femmes.” Editors at Macmillan’s <a href="https://www.flatironbooks.com/staff">Flatiron</a> — the same imprint that publishes Elliot Page and Joe Biden — request “contemporary fiction that centers Black and queer voices” and “literary fiction that explores music and art, friendship, gender, and progressive politics.” 
A single editor’s “preference” for progressive fiction and antipathy towards traditional messages does not constitute a book ban, but when large swaths of literary agents and editors across an entire industry begin parroting the same message, then it becomes clear that conservative fiction — or simply books with traditional moral messages in the vein of &#8220;The Brothers Karamazov&#8221; or &#8220;Anna Karenina&#8221; — are no longer welcome on our shelves. 
The irony is impossible to ignore: the same people who have built an entire cultural identity around &#8220;banned books&#8221; are often the very people deciding which books never get the chance to exist in the first place.
No, conservative books aren’t being banned in public squares or ritually burned at the stake. They are simply being filtered out long before they ever get the chance to find an audience in the first place. 
Banned books are in. But they’re not the banned books that Dua Lipa wants you to read or the books that do not belong in elementary school libraries. They are the books with great moral messages that we once venerated as a society but whose contemporary iterations will be forever lost on us because they never made it to our shelves.
That’s the book ban that should worry us the most. 
***
Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at <a href="http://pensandpoison.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://pensandpoison.org&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784347615882000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2GAA5qwHERjxoFhiQFN_lD">pensandpoison.org</a>. Follow her on X <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison">@pensandpoison</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Real Book Ban No One Talks About

A new bookstore has opened in my Oxford <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/06/inside-the-uks-first-romantasy-shop-bad-girl-books">neighborhood</a>. Given the academic reputation of this city of dreaming spires with its medieval colleges and historic libraries, one might think such a bookstore would cater to a highbrow and scholarly readership. But no, it exclusively stocks “romantasy,” a fusion of romance and fantasy literature, and the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/style/romantic-books-fantasy-romantasy-booktok-cec">fastest-growing sector</a> of the global book trade.
The literary genres of romance and fantasy have been popular for centuries, but their fusion into romantasy is relatively new. Many argue that the 1983 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, &#8220;The Mists of Avalon,&#8221; which upended traditional Arthurian mythology, started the trend. This was followed by Diana Gabaldon’s &#8220;Outlander&#8221; books, blending historical adventure, time-travel fantasy, and an emotionally central romance. These books established the template: fantasy as a stage for romantic destiny, psychological intimacy, and female-centered moral stakes. 
Since the turn of the millennium, the formula has been replicated at scale. Self-published authors began producing romance-fantasy hybrids that traditional publishers had overlooked. According to industry analyses, romantasy has become “the single biggest growth engine in global publishing,” with sales in the U.S. and more recently in the U.K. either tripling or quadrupling over the past five years. Prestige publishing houses remain cautious, but with such astonishing sales figures, one wonders for how long. 
The opening weekend of my local romantasy bookstore, Bad Girl Books, reflected that popularity. Even with pre-booked tickets, there was a line down the sidewalk of excited fans, among whom I waited in some trepidation. Once inside, I discovered there are many sub-genres of romantasy, ranging from “Cosy Romantasy,” where characters bake cookies and muffins to woo and enchant each other rather than fighting battles, to the “Reverse Harem” or “Why Choose?” stories, in which the girl ends up with all the guys. (Imagine a gender-swapped “Mormon Wives” and you get the idea.) As one of the more memorable sub-genres, “Monster Smut” (I won’t elaborate) suggests, sex is a big part of the attraction. The degree of explicit content in books is indicated through a “spice” rating, which was illustrated in the bookstore via the relative number of chili pepper icons on shelves, rather like one might find on the menu of a Mexican restaurant to denote how hot a particular dish is.
Fans of the genre are quick to challenge suggestions that the appeal of the books is their “fairy smut,” even if the available <a href="https://badgirlbooks.co.uk/products/read-smut-tote-bag?variant=53057230799180">merch</a> might suggest precisely that. These books are about self-actualization, their defenders claim, about seeking one’s destiny and achieving empowerment of a predominantly female variety. Yet the sex in modern romantasy stories is vastly different from the way sex was treated in the OG romantasy stories, the Arthurian romances that had a similarly popular appeal throughout medieval Europe. 
Arthurian literature is a storytelling tradition built around King Arthur, his knights, and the mythical kingdom of Camelot. It began as an oral Celtic legend in Wales and Brittany and circulated for centuries before being written down. By the late Middle Ages, authors such as Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory had turned these tales into great romances, establishing the themes we still recognize today: the noble quest, the testing of virtue, the tension between love and duty, and the tragic fall of a once-ideal kingdom.
Two of the most famous written versions anchor the tradition. &#8220;Sir Gawain and the Green Knight&#8221; explores chivalry, temptation, and moral testing through a single knight’s ordeal, while Malory’s &#8220;Le Morte d’Arthur&#8221; gathers the whole cycle into a sweeping narrative of Arthur’s rise and fall. 
In these Arthurian stories, adultery is not just about knights and queens swept up in forbidden passion. Rather, it becomes the place where personal desire collides with the hard work of building an ideal society. When those Arthurian lovers Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde give in to desire, they are not simply breaking a marriage vow but are shaking the foundations of loyalty and duty that hold Camelot together. Lancelot, formerly the most heroic knight of the Round Table, fails in his quest to find the Holy Grail and must slaughter his fellow knights and closest friends to save Guinevere from the punishment her adultery brought down upon her. In contrast to such a tragic story, Sir Gawain manages to reject the seductive advances of the wife of the Green Knight. His reward for staying loyal to his values is moral clarity, public honor, and the respect of his fellow knights.
In medieval struggles between right and wrong, the ultimate battleground is the invisible human soul, where a person wrestles with temptation, pride, and sin. But how do you make a silent, internal, spiritual struggle visible and dramatic for an audience? You externalize it through magic. Magic in Arthurian literature provides the moral framework within which temptation, deception, and testing can occur. Enchantments, shape-shifting, and illusions create the narrative conditions for characters to confront their moral vulnerabilities. Magic is used as the stage for an ethical trial: characters must discern truth from illusion, loyalty from seduction, virtue from glamour.
The modern term <a href="https://www.oed.com/discover/revision-glamour/?tl=true">glamour</a> comes directly from this medieval positioning of magic; the word originally meant an illusion or enchantment that makes something appear more beautiful or desirable than it truly is. In Arthurian romance, glamour is not decoration but moral danger, and the shimmering surface tests whether a knight’s inner virtue can withstand the world’s deceptions. By using this magical frame, medieval authors could show how sin rarely presents itself as ugly; it presents itself as enchanting, beautiful, and magically justified. The knight’s task was discernment: piercing through the magical illusion to see the objective moral reality underneath.
The celebrated author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis, who himself taught medieval literature at Oxford, positioned magic in precisely this way in &#8220;The Silver Chair.&#8221; The more beautiful and appealing a character was in that story, the more dangerous and dishonest they turned out to be. Undergoing a moral trial like that of the medieval Sir Gawain, the children in the story must resist the temptation to follow a beautiful illusion by choosing to do their duty, however unappealing it feels at the time.
Modern romantasy treats magic differently from the old Arthurian world. In the medieval stories, enchantment was a test. But in romantasy, magic becomes a superpower, a personal strength that expresses identity, desire, and emotional intensity. It is something a heroine “comes into,” something a couple “unlocks together,” something that grows as they grow. That shift matters. Once magic becomes a form of self-actualization rather than a moral hazard, the whole ethical framework of the story has changed. 
Alongside that reorientation, sexual consummation becomes the narrative&#8217;s highest aspiration, and the surrounding moral world must thin out to make room for it. Duty, sacrifice, and communal responsibility have no logical place now that personal fulfillment is the story’s guiding star. Honor becomes the first casualty of this new storyline; the quest is no longer to uphold a kingdom, but to complete the self.
The move away from the ideals of Arthurian altruism has been a slow and subtle constant across the 20th century, from T.H. White’s &#8220;The Once and Future King,&#8221; a retelling shaped by his own pacifism during World War II, to the later habit of casting the Kennedy political dynasty as a modern Camelot. Given the uniformly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/books/review/maureen-callahan-ask-not.html">unchivalrous</a> treatment of women by the Kennedy men, the only point of connection with the Arthurian origins seems to have been physical hotness. The mushy 1995 movie &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq6DJ3JF3iI&amp;t=3s">First Knight</a>&#8221; even portrayed Sean Connery’s Arthur, on his deathbed, blessing Guinevere and Lancelot’s union. 
Romantasy is purely the latest manifestation of a broader cultural shift away from duty and toward self-fulfillment. But has this jettisoning of moral absolutes in favor of expressive individualism made us happier? More fulfilled? More free to be our true selves? The statistical evidence suggests not. Data from long-term scientific studies such as <a href="https://midus.wisc.edu/">MIDUS</a> and the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032725008687#ks0005">Dual-Continua Model</a> now show what earlier generations intuited: that when self-expression becomes the highest good, psychological resilience tends to collapse. One recent <a href="https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/virtues-as-protective-factors-for-adolescent-mental-health/">research paper</a> from the U.K. even “explores the decline in adolescent mental health and the weakening of traditional moral frameworks, positing education in the virtues as protective of mental health due to the intrinsic link between moral/existential wellbeing and psychological health.” Well, yes. Quite.
Modern scientific data simply confirm what the compilers of the original Arthurian romances instinctively knew all along: that a strong sense of duty — committing oneself to a community, a code, or a purpose greater than the self — acts as a psychological buffer against mental health crises. A truism familiar to previous generations was “virtue is its own reward.” This is the neglected message of Arthurian romances and a moral truth that all the chili peppers in the world cannot replace.
***
Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Moral Shift Hiding Inside Today’s Hottest Books

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When I first saw the Atlantic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/">headline</a> “The End of Reading Is Here,” I felt a familiar sense of dread. If Rose Horowitch&#8217;s viral essay is to be believed, America&#8217;s reading habit is in a death spiral, and the TikTok generation doesn&#8217;t seem particularly concerned. Many students now rely on AI to write papers and summarize novels instead of curling up in an armchair and cracking a dusty spine. 
The statistics Horowitch cites are sobering. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of American adults read a book in 2022. The American Time Use Survey found that the share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to just 16% in 2023.
But after sitting with the article, I found myself less convinced by its underlying premise. Reading isn&#8217;t disappearing because books have become relics of another era. Instead, books are becoming yet another element of our culture that must be preserved through thought and effort. And like most things, that all starts and ends in the home, with families. 
Reading is a learned skill. More importantly, it&#8217;s a habit. Sustained attention doesn&#8217;t come naturally in a world full of notifications and endless scrolling, but it can be strengthened with practice. Like exercise, reading becomes easier and more enjoyable the more we do it. The love of reading typically begins in childhood, and parents have far more influence over that process than some people may realize.
That&#8217;s why parents start reading to children long before they can understand the words. Expectant parents read to pregnant bellies. Newborns are surrounded by board books. Baby shower invitations increasingly ask guests to bring a favorite children&#8217;s book instead of a greeting card. The implication is clear: the more books, the better.
Children also learn by imitation. No one is surprised when the son of an avid fisherman grows up loving the outdoors or when the daughter of a musician starts playing an instrument. Reading is no different. If children grow up seeing books treated as a normal and enjoyable part of daily life, they&#8217;re far more likely to develop that habit themselves.
At our house, the screens go off two hours before bedtime and everyone must read books. I have conceded to my children’s preference for graphic novels even though they’re not my favorite genre. To counteract this nonsense, we also read books together as a family, working our way through the &#8220;Little House on the Prairie&#8221; series, &#8220;The Chronicles of Narnia,&#8221; &#8220;Charlotte’s Web,&#8221; &#8220;The Secret Garden,&#8221; and most recently, &#8220;Stuart Little.&#8221;
We love going to the library, the bookstore, and local book-themed or reading events when they arise. We even have a membership to Epic – a digital reading platform – so that some of their allotted screen time is devoted to reading, too. 
I am not crunchy, nor am I anti-screen. My kids have tablets and gaming systems. Our goal is not to reject modern technology, but rather to manage it and retain the best parts of life, which include reading. Several of my kids are natural readers who love to get lost in the pages of a book. Others struggle to focus and would rather be doing other things. That’s OK. They keep reading even when it’s hard or they don’t feel like it because habits are often built long before they&#8217;re appreciated.
I&#8217;ve noticed benefits that extend beyond the page. My older children are articulate, curious, and comfortable discussing ideas well beyond what many people expect for their age. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s a coincidence. Reading has almost certainly played a meaningful role in shaping how they think and communicate, just as it did for me growing up.
Research points in the same direction. One <a href="https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/reading-aloud-to-students-shouldnt-get-lost-in-shift-to-science-of-reading-teachers-say/2023/12">study</a> highlighted by Education Week describes the &#8220;million-word gap,&#8221; finding that children who are read to frequently from an early age are exposed to dramatically more language before they even enter kindergarten than children who are rarely or never read to.
And for anyone freaking out about the Atlantic article, it’s also not entirely true that reading culture has disappeared. It merely changed with the times.
Reading isn’t dying; it’s evolving. I know because my personal algorithm is chock-full of book-themed reels, ranging from bestseller recommendations to modern interpretations of classics. BookTok is real, and it’s huge. According to <a href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/booktok-community-50-million-books?lang=en-150">2026 data</a>, BookTok-recommended titles sold more than 50 million copies across Europe in 2025, generating a little more than $900 million. The same phenomenon is happening in the United States and around the world.
Consumers are shelling out hundreds or even thousands of dollars for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-luxury-book-boom-nobody-saw-coming">high-end luxury books</a>. Audiobooks, controversial as they may be, are having a real moment: a recent <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/100588-u-s-audiobook-sales-up-9-in-2025-reaches-2-43-billion.html">report</a> found that audiobook sales grew 9% in 2025, to $2.43 billion.
Every generation decides which parts of civilization are worth preserving. Reading will live on because people, especially parents, pass it down to future generations. 
If we want our children to become readers, the solution isn&#8217;t especially complicated. Open a book. Read it. Let your kids see you enjoying it. Read out loud to your kids even when they’re teenagers. The future of reading will be determined by ordinary families who choose to keep the habit alive.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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This One Family Habit Could Save Reading

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
The mass-market paperback is dead. Last year, <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99293-last-call-for-mass-market-paperbacks.html">headlines decried</a> the end of the once-ubiquitous, affordable, and pocket-sized editions, which have been phased out in favor of hardcovers and standard paperbacks. But amid the fall of a beloved format and talks of an affordability crisis, many readers are choosing a far more expensive option, sometimes forking over hundreds of dollars for their favorite books. 
Mass-market paperback sales have been on the decline for years, and though millions of mass-market editions still sold in 2025, major book distributor Readerlink <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/97161-readerlink-will-stop-distributing-mass-market-paperbacks-at-the-end-of-2025.html">made the decision</a> to stop selling them amid a steep decline in sales over the last two decades and as the wholesaler market has consolidated. In their place, ebooks have become the go-to cheap format for many readers, but even as digital is on the rise, another medium has become a major contender for avid readers: premium editions. 
In 2022, science fiction and fantasy author Brandon Sanderson broke records to have the highest-earning Kickstarter. Readers backed his four-book campaign to the tune of <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/authors-record-breaking-kickstarter-campaign-closes-at-41point7-million.html">more than $40 million</a>. Though Sanderson’s project was unique in its bundles of ebooks, audiobooks, and physical books — as well as merchandise and optional add-ons — each “premium hardcover” book <a href="https://www.dragonsteelbooks.com/collections/the-year-of-sanderson/products/secret-projects-premium-hardcover-4-book-bundle">sells today for $55</a>. Featuring duotone printing for color accents and faux-leather covers, the copies are a step up from the typical hardcover experience. 
Another tier above these editions are leather-bound books. Authors such as <a href="https://www.dragonsteelbooks.com/collections/leatherbound-books">Sanderson</a> sell gorgeous, foiled hardcovers to grace the bookshelves of loyal, aesthete readers. While these books can easily cost over $100, readers who can afford the price tag keep the demand high enough that authors continue releasing these special editions for each new novel.
Books like these offer their readers not only the latest stories from their favorite writers — and these are often big-name writers who pull in big numbers even without premium editions — but also something real with which to experience the story. Custom endpapers, show-stopping illustrations, and embossed covers make the physical form of the story into an artwork. Many editions are also signed, offering readers a hand-done touch to add to their bookshelves. 
Even public domain titles have found a home among these high-end books, often for a non-luxury price. These stories are all available for free online or for a few dollars in a cheaply-made paperback version, but publishers such as Penguin Random House also offer them in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Penguin-Clothbound-Classics/dp/0141192445/ref=sr_1_6?sr=8-6">clothbound versions</a> for around $20. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141392460/ref=sspa_dk_detail_4?psc=1&amp;sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWw">Thousands</a> of Amazon purchases testify to just how much readers are willing to shell out a few extra bucks for a special copy. And on the high end, specialty booksellers such as the <a href="https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/fiction/classic">Folio Society</a> offer premium editions of public domain works with prices hovering at $100. 
Just as younger generations rediscover the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/people-are-ditching-convenience-for-something-they-can-actually-control">joys of physical media</a> like vinyl and CDs, the value of a book you can hold, own, and admire is higher in an age of the ephemeral.
Of course, paper will eventually decay, but the cloth-bound books from the early 1900s and late 1800s that sit on my own shelves are a testament to how long a carefully handled and well-crafted tome can last. Though my shelves also have mass-market paperbacks gathered from the 1990s and 2000s, their covers are tattered at the edges, spines are sporting creases, and pages are held together with packing tape. These are books that are, fundamentally, made to be replaced sooner rather than later. They are not the pages that I could hope to read to my grandchildren or expect to last for decades longer. 
But just as many adult readers are picking up high-quality editions for themselves, there is also a market to pass down this appreciation for beautiful books to the next generation. Passage Press, for example, recently announced the launch of <a href="https://chapter.house/">Chapter House Books</a>, a curriculum of curated classics for young and growing readers. While the content of these books is perhaps the biggest selling point, the books themselves are also beautiful objects. They are clothbound in linen, color-illustrated, and feature classic and new artwork. They are the sort of volumes you hope to see pass from one child to the next, reaching your grandchildren one day as a family heirloom and treasure-trove of reading memories. 
Parents are investing in these premium classic books to craft young minds delighted in and appreciative of art. In a world increasingly full of clicks and bytes rather than pages and real beauty, it’s a worthy investment.
Certainly, there are other repercussions of the fall of mass-market paperbacks (such as author royalty structures and ongoing book sales). And as sad as I am to see the beloved mass-market paperback decay to dust, especially with the memories the little volumes hold, I gladly spend the extra dollars on these luxury books. I want something beautiful on my shelves and in my home, and I hope that one day my children will pick up some of these volumes and discover the same beauty I have found — between the pages, and on the cover.
***
Jordan Jantz is the assistant editor at IW Features as well as a freelance writer, editor, and website designer.

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The Luxury Book Boom Nobody Saw Coming

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Between the lazy days of summer and our country’s upcoming 250th birthday, a well-curated booklist is essential for all families. There are always a bevy of new titles hitting the market, and while several usually emerge that will stand the test of time, I find that the classics are classics for a reason. Just as our nation has seen the inevitable sweep of time and stood strong, so have many of the selections I will be sharing with you.
They may not be the most modern or popular in 2026, but they are still recommended because they offer a beautiful tapestry of our national story. These aren’t simply books about the founding, although you’ll see an emphasis on that time period. They highlight early America and what it looked like day to day. There are, of course, thousands of books I could recommend, but this is a start. 
It’s my hope that you might encounter a piece of literature that is completely new to you and leave its final page with even more hope and admiration for America than when you read the first sentence.
Picture books &amp; read-alouds (ages 3–6)
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Landing of the Pilgrims by James Daugherty. This book is a simple first introduction to the courage it took to cross an ocean for the promise of a new home.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The First Thanksgiving by Jean Craighead George. This retelling gives life to the first feast between the Pawtuxet Indians and the Pilgrims.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall (with gorgeous drawings from my favorite illustrator, Barbara Cooney). This is a quiet portrait of the seasons and work that shaped early New England life — from weaving linens to sheering sheep. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Fourth of July Story by Alice Dalgliesh. The perfect read-aloud for the holiday itself, this book explains the Declaration in words even your youngest can understand. Head back to the Revolutionary period and see how the 13 colonies learned of their independence. (Everything by Dalgliesh is worth reading!)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A Picture Book of George Washington by David A. Adler. This is the story of the father of our country, from surveyor to first president. It cover facts and his biography from his early life through becoming our first commander and chief.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?, Can&#8217;t You Make Them Behave, King George?, Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? by Jean Fritz. Fritz has a way of making American history incredibly witty and re-readable in each of these books. No wonder she’s a Newberry Award winner.</li>
</ul>
Ages 7–9
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A Child&#8217;s First Book of American History by Earl Schenck Miers. This book is a very readable overview that ties the whole national story together in one volume — captivating illustrations, too! (This would provide a lovely spine for a whole year of study if you homeschool.)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A Lion to Guard Us by Clyde Robert Bulla. Follow Amanda Freebold and her brother and sister as they brave the Atlantic to reach Jamestown and find their father after their mother’s death. It&#8217;s a tale of loyalty set in the colonial era.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 by Ann McGovern. This fun picture book answers everyday questions children have about Pilgrim life in question-and-answer format. It can also be read to little kids, who will love the intricacy of the illustrations.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Rascal by Sterling North. A boy and his raccoon in small-town Wisconsin capture the freedom and wonder of an early American boyhood. Don’t let the girls miss out on this one, though; my 11-year-old daughter loved it!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Pocahontas by Ingri &amp; Edgar Parin d&#8217;Aulaire. This is a beautifully illustrated retelling (as all d’Aulaire books are) of the life of a historical legend. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh. A young girl in 1707 keeps her father company on the Connecticut frontier, which tests her bravery. This is short chapter book and perfect for struggling readers. It can be read in an afternoon!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds. This is a true colonial tale of a boy who guards his family on the frontier, set in New York in 1756. Another short, engaging read!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ben and Me by Robert Lawson. As told by Benjamin Franklin&#8217;s mouse, this is a delightful, funny look at Franklin&#8217;s genius through the eyes of his littlest companion. If you have a creative child who loves to invent new things, this is perfect.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates. The true life of At-mun, an enslaved African who was taken at the age of 15 by slave traders and you eventually purchased his freedom and lived out his days with quiet strength and wisdom. I would also recommend older children read this; it will be an easy read, but the story is profound.</li>
</ul>
Ages 10–12
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Captain&#8217;s Dog by Roland Smith. The great westward expedition is seen through the eyes of Seaman the dog as he travels alongside Lewis and Clark. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Of Plymouth Plantation (abridged) by William Bradford. This is a real Pilgrim governor&#8217;s firsthand account, bringing children straight to the source. It was written between 1630 and 1647 and covers historical events such as encounters with the Native Americans, surviving the harsh winters, landing in places along the way, and travel woes.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Calico Bush by Rachel Field. A French girl who comes to America as an indentured servant makes a new life on the Maine frontier during Colonial America, providing a tale outlining the importance of courage through hardship.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Yankee Doodle Boy by Joseph Plumb Martin. Another true account, this book tells of the Revolution through the eyes of the boys who actually fought. It&#8217;s an incredible primary source for children.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Toliver&#8217;s Secret by Esther Wood Brady. A timid 10-year-old girl carries a secret message through enemy lines during the Revolutionary War straight into the hands of George Washington. Perfect for your plucky daughter!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Bulletproof George Washington by David Barton. This is a retelling of Washington&#8217;s survival in multiple battles and the providence displayed throughout his life.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. This is the triumphant memoir of an American who overcame many obstacles through perseverance. Keller wrote this candid work at the age of 22, but younger readers will benefit from hearing her own words as she chronicles her many struggles.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. This is a classic Civil War tale that follows one young soldier&#8217;s hard journey from boyhood into manhood as he finds himself having to become part of the Union Army in a war he doesn’t want to fight in.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Boys&#8217; War by Jim Murphy. This is a sobering look at the very young soldiers who served on both sides. (A note: This book discusses children who fought in the Civil War. Depending on the age of your child, it might be best if you read it with them.)</li>
</ul>
Ages 13+
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare. A boy alone on the Maine frontier forms an unlikely friendship as he waits for him father to return to the cabin where he is staying. Adventure awaits!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. The Revolution comes alive through a Boston apprentice swept into the cause of liberty after a tragic accident causes him to lose his beloved job and change course. This is a must-read: an electric coming-of-age tale for both boys and girls! </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham. The true story of a self-taught American sailor whose grit still guides ships to this day. I would also recommend the audiobook, read by Jim Weiss.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. A powerful American testament from a former slave as he writes about four decades of his life. This should be required high school reading.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">George Washington&#8217;s World by Genevieve Foster. Set in the years 1732-1799, this is a panoramic look at everything happening across the globe during Washington&#8217;s lifetime. (I would also recommend Foster’s other American history books!)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass. This is a firsthand memoir, written in 1845, of one man&#8217;s road from bondage to freedom and his tireless work promoting abolition. Incredibly powerful.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This great American novel is set on the Mississippi river and follows Huck and his friend and former slave, Jim, as they travel together, Jim imparting many lessons along the way. (Also recommend from Twain: “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur&#8217;s Court.”)</li>
</ul>
For the grown-ups
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred McClay. This is a single-volume history that reads like an invitation rather than a textbook and provides a very fair accounting of America from the beginning. It covers the founding of the country through the Cold War, and there is also a Young Readers edition!</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A Patriot&#8217;s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart &amp; Michael Allen. This is a large and comprehensive look at our country and its triumphs and struggles. As it says in the title, it spans from Christopher Columbus to the Age of Entitlement. It’s big but a worthy read. This could also be read in chapters by teens for specific time period study.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">John Adams by David McCullough. An absolute must read for all, this is a magnificent biography of the indispensable founder. The HBO series is also an exceptional watch. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen. This is the thrilling story of the Constitutional Convention as told by the author, who used primary source documents and records to create this historical account. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Abigail Adams: A Life by Woody Holton. A vivid portrait of one of the most remarkable women of the founding generation, this is a personal favorite. With heartbreak and drama, it includes stories of life during the revolution. Much of the book was drawn from actual Adams transcripts, so it is written with exceptional accuracy and specificity.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. The famous Frenchman&#8217;s observations on what makes American self-government work were penned during a trip to the United States between 1831 and 1832. It’s easily accessible, and I would also recommend strongly for high schoolers.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. These are the founding arguments for the Constitution.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">George Washington&#8217;s Rules of Civility &amp; Decent Behavior by George himself. Washington&#8217;s handwritten maxims for character and conduct are as worthy today as ever – short enough to read a few a day and share with the kids.</li>
</ul>
A dad shoutout: Hands down, the finest book on the Civil War is &#8220;Battle Cry of Freedom&#8221; by James M. McPherson. Readers of every kind tell me they treasure it as a complete, comprehensive look at the Civil War. 
Happy reading, and God bless our wonderful country!
***
Rachel Reeves is a wife and homeschool mother of four daughters. She works in political commentary at Here Are The Headlines, both on Instagram and Substack.

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