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I can’t get enough of the overtly seasonal romantic comedies. I will watch every variation of people meeting implausibly (especially if a big city business person needs to learn how to slow it down in a snowy small town); somehow getting into a cookie-decorating fight or toppling a fully decorated tree; and kissing in a wintery gazebo after discovering the true meaning of the season. The wackier the holiday trappings, the better — As Mindy Kaling once put it, “I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.”

Since I run out of the movies unsettlingly early in the season, I’m making a list (and checking it twice) of giggly, over-the-top, seasonally bright holiday romance novels. This is the only thing I’ll want to read while I’m waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven in two weeks...

We've started to get the big fall rains in Portland recently, which means we’ve started seeing mushrooms pop up everywhere. I’m a bit of a fungi novice — I love eating chanterelles, but haven’t yet embarked on the Pacific Northwest rite of passage of foraging for my own mushrooms. Luckily, there are some fantastic books to guide the next stage of my mushroom appreciation. Whether you’re just beginning to seek out sumptuous spores, looking to identify the new friends sprouting from a tree stump, or just searching for more fungus puns in your life, this list is for you...

Way back in April of 2020, I attended a virtual panel called The Asian American Experience. Cathy Park Hong, Kevin Nguyen, and Mira Jacob were phenomenal, and I’d highly recommend watching the recording of the event. Because it was the early days of all-virtual-everything, there were some technical difficulties as the event was kicking off, and a magical thing happened: the attendees started enthusiastically recommending books to each other. 

This list is inspired by that excited energy, but a little more homegrown. These are the titles that keep popping up in my group chats, and that make my phone overheat because everyone wants to talk about them...

Like a fresh notebook or a back-to-school fashion experiment, campus novels are full of promise and possibility. And in a year when academic pursuits feel paused at best, fraught at worst, we’ve compiled some of our favorite novels that conjure the specific community norms a campus has to offer, and let you experience that first chill of the still-fresh school year, without having to move into a dorm.