Reading other people's opinions on a book is a fun way to decide whether you want to read it yourself. With BookBrowse's First Impressions program, you can dive into a variety of personal perspectives on new titles, enjoying honest reviews from multiple independent readers to form an idea of a book similar to what you might gather from a casual conversation with a group of friends.

We make sure our First Impressions reviews and ratings are free from any connections to an author or outside influences by exclusively featuring feedback from members who opt in to the program and receive books assigned by an algorithm months ahead of publication. So you can browse high-quality comments with confidence and feel excited about choosing your next read!

In 2023, our First Impressions program covered more than 50 books. We invite you to peruse these reviews as well as ones for hundreds of other titles in our archives.

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It can be difficult to decide what middle age is, much less what books on the subject should cover. Depending on who you ask, mid-life may begin as early as 35 and end as late as 65. And experiences of the period vary widely based on many factors; for example, whether or not a person has (or wants to have) children, where they are professionally or in life. But when it comes to books about those in middle age, the particular topics that emerge often have to do with aging itself and a growing understanding of the limits of human existence. In accordance with the concept of the mid-life crisis, it's in middle age that many begin to grapple with the question of whether it's "too late" — to be a parent, to excel in one's chosen career path, to make significant changes to one's personal life. Middle age can also be a time of reflecting on the past, of questioning, from a more mature perspective, the choices one made long ago, and the current cycles and habits those decisions have established. All of this makes for philosophically rich considerations that many authors turn into literary gold, as evidenced by this list we've compiled of recent books about people in middle age.

Topics covered include mental health, infertility, illness, love in mid-life, how one's personal decisions impact others, the search for meaning, the everyday realities of marriage, the legitimacy of choosing a childless or unmarried life, and many others. All of the books come recommended by our reviewers and some have reading guides provided by the publisher to help build fulfilling book club discussions. Whether you fall into the middle-age range yourself or are somewhere on either side of it, we hope you enjoy these selections.

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Recent years have seen increased awareness of the ongoing trauma created by historical residential schools for Native children in North America, which were operated by government bodies and churches beginning in approximately the mid-1800s, and lasting until the 1960s in the United States and the 1990s in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly removed from their families and taken to these institutions, where they were subject to mistreatment and abuse, including being stripped of their cultural practices and languages. In 2021, the buried bodies of 215 children were found at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, prompting new mainstream consciousness of the scope and severity of this historical phenomenon, as well as an investigation by the United States Department of the Interior into the US's own role in maintaining hundreds of schools that "deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children."

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If you love reading books about animals, you're not the only one! Animals can evoke a sense of both the familiar and the otherworldly. As children, many of us read books featuring cute anthropomorphic cats, dogs, rabbits, bears, birds and other furry or feathered friends living through relatable circumstances. Many of us also read books full of fascinating facts about wildlife, or about extinct creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago. In adulthood, we can continue using reading to celebrate our connections with animals as well as to explore the details of how they exist in the world.

Below are recommended books from recent years, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring you a little closer to all the other beings with whom we share the planet. Some of them inhabit an animal point of view, while others consider how much people may be able to learn from living alongside animals. These also make great choices for book clubs.

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For book lovers, reading about magical libraries can have a special appeal—a place that, in the real world, already feels enchanted and full of possibility can literally be so in fantasy. Below are six books set in extraordinary enchanted libraries.

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In addition to browsing by genre, time period, setting and a wide range of themes, BookBrowse offers specialized reading lists in our "beyond the book" section. These lists are curated by our professional reviewers to accompany featured works, and they can help you familiarize yourself with many fascinating niches of the book world.

Below are just a few examples of the hundreds of articles available in our Reading Lists category.

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