Lit Hub Daily: December 6, 2023

• Sara Franklin looks back on a year in reading children’s books (with her kids). | Lit Hub

• Shahnaz Habib considers how bougainvillea colonized the world. | Lit Hub

• From mass incarceration to mass supervision: How parole keeps ex-prisoners stranded between two worlds. | Lit Hub Politics

• Emmeline Clein on the new film adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen: “It is a riveting watch, telling a story at a slight angle from the novel’s, a slightly more romantic, optimistic narrative.” | Lit Hub Film & TV

• The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in. Here are the Best Reviewed Fiction Titles of 2023. | Book Marks

• PSA for very wealthy Austenites: Austen’s annotated copy of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature is up for auction. | Smithsonian Magazine

• “The superpower of the professional noticer may be a preternatural ability to ignore decisive realities in their own lives: facts, families.” Parul Sehgal considers what we can learn from the lives of critics. | The New Yorker

• Yiyun Li writes about a favorite paragraph from Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. | The Paris Review

• “The ordinary is but a threshold through which we might glimpse the fullness of the divine.” Laura B. McGrath on Lauren Groff and the radical act of paying attention. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub: Seven books for the lefties on your holiday gifting list • Two poems by Marlon Hacla (tr. Kristine Ong Muslim) • Read from Anthony Veasna So’s posthumous collection, Songs on Endless Repeat