Your RYC Release Report
What's new, sorted by color
January is sneaky as a busy month in publishing. After the holiday lull, it kind of feels like the floodgates open and publishers release titles that have been waiting in the wings. This week alone, I sorted through more new releases than I typically see in a month.
Before we get to the books though, I do want to say that as this newsletter has grown, I’ve started receiving advance copies of books on my doorstep. Publishers send ARCs hoping they’ll make this list. I want to be transparent about that. These books only appear here if they meet the same criteria as everything else—I’m scanning the pages, reading the reviews, applying the Read Your Color framework the same way I always do. If anything, early access just gives me a better shot at sorting them correctly before I recommend them to you.
Alright. Six new releases (or about-to-release books) sorted by color. Let’s get into it.
🟡 Yellow Reader
Crux by Gabriel Tallent
Two teenagers in their last year of high school in the Mojave Desert—one a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout—bond over rock climbing during cold desert nights. As adult reality looms, differences of class and prospects begin to pull them apart.
The climbing is gorgeous, but the engine is emotional: the relationship between two people who understand each other in ways no one else does. Stephen King called it one of the best novels about friendship he’s ever read. Grounded, raw, and exactly what Yellow Readers are looking for.
🔵 Blue Reader
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Martin Aitken)
A Faustian tale set in 1985 London. Kristian Hadeland, young and seething with ambition, moves from Norway to study photography. He meets an eccentric Dutch artist involved in a production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and slowly crosses lines he can’t uncross. The second half jumps twenty-four years forward, where his past finally demands an accounting.
Knausgaard is asking what you’re willing to trade for success—and what it means to reckon with moral corruption decades later. Contemplative, morally serious, and exactly the kind of deep, slow fiction Blue Readers prefer.
🟢 Green Reader
Attensity! by The Friends of Attention
A manifesto from a collective running the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. Their argument: our attention is being extracted and exploited by tech companies, and pushing back requires collective action, not just individual discipline.
This isn’t vague hand-wringing about phones. The authors interview welders, nurses, poets, and surfers about their attentional practices. They identify sanctuaries where attention can be restored. The writing is clear, the argument is structured, and the call to action is concrete. If you want frameworks, not just complaints, this is the book.
🟠 Orange Reader
The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao
You can’t buy a ticket for the Elsewhere Express. The magical train appears only to those whose lives are adrift. Raya, a songwriter who gave up on her dream after her brother died, finds herself swept aboard alongside Q, a charming artist who’s also lost his way. Together they discover a train full of wonders: a boarding car that’s also a meadow, a bar where jellyfish swim through pink clouds.
Every review says it reads like a Ghibli film—wonder, melancholy, and hope all at once. The worldbuilding is inventive and transportive. If you loved The Starless Sea, this is your next escape.
🟣 Purple Reader
Vigil by George Saunders
Saunders’s second (adult) novel takes place over a single evening at the deathbed of K.J. Boone, an oil company CEO. His guide through these final hours is Jill “Doll” Blaine, who died in 1976 and has since dedicated her afterlife to comforting the dying. Except Boone doesn’t want comfort. He lived a big, bold life. The world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Like Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders plays with voice, perspective, and the boundaries between life and death. Birds swarm the dying man’s room. A man from a drought-ravaged village materializes to demand a reckoning. Inventive, playful, morally serious—exactly what Purple Readers want.
🔴 Red Reader
Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school. For five years, he vanished into an unseen space—her increasingly eccentric theories, her erratic whims, her project to recapture his early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. This memoir is the story of what happens when love becomes suffocating.
Block writes with the intensity and pacing of a novelist, and the emotional pressure never lets up. The first Read With Jenna pick of 2026. If you loved Educated or I’m Glad My Mom Died, this delivers the same urgent, can’t-look-away intensity.
Happy reading!
usually a purple/orange reader but I could see myself easily checking out everything on this list
I am usually a purple or red reader but the orange one is really appealing to me.