Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why the New York Public Library is giving away books — and providing no-waiting access to 25 e-book titles. We’ll also look at the relationship between Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
Usually you have to return books you get from a library. Today the New York Public Library will give books away — 1,000 books from its list of the best titles of 2025, chosen by more than 80 librarians from branches across the library’s system. If you get one, you won’t have to return it.
The giveaways are a way to promote the library’s best-books list. They will be available at three “flagship” libraries — the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, at 455 Fifth Avenue; the Bronx Library Center, at 310 East Kingsbridge Road; and the St. George Library Center, at 5 Central Avenue on Staten Island.
But giving away books is not the only way the library is attempting to put the titles on its list in readers’ hands. The institution is making 25 of the titles available as e-books with no waiting to anyone who has one of its library cards. Ten of the 25 are for adults, five are for teens and 10 are for children (five in English and five in Spanish).
“Usually when we announce our best books, there’s a run on the titles, no matter how many we buy” to put on the shelves, said Brian Bannon, the chief librarian, “so it’s sort of like you can’t check out the ones you want until next summer.” With e-books, “we’re leaning into a way that makes it easy to borrow a book” — and to read it while the impulse is fresh.
Bannon said he used the best-books list to shape his own read, especially in categories he does not gravitate to. “I’m not a big horror fanatic,” he said, but he has been reading Stephen Graham Jones’s “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” one of the 25 titles with no-waiting e-book access. “I love it,” he said.
Another title on the list is “Audition” by Katie Kitamura, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. By coincidence, Kitamura has a fellowship at the library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers this year.
She said she was “thrilled” to hear about the list, the book giveaway and the e-book access. “The role of libraries in the life of any writer is very profound because the vast majority of writers have been formed by libraries from childhood through to adult life,” she said. “We’ve been formed by the institution of the library. The mission of the library, particularly public libraries, the idea that info and knowledge should be freely available to all feels increasingly like an almost radical mission.”
“We have a record number of book bans taking place,” she said. “There’s a lot of energy slowing the dissemination of books and knowledge, and libraries play an incredibly important role in stanching that.”
Bannon said that providing free access to books was an antidote to declines in leisure-time reading. The library cited a study from the University of Florida and University College London that found that daily reading for pleasure in the United States plummeted by more than 40 percent in the past 20 years.
Jill Sonke, an author of the study, told me that there had been “a sustained decline” of about 3 percent per year. The study analyzed data from 236,000 people in the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to measure how much time people spend doing different things on a given day.
She said that the time people spend on digital media figured in the decline of reading. “The last big documented decline in reading was 80 years ago when television entered our homes,” she said. “We imagine a parallel with digital forms of information and social media now.”
But financial realities are also a factor, she said: People who have to take more than one job to make ends meet have less time to read.
Weather
Expect a cloudy morning followed by sunshine, with a high in the upper 40s. Clouds will move in tonight, and the temperature will dip to around 42.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Nov. 27 (Thanksgiving).
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Tisch will continue as police commissioner under Mamdani
It was an unusually frank line, coming from someone who was talking about her new boss: “Do the mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t.”
But Jessica Tisch, in an email to rank-and-file officers announcing her decision to accept Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s offer to continue as police commissioner, wrote that “it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department.”
Tisch’s announcement came after weeks of speculation over whether she would agree to continue after Mamdani said he wanted her to. On Wednesday, Mamdani praised her for continuing to bring down crime and “cracking down on corruption” inside the department. He said in an interview that he had spoken to her about the importance of creating a Department of Community Safety, which would divert some 9-1-1 calls to mental health teams in the hopes of allowing police officers to focus on violent crimes.
My colleagues Maria Cramer and Emma G. Fitzsimmons write that the relationship between the mayor-elect and the police commissioner will be closely watched once he takes office on Jan. 1. He is a democratic socialist who once called for defunding the police. She is a datacentric billionaire heiress who has criticized laws intended to reform bail and to prevent juveniles from being tried as adults.
Their viewpoints, in part, are rooted in their political beliefs. She is well liked by Democratic leaders, though some of Mamdani’s progressive supporters have criticized her. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Letitia James, the state attorney general, both urged Mamdani to keep her. But my colleagues Chelsia Rose Marcius and Maia Coleman write that it’s not clear how much power Tisch will have under Mamdani to choose her executive staff or increase the number of officers in the department.
Their sharpest disagreement has involved imposing discipline. Mamdani said during the campaign that he supported expanding the powers of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct. He would allow the board to impose discipline rather than to merely recommend it. Tisch, according to two people familiar with her thinking, wants to retain control over meting out discipline in cases substantiated by the board.
Tisch supported Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to hire 5,000 more police officers to join the 33,745 uniformed officers in the department. Mamdani has said that he wants to keep the head count the same. He also wants to eliminate the department’s Strategic Response Group, a unit with several hundred officers who are often dispatched to protests. Tisch has called the unit, which has been the subject of several lawsuits, crucial to maintaining order.
METROPOLITAN diary
Singular focus
Dear Diary:
It was a Wednesday morning in August when an older man and woman got on a downtown No. 3 together at 96th Street.
The woman was heading to 14th Street for an appointment with her eye doctor. The man, who would customarily catch the uptown No. 1 to go to work in Harlem, hopped on the downtown No. 3 with her instead.
“What are you doing?” she asked, happily surprised to have his company a little longer.
“Honey,” he said with a smile, “like the Pequod and Captain Ahab searching for the white whale, I’m roving the city looking for a working MetroCard machine.”
— Steven Flax
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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