This will sound silly and obvious to some people, but working as a book review assignment editor as I have been doing for the past six weeks or so, I have realized that books are news. I used to be a newspaper reporter and, briefly, a newspaper editor. I loved working in news, working beats, and of course—books are a beat.Books are newsworthy. Literature and thought and creativity are newsworthy. It’s easy to forget this when the coverage of literature has been so thoroughly gutted and eliminated at newspapers across the U.S. and in other parts of the world. In the same way that school board and town hall meetings are increasingly going uncovered, thanks to the death of small local media, so too is the country’s intellectual and creative outlet via books. By deciding what will get covered and what will not, we are deciding what we value and what we don’t. So it feels good to unexpectedly find myself on a kind of news beat again—the books beat.