Looking for some good reading during the holiday season? Here’s every story that was chosen as number one in Longreads’ Weekly Top 5 email.

“I became aware of this phenomenon—people believing fiction is true—some years before this mass delusion about a popular novel swept the nation.” At The Mendocino Humanist, Todd Walton recounts his experiences with audiences who assume his stories are autobiographical.

Dementia took the mind of Bruce Jenkins’ mother, but it could not erase their shared love of words. “Take a book, and read to her just as she read to you.”

“Even at fifty, I feel the stirrings as strongly as a young shepherd boy who dropped everything he knew, crossed the desert, and ultimately found his  heart’s desire.” Musings on books and dreams by Michelle Terry, inspired by Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

From classic summer reads to powerful poetry, creative nonfiction, and art books, TED speakers provide you with a mammoth reading list for the next couple of months.

J. K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on June 26, 1997. The blog of the National Library of Medicine’s historical collections celebrates 20 years of Harry Potter with a series of posts, a curated collection, and lectures.

Logan Goldberg reflects on how we need a world with fiction: “And maybe we need a world wherein we escape from our outside influences and pour ourselves onto the page, and then show those pages to anyone willing to give them a chance.”

“So what part will writers and illustrators and comic book writers and creators of SFF play in this coming struggle? . . . That’s up to us. To decide to see this story through. To write and dream of that better ending.” Phenderson Djèlí Clark on writing in the midst of dark, trying times.

Pam Mandel from Nerd’s Eye View shares her favorite stories about animals from 2016.

From the Trump Syllabus 2.0 to the Native Lives Matter Syllabus, crowd-sourced syllabi have popped up as resources for educators and readers looking for background about complex current events.

In a post that has gone viral instantly, author, editor, and book-loving mother Amy Rawe writes an ode to Dolly Parton’s community work and philanthropy, especially her efforts to promote childhood literacy.

Journalist and independent-press advocate Josh Stearns offers a wide range of resources for readers looking for trustworthy media outlets in our post-truth, fake-news era.

“I was curious about more than just how often ‘girl’ books appeared; I wanted to understand who was writing these books, and the fate of the ‘girl’ in the title.” Exploring today’s book titles, Emily St. John Mandel asks: “Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them?”

A reading list for this spooky holiday, from pieces in GQ to Electric Literature.

Emily Perper compiles seven longreads about the modern rituals of witchcraft and how they inform our past.