I noticed the list of books on the homepage (under the tips section) mirrors pretty much exactly something I currently use Airtable for, and I would like to do this in logseq instead.
Is this kind of table (including colored status labels, book thumbnails) possible with a query, or is this some other plugin?
Yes, it is doable. Probably most flexible is with a query. For the colored labels, one would have to use some css (in-line in the example, but ideally in custom.css):