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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of 2024
B&N is out of the gate first among the major makers of annual (and semi-annual, and monthly, and, and, and) best books lists. This year, they’ve dialed back on the the more bespoke (precious?) categories from last year and gone back to familiar genres, though with a couple of notable wrinkles. First: “smart thinking books” becomes a category for the sort of non-fiction that encompasses productivity, idea-forward business books, and other kinds of books that are non-academic, but claim to help you understand the world, and yourself better. That long, fuzzy description shows that “smart thinking” is a good moniker.
Second, and this is a first as far as I can remember, there is a section for the best Spanish language books of the year. This is a) very cool and b) another manifestation of something I have been told by major publishers themselves–they want to get into the lives of more Spanish-speaking readers and also Latinx people who don’t speak/read Spanish. Trend to watch in 2025 and beyond.
Trailer for TV Adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing
A lot of people liked the trailer for Interior Chinatown I linked to yesterday. Can I interested you in the trailer for Say Nothing? (click screencap to watch it on YouTube. Embedding videos in email is impossible. We don’t have the technology. We have LLMs that can write A- English papers but we can’t embed YouTube in email.)
Inside the Political Book Machine
This look at publishing (or not publishing) political books during election-season strangely begins by recounting the publication of Hillbilly Elegy which was initially neither an overtly political book (at least in the way figured here) or published during an election season (June of 2016), though it was an election year. It is a telling fuzziness that permeates both the article and any kind of conventional thinking or expertise about what works or doesn’t work. I have talked to publishers that say they are dodging the election and some say they aren’t. Some political books cited here aren’t selling very well, though Melania Trump’s memoir is doing extremely well as are a handful of others. No one can disprove really the null hypothesis here–that the presence of an actual election materially changes the shape of buying for political books in consistent ways.
Author Buy/Sell/Hold: 2024 Edition
On the most recent episode of the Book Riot podcast, Rebecca Schinksy and I take discuss twelve notable authors and try to decide if we would buy, sell, or hold stock in them. Where do we see their careers now? Are they at their peak? Past it? Or just getting cooking? Also, the Book Riot Podcast is now on Instagram. I have some ideas for it. Might actually do a few of them.
