The Biggest Book News of the Week
Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are biggest stories from last week.
Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year is….
James is Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. I had a little fun with this announcement on Instagram, but this is the right selection. I will cannibalize what I wrote about James for Book Riot’s forthcoming Best Books of the Year post:
“James was my most anticipated book of 2024 from the moment I heard that it was coming. A Huck Finn reimagining from the literary Morpheus that is Percival Everett was reason enough to be excited, but add to that the heat around him from American Fiction and his move to Doubleday, and this thing was set up to be major. And it is a modern masterpiece. By turns hilarious, beguiling, provocative, and terrifying, James is virtuosic. It is a miracle of page-turning readerly entertainment paired with god-tier literary experimentation and thematic depth. We don’t get ones like this very often, so when we do it is cause for celebration.”
Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize 2024
The 160-page Orbital by Samantha Harvey was announced last night as the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.
From the citation: “Harvey’s novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Compact yet beautifully expansive, Orbital invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.”
The mini-review I posted on Instagram: “A slim, meditative book following crew members aboard the International Space Station over six days. This is not a novel of character or plot: do not expect fires or rescue missions or the regular drama we see in mainstream space stories. Rather, it is about being above and away from Earth—and the perspective that affords. It can be moving, though it glides from impression to impression so quickly that it can be hard to hold on to much. Sort of a hard book to recommend: space/science nuts will find those elements rather slight. Probably best if you in a contemplative state of mind.
The Amazon Editors Make Their Selections for the Best Books of 2024
It’s that season. And a surprise pick at number one from Amazon: The Boys of Riverside by Thomas Fuller. And it sounds like it was pretty unanimous. When I saw this during some catalog perusal, I thought it sounded like a nice, charming, inspiring sports story. The only things about that is—it’s a well-worn genre. I would definitely watch a movie version of this with like Josh Lucas or Michael Pena as a coach on Disney+, but it didn’t jump out to me as being out of the ordinary. This suggests that it is? James and God of the Woods are #2 and #3, which is pretty much what I would expect (and perhaps do myself). Still, a pretty good snapshot of what has been both popular and good, a sort of hybrid of the Goodreads Awards and the NYT 100 Notable.
Reading Rainbow to Get Its Own Channel On Amazon Prime
Buried in this post about some PBS programming coming to Amazon Prime is the news that Reading Rainbow, the univerally-beloved-when-Levar-Burton-was-hosting-it reading show for kids, is getting its own “pop-up” channel. I have no idea what this means, but it will neither require an Amazon Prime membership, nor does it will have ads, as some of the other PBS channels coming to Prime seem to. A shrewd marketing move: once you get people there for the free stuff, you can show them all the stuff they can get that isn’t free. Be curious to know what kinda check PBS is getting for this.
Time Names Its 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
There are three broad ways of doing a year-end list: best, note-worthy, and Time’s strategy–the vaguely imperative must-read. This is sort of a mash-up of the first two, the “must” can mean that you have to read this to get something out of it and it can be superlative. I more and more think that it actually does neither, and we here at Book Riot have backed away from this sort of language. Either go full-throated recommendation or literary journalistic with something like “newsworthy” or “notable.” Aside from that, looks like a pretty normal looking list, light on both genre and non-fiction, while heavy on upmarket commercial. A few of my personal favorites of the year are here, as are a few that really didn’t work for me. So it goes.
India’s Ban on Salman Rushdie The Satanic VersesMay End — Thanks to Missing Paperwork
For reasons that are perhaps obvious, the degree to which block-headed, dangerous, and small-minded people often cannot deliver fully on their block-headed, dangerous and small-minded initiatives because they are in fact block-headed, dangerous, and small-minded is a source of some small comfort as of late. Eventually, the chickens of being impulsive, sloppy, meandering messes come home to roost. Most of time, at least. It is the rest of the time that keeps you up at night.
Voting Opens for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards
Voting is now open for the bookish internet’s annual popularity contest: the Goodreads choice awards. I have never done this, but you could probably win your theoretical office Fall Madness pool (this does not exist) by just looking at which of the nominees have the most rating in each category and picking those. (Maybe I will do that this year?). Because when you ask the internet to vote for things you will get one of two outcomes: regression to the mean or Boaty McBoatface. And since there is really no way to McBoatface this things, mean regression it is. Notably, Goodreads is the only major award to split out historical fiction, which makes it somewhat less predictable in the general fiction categories, as historical fiction comprises so much of the commercial upmarket literary space that tends to win things like this. Also, Romantasy & Horror have their own categories, further cementing them as the fav genres du jour.
Most Texas school board candidates who support book bans lost their elections
I have zero-interest for woulda-shoulda election post-mortems, but extreme curiousity about issues and tactics that worked. In Texas, where Democrats had a very rough cycle on the top of the ballot, it appears that the more local world of school boards, things weren’t quite as bad. In fact, of the 15 school board members who opened campaigned on book banning and censorship as a good thing, nine of them lost. Not exactly a wipeout, but generally in line with opinion polls about these issues. With their team having won a national-stage trifecta, I wonder how much juice local idea cops have for continuing their rapacious and dumb crusades against schools and libraries having books with actual ideas and experiences in them.
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