Category: This Week In Books

Bury the White House in Books?

Readers have come together to organize a massive mailing of books to the White House for Valentine’s Day, specifically a mailing of books readers think POTUS 45 should read. It’s a nice statement about the power of reading, and the encouragement to get the books from local independent bookstores is great. But as he’s said in interviews, 45 doesn’t read books and certainly won’t read these. The best we can hope is that the White House staff will gather these up and send them to a school that needs them. Maybe buy a book to send to the White House, but also buy one to donate to a literacy charity while you’re at it?

Kim Kardashian And Chrissy Teigen Are Starting A Book Club

Kim Kardashian announced on Twitter that her and her best friend Chrissy Tiegen are starting a book club, and the first pick is Embraced by the Light by Betty J. Eadie. They haven’t seemed to announce any other details other than that the book club is happening and what the title is and that you should join them, but this trend of celebrities starting book clubs (hello, Emma Watson) is pretty neat. Not sure about that first title, but to each their own (book club).

Langston Hughes’ Home Saved

You might remember hearing last year about Langston Hughes’ brownstone being for sale and about the art collective that was trying to save it–they’ve succeeded! Through online fundraising, mostly, the I, Too, Arts Collective will be turning the space into a community center for open mic nights and author events in Harlem. Renee Watson, founder of the collective, says that saving the brownstone was about preserving a part of Harlem: “It’s a testament to wanting to hold onto Harlem,” she said. “And just make sure that we also take care of the history here and that we guard it [fiercely].”

Thanks to A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom for sponsoring this week’s newsletter.

For Mel Hannigan, bipolar disorder makes life unpredictable. Her latest struggle is balancing her growing feelings in a new relationship with her instinct to conceal her diagnosis by keeping everyone at arm’s length. But when a former friend confronts Mel with the truth about the way their relationship ended, deeply buried secrets threaten to upend her shaky equilibrium.

As the walls of Mel’s compartmentalized world crumble, she fears that no one will accept her if they discover what she’s been hiding. But would her friends really abandon her if they learned the truth? More importantly, can Mel risk everything to find out?

Changes to New York Times Bestseller Lists

As part of a larger plan to revamp its coverage of publishing and give more space to coverage beyond bestseller lists, the New York Times has cut several bestseller lists. Weirdly, the exact number of removed lists could not be confirmed, but we do know that the lists for graphic novels/manga, mass market paperbacks, middle grade ebooks, and young adult ebooks will be among the missing. While some publishers lament the new challenges these changes will present as they attempt to communicate a book’s success in-house and in the marketplace, what I’d like to see is an industry finally acknowledge the arbitrary and incomplete nature of these lists and just…decide they don’t really matter.

Roxane Gay Pulls Book from Simon & Schuster in Response to Milo Yiannopoulous Deal

Roxane Gay, whose TED book How to Be Heard (how’s that title for a nice coincidence?) was due to be published in March 2018, has pulled the book from Simon & Schuster in response to the now-widely known $250K book deal with white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulous. In a comment published at BuzzFeed, Gay notes how “egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation” and reminds readers that this is not about censorship. She also notes that she recognizes not all S & S authors are in a position to make this decision. Here’s hoping that more of those who can make the sacrifice will follow Gay’s lead.

Related: see this note from Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, promising that the book will not include hate speech.

The Bronx Set to Have a Bookstore Again

When the Barnes & Noble Co-op City location closed in late 2016, the Bronx — home to 1.4 million people and 10 colleges in just 42.7 square miles — was left without a bookstore. That’s all about to change thanks to Noëlle Santos, who is currently raising funds to open The Lit.Bar, a bookstore-wine bar, in the South Bronx neighborhood. Some Riot readers may remember hearing about Noëlle on the Book Riot Podcast or meeting her at Book Riot Live. If you’re looking for a literary cause to support, take a look at the Indiegogo campaign–she has done her homework!–and consider chipping in. Rock on, Noëlle.

Thanks to The Girl in the Garden by Melanie Wallace for sponsoring This Week in Books.

When June arrives on the coast of New England, baby in arms, an untrustworthy man by her side, Mabel—who rents them a cabin—senses trouble. A few days later, the girl and her child are abandoned. June is soon placed with Mabel’s friend, Iris, in town, and her life becomes entwined with a number of locals who have known one another for decades: a wealthy recluse with a tragic past; a forsaken daughter returning for the first time in years; a lawyer, whose longings he can never reveal; and a kindly World War II veteran who serves as the town’s sage. Surrounded by the personal histories and secrets of others, June finds the way forward for herself and her son amid revelations of the others’ pasts, including loves—and crimes—from years ago.

E.L. James in Talks for 50 Shades Musical

Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the best-selling books, well, ever, and also a successful set of movies. Fans can now also look forward to a musical? E.L. James has confirmed that she’s in talks with theater folks to put her work on Broadway. If a thing can be adapted to the screen I see no reason it can’t also be put on the stage, but…songs? The snarkier corners of the internet is going to have so much fun coming up with song titles/lyrics.

President Obama on What Books Mean to Him

As we transition out of the era of literate presidents, I found solace in this interview with Obama, done by the New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani, about what books mean to him. He isn’t just talking about his favorite works of fiction, which is what most interviews about his bookishness focus on–he also discusses how literature impacted his work as a community organizer, and his life as a writer. I’m looking forward to his (hopefully soon, hopefully upcoming) memoirs.

Is Elizabeth Bennet the Original Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

A manic pixie dream girl is a trope most often used in film: she’s a quirky, lovable female character with no inner life of her own, and only there to amuse the male main character and provide a means for his personal growth (think Penny Lane in Almost Famous). This piece does an interesting thought experiment: was Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet the original MPDG? The answer is, of course, no: Elizabeth isn’t written by a man, she has a rich inner life of her own, and Darcy provides her means for growth as much as the other way around. But it’s always fun (in an unbearably nerdy way) to re-examine our favorite characters through new, modern lenses.

Thanks to Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler for sponsoring this week’s newsletter.

A stunningly beautiful, heartrending literary memoir about the tragic death of the author’s beloved older sister and a tribute to their bond. When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew in, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with the lingering effects of their unusual childhood. In her signature spare and incisive prose, Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death.

Pretty wild week in the news of the world, so let’s look at some good stuff, okay?

National Book Foundation Launches Book Rich Environment Initiative

Furthering its efforts to promote literacy and expand access to books, the National Book Foundation has launched the Book Rich Environment Initiative to provide books to underserved communities, colloquially known as “book deserts.” In partnership with the US Department of Education, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Libraries Council, and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, the NBF has secured more than 250,000 donated books from Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan, among others. Between the BRE Initiative and other programs, the NBF will have given away more than 300,000 books by the end of 2017.

4-Year-Old Power Reader is LoC’s “Librarian for a Day”

Daliyah Marie Arana was reading whole books on her own before her third birthday. Now, at four years old, she has read more than 1,000 books, including some college-level texts. This week, Daliyah and her family traveled from their home in Gainesville, GA to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where Daliyah spent a day with Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, and was named “Librarian for a Day.” It’s pretty incredible to see Hayden, the first woman and first black person to serve in the position, interact with a young girl who not only might want her job someday but who can now see that it is a real possibility. Representation matters.

2017 Tournament of Books Shortlist & Judges Announced

For the 13th year running, the Rooster prepares to crow! The Morning News has revealed the shortlist and judging panel for the 2017 Tournament of Books. As always, the list is a mix of literary bestsellers, critical darlings, and a few surprises. It’s hard to imagine anything beating Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, but in a tournament where subjectivity and idiosyncrasy reign (to glorious effect), anything can happen. Things really start get interesting when the brackets and book-judge pairings are revealed, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis for sponsoring This Week in Books.

What could cause a man to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and bestselling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect.

DeMarco knows—or thinks he knows—that Huston couldn’t have been capable of murdering his family. But if Huston is innocent, why is he on the run? And does the half-finished manuscript he left behind contain clues to the mystery of his family’s killer?

The Most Popular Books at US Public Libraries

Happy day for Paula Hawkins: The Girl on the Train is the most frequently checked out book from eight of the 14 US public libraries surveyed by Quartz. Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton also tops the list (unsurprisingly), and books from mega-best-sellers James Patterson and Janet Evanovich. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up continues to fascinate American audiences, apparently.

Amazon Bookstore Coming to Manhattan

Amazon is opening a 4,000 square foot bookstore in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, joining its existing brick-and-mortar stores in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego. Their foray into physical bookstore spaces is interesting–it seems to me that the things people value about local bookstores (keeping money in the hands of small business owners, author events, concerns about literary culture) will be absent in Amazon locations and therefore the people who shop at physical bookstores won’t care to visit the Amazon ones. We’ll see!

Simon & Schuster UK Declines to Publish Milo Yiannopoulos

The book world was sent into a tailspin when news that Simon and Schuster was paying Breitbart editor and vocal sexist and racist Milo Yiannopoulos $250,000 for a book about, well, sexism and racism, one assumes (does it really matter?). The company’s UK division has announced that it would not be following suit. Milo probably isn’t as well known in the UK and wouldn’t sell as well, but a publishing insider also said it would be a “toxic book to try and sell here.”

Out-of-office notifications are the name of the game this week in publishing. With most offices closed for the holidays, news has been slower than slow. Let’s see what we can find.

Book Sales Get Christmas Week Bump

The holiday season started slowly for books – sales between Thanksgiving and December 18th were down 6% from last year – but last-minute shoppers came through to the tune of a 21% increase in unit sales in the week leading up to Christmas. Leading the bounce were juvenile fiction (perhaps thanks in part to the “something to read” part of the want/need/wear/read gift-giving trend this year?) and adult nonfiction (all hail the dad books!). Surprising absolutely no one, four of the six bestselling kids/YA titles were by J.K. Rowling.

NYPL Reveals Most Checked-Out Books of 2016

With more than 25 million (!) items checked out each year, the New York Public Library’s circulation data make for a fascinating peek into reading habits. Paula Hawkins’s Girl on the Train leads the NYPL’s top 10, which is, notably, dominated by backlist. Only one of the most checked-out books (When Breath Becomes Air) was published in 2016. This is interesting, as it may reflect a difference between what people are buying and what they are actually reading. Bonus: the NYPL staff have included readalike recommendations for each of the most popular titles!

Milo Yiannopoulos Gets $250K Deal from Simon & Schuster

Nothing like the last week of the year for dumping news you hope no one will notice. Simon and Schuster has brokered a $250K book deal with infamous white nationalist and Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, because when someone is so offensive that even Twitter bans them, giving them a new platform for their dumpster fire is a super great idea!

Thanks to The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller for sponsoring This Week in Books.

From the author of Norwegian by Night, a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before.

“The Girl in Green is a Catch-22 for the twenty-first century. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll cry tears of blood.”—Madison Smartt Bell

12 Authors We Lost Too Soon in 2016

2016 feels like a garbage fire for a lot of people, in large part because we lost so many amazing artists, musicians, and writers (David Bowie and Prince in one year? What were you thinking, 2016?). I doubt 2017 or many of the coming years will be much better–the baby boomer generation is getting older, and those are the artists many of us grew up with. But before we hold our noses and see what 2017 brings, let’s remember Umberto Eco, Katherine Dunn, Anna Dewdney, Natalie Babbitt, and of course, Harper Lee.

Nancy Drew Re-imagined as Femme Fatale

In what is an almost offensively bad idea, Nancy Drew is being re-imagined as a femme fatale who “aids” the Hardy Boys in their crime solving in a new comic from Dynamite Entertainment. First of all, re-imagining a teenager as a sexy noir femme fatale is gross. Objectively, that’s icky. Secondly, way to take one of the few characters girls my age grew up with who had her own series and possessed agency and make her a side-kick to a bunch of dudes. And while I am at it, can we please find new ways to re-imagine things that isn’t just “take this light-hearted thing and make it gritty“?

Pantsuit Nation Gets a Book Deal

Libby Chamberlain, founder of Pantsuit Nation, the “secret” Hillary Clinton-supporting Facebook page with millions of members, has gotten a book deal for the page. Not everyone is happy about it–people who have posted on a private group are concerned that their stories will now be published for literally the whole world to see, probably with no compensation. Until more details about how the page’s members will be paid (if at all) and their permission obtained (if at all), criticism will likely continue.

Bit of a light news week as temperatures fall and the holidays turn up. Enjoy some potpourri!

Master List of “Best Books of 2016” Lists

For nine years running now, David Gutowski is aggregating every ‘best of’ list he can find at his beloved site Largehearted Boy. At writing, the list is more than 400 lists strong, with entries ranging from the usual suspects (best fiction, best memoirs, etc.) to the unexpected and esoteric (best historical geology books, for example). The breadth and depth of Gutowski’s collected lists is always stunning, and it serves as a nice reminder that in any given year, even the most voracious of readers only cracks the surface of the available and deserving material.

New Program Offers Croatian Readers 100,000 Free eBooks

A group of government agencies and private donors have partnered with ebook platform Total Boox to create Croatia Reads, a new program built on that offers Croatian residents and tourists alike free unlimited access to the 100,000 bestselling ebooks in the world. Details about how the list was compiled are few, and I would love to know more. This is the first experiment of this size and scope I’ve seen, and if it works, what amazing potential for making more books more available to more people!

NYPL Transforms Former Apartment into Teen Tech Center

In the early twentieth century, many branches of the New York Public Library contained hidden apartments to house custodians charged with shoveling coal to keep the furnaces running overnight. Thirty-two of the current branches once contained these apartments, though only a few remain, and the venerable institution has done all kinds of cool things with them. Most recently, the apartment in the Washington Heights branch was turned into a (now-open) center for after-school activities, media and computer programs, and more for teen patrons. Hard to think of a better way to bring a glorious old building into the present. (And here’s a free idea for the romance writers in the house: an early-20th-century romp between a bookish beauty and a library custodian who invites her up for a closer look at his….shelves.)

Book Riot Reveals 2017 Read Harder Challenge

This update is coming from inside the house! Book Riot has revealed the third annual Read Harder Challenge, created by founding contributor Rachel Manwill. As always, the challenge contains 24 tasks intended to help you expand your reading life and explore new genres, subjects, and perspectives. New this year are six tasks contributed by some of the Riot’s favorite authors, including Roxane Gay, Celeste Ng, and Daniel José Older. If you’re looking for a readerly resolution for the new year, look no further.

We’re giving away a $250 Barnes & Noble shopping spree. Go here to enter.

Amazon Reveals the Best-Selling New Releases of 2016

The machinery of and inherent biases in the publishing industry and the reading community are never more apparent than in the best-selling new releases list. The recipe for a best-seller is a big name + a hefty marketing budget + a white author. With only one author of color on the general list and zero on the kids/YA list (but plenty of Bill O’Reilly), it’s hard not to worry about the progress we are (or aren’t) making in combating complacency and institutionalized racism in reading.

Virginia School District Pulls Classics

Accomack County Schools in Virginia have pulled To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn from their curriculum after a parent complaint about racial slurs used in the books. The parent’s biracial son told her he had a hard time getting past the slurs in his reading. I really wish parents used these moments as opportunities to discuss history, language, and context with their kids instead of insisting an entire school district be deprived of the opportunity to think critically about a text.

Upcoming Adaptation News

A few exciting adaptation bits of news for you! Elizabeth Banks has optioned Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman for a TV show. West’s memoir is hilarious and necessary, and I’d love to see it on any screen. Also, Hugh Jackman will have a role in Fox 2000’s upcoming adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie himself is adapting the screenplay, which is always a vote of confidence in my book (see what I did there?).

Monroeville, Alabama Plans Harper Lee Tourist Attraction

Harper Lee’s hometown announced last week that it is developing the Harper Lee Trail. The tourist attraction will include a 1909 bank building where Lee’s father–on whom she based Atticus Finch–kept an office, along with replicas of three houses that are featured in To Kill a Mockingbird. Led by Lee’s erstwhile lawyer/advisor Tonja Carter, a coalition of local business owners hopes to bring hundreds of thousands of the legendary author’s fans to town. They also hope to avoid accidentally creating “Disneyland for racists” or drawing in white nationalists with an appetite for nostalgia. As with basically everything else connected to Lee’s legacy, “Whether Harper Lee herself would approve of the plans is open to question.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda to Produce Kingkiller Chronicle Series

If you gave me a hundred chances to guess who would be tapped to adapt Patrick Rothfuss’s monster fantasy trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicles for the big screen, I would never have gotten to Lin-Manuel Miranda. But the world is full of wonders, and that’s exactly what has happened. Miranda will serve as a producer and will compose original songs for both a feature film and TV adaptation. What a delightfully weird and unexpected pairing!

The Girl Gets Back on the Train? (New Paula Hawkins Novel in 2017)

The good folks at Riverhead are no doubt hoping to make lightning strike twice. Paula Hawkins, whose novel The Girl on the Train sold a floppity jillion copies and broke almost as many sales records, will release Into the Water in 2017. It’s another work of suspense that will “interrogate the deceitfulness of memory.” Gonna be fun to watch what happens. Will you be waiting for it?