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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. Here are top stories from the last week.
Before we get to the rundown, have you heard of Book Riot’s TBR? It’s a personalized book-recommendation subscription that taps Book Riot’s expert book recommenders to match you (or someone you want to gift it to, hint hint) with books you’ll love. Gifts start at just $15. Check it out here.
The Books New York Times Readers Loved in 2024
The NYT continues to slice and dice best-of coverage in 2024, from all-century selection all the way today to reader choices for favorite books of 2024. I always wonder if slight difference in adjectival choice would yield noticeably different results or not? Do readers clock favorites all that differently than best? What about fun? Recommendable? Memorable? Dare I say notable? The selections here are not weighted or tallied, but rather anecdata and pull-quote. Which is honestly fine. Hearing directly why pretty serious readers liked the books they like from 2024 is a welcome break from another list.
The Most Borrowed Books in New York City Libraries in 2024
It is one of the greater strangeness of New York City that it’s libraries are more a confederation that an an integrated system, but one interesting effect is that because of this, data is collected by borough, which shows how the different parts of the city do seem to read differently:
Chief Librarian Brian Bannon said he noticed a number of differences in genre preference by borough while scanning NYPL’s list.
“The Bronx is more like thriller, memoir, historical fiction. Manhattan — literary fiction, social contemporary, relationship driven. Queens, I saw fantasy, thriller, diverse voices, and then Staten Island — thriller, family drama, comfort reads.”
The top book overall was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, though in Queens it was The Women and in The Bronx it was The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
More Bold Than Cozy: Drama In The Coloring Book Community—What It Is and Why It Matters
I generally don’t pick a Book Riot piece for one of the three main stories of the day (does anybody notice that I pick three stories with a BR piece kicker most days?), but Kelly Jensen’s deep dive into drama in the world of coloring booksreally is worth spotlighting today and would be even if we didn’t publish it. Admittedly, it is less of a “book” story that I generally am interested in, but it is about inspiration, modern retailing, virality, modes of production, and globalization. Good stuff.
2024 NBCC Awards Longlist: Fiction
With the PEN Award, the NBCC often has the most unexpected end of year finalists, but this year’s list is probably as a consensus of a lists from them as I can recall. Only two here stand out as unusual: Sister Deborah and Us Fools, though this might be the highest profile list out this year that does not include All Fours. I am also of the opinion that if you are going to make a big show of announcing finalists ahead of the award, some description or explanation of what makes each book special is appropriate. Sure there was language from some review of this body of critics that would have illuminated, contextualized, or otherwise made the case for the excellence of these book, especially for the ones from whom this is the most major spotlight they have, or ever will have, to enjoy.
The Ultimate Best Books of The Year List
Lit Hub does the yeoman’s working of rounding up soooooo many end of year book lists to see what books are making the most appearances. It should surprise no one, especially not readers of Today in Books, to see that James has the most mentions (33) and is a full 12 mentions ahead of the next tier. I played where I scrolled until I found myself surprised to see something and that happened at the 11 mention tier. Won’t spoil it so that you can see if that’s where the chalkiness of the ranking starts to blur.
The Books of the Year
On The Book Riot podcast, Rebecca and I attacked a similar question in a different way: what were the books of the year? Not the best, necessarily, or the most popular, definitely, but the books that together captured readers’ attention in 2024. Top half was pretty easy, but the last few spots turned out to be the trickiest.
Liz Pelletier Named Publishers Weekly Person of the Year
Pelletier had an excellent case to be named PW’s Person of the Year in 2023, as Fourth Wing burst into the reading world (though hard to argue with last year’s honorees either). The citation offers a bit of a profile of Pelletier, as well as some good backstory to Yarros’ romantasy titan. (If you like stuff like this, my interview with some of the folks at Red Tower on First Edition might be worth a listen). Colleen Hoover’s 2-3 year run atop the sales charts didn’t have much in the way of coattails; what has made Fourth Wing different is that has given rise not just to more books like it, but whole new imprints, series, packaging, and careers.
The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year
Lit Hub ran down the 50 literary stories that mattered most this year, and I have no issue with the top handful. One oddity and one oversight. Colleen Hoover’s adaptation of It Ends with US makes the list, but there is no mention of Romantasy’s (see the above story) on-going reign (this is the oddity). Sally Rooney’s publishing a new novel appears at #7, and while clearly Intermezzo was one of the events of the year, Percival Everett’s alley-oop-to-himself, career-victory-lap-cum-modern-classic James is no where to be found.