Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
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.”
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.
Parul Seghal Returns to The New York Times
Who is our leading literary critic? I don’t think there is much agreement (or even attention around) on this question, but I don’t think I am alone in citing Sehgal as being at the top of my “ooo she is writing about X book” list. Unfortunately for me and others that have such a list, it sounds like she might be writing less about books and more about “ideas” (I didn’t know the NYT had an “Ideas” franchise until just this moment). I presume that she will still be writing about books, but less on their own terms than in larger thinking about life, the universe, and everything. Side note: what percentage of former humanities majors would give up whatever gig they have to be an editor-at-large at the Times to write about ideas? And what percentage, when they read Seghal, realize they don’t deserve it? 1 for 1 over here, at least.
My family has found family-friendly adventure stories to be the sweet spot for our collective audiobook listening. I tbr’d a couple of things on this list to keep the queue filled.