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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 2025
You’re not imagining it; Best Books of the Year season is getting earlier and earlier. PW has been first out of the gate the last few years, dropping their list in the final days of October. Barnes & Noble beat them to the punch on Friday with not one, not two, not seven, but 19 lists. Both the number of lists and the way they’re arranged are reminders that Best Books season isn’t just about highlighting great work. It’s also—maybe even primarily—about holiday shopping. While I still have a knee-jerk “are you kidding me?” to seeing a best-of list before Halloween (and tbh, I probably always will), I want bookstores and publishers to succeed. If releasing best-of lists early helps them prepare for the season and compete with the Big A, I can’t be mad at it.
Self-Publishing is a Haven for Trans Authors, and It’s Under Threat
The Verge is running a terrific series about the future of being trans on the internet, and it’s a sobering reminder about the vast ocean of space between the internet as it is and the internet as it should be. The whole series is worth your time, and readers of this newsletter will be particularly interested in Talia Bhatt’s exploration of the ways trans authors have used self-publishing to push back on and work around institutional gate-keeping. Now, some of the online channels that claimed to offer democratized access to publishing tools and audience-building are caving to right-wing pressure to censor and outright ban trans content. When my colleague Kelly Jensen says that school book bans are not really about the books, this is what she means.
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Reviews Roll In for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
I’ll admit to having been skeptical about Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. He’s been working on it for more than a decade, and that’s often not a great sign for a work of art, be it a movie or a book. The first trailer didn’t show anything meaningful, the press roll-out felt a little too scripted to me, and it took the studio forever to commit to a release date. The movie hit theaters in limited release on Friday, and I’m delighted to report that the reviews are good. The NYT’s Alissa Wilkinson declares it the movie del Toro “was clearly born to make,” and NPR’s Glen Weldon elaborates:
..the resulting film captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its breathless zeal and hie-me-to-yon-fainting-couch deliriousness, the many narrative tweaks del Toro has made — some of which work, some of which don’t — ensure that you’d never mistake hisFrankensteinfor anyone else’s.
We’re in the thick of Oscar Movie Season, and it looks like Frankenstein will be a contender. If you’re not ready to commit movie theater dollars to it, sit tight. Frankenstein was produced by Netflix and will hit the streaming service November 7.
The Best Bathtub Trays for Reading in the Bath
Take it from an OG nightly bubble bath girlie, the right bathtub tray makes all the difference.