Book Riot &#8211; The Podcast

Read Harder 2024 is alive!

Good job, book people: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store gets all the love; Paul Harding does not win awards for the book Jeff called “gormless”

Bad job, book people: The Vaster Wilds & Let Us Descend are under-celebrated

Love to See It: Pultizers expand eligibility

Audiobook moments of the year: Michelle Williams narrating Britney’s memoir; Leslie Jones’s 17-hour-long freestyle; Spotify introduces free listening for Premium members

Worst publisher response to book bans: Scholastic’s whole diversity collection situation

Best publisher response to book bans: PRH takes legal action against book banning states

Achievements in Reporting: The Atlantic’s coverage of the Books 3 data set used to train LLMs

More of These Conversations: The bestseller lists are broken and Goodreads is bad for books

Biggest Mystery: WTF Oprah was up to with Covenant of Water

Still Waiting to See Its Impact: Simon & Schuster sold to KKR, TikTok plans a publishing imprint

Eyeballs Emoji: The BookTok hockey romance shenanigans, Bigolas Dickolas moves some units, Review Bombing Author

Nobody Asked for This: Twilight series coming to TV; HBO plans 10-year run for Harry Potter reboot

Anticlimactic: Manuscript thief pleads guilty

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Bonus: The Books We Missed This Year [Teaser] Dec 12, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca run through the books they had their eyes on but didn't quite get to this year.

Subscribe to premium content on Patreon to hear the rest: https://www.patreon.com/bookriotpodcast

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Wrapping Up Holiday Recommendation Requests & Our Most Giftable Books of the Year Dec 11, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca handle a few last recommendation requests and then give some ideas for generally giftable books for 2023.

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It’s happening, readers — we’re bringing paperbacks! Whether you (or a reader you know and love) hate carrying around bulky hardcovers, you’re on a budget, you want a wider range of recommendations, or all of the above, you can now get a paperback subscription from TBR, curated just for you by one of our Bibliologists. The holidays are here, and we’ve got three different levels for gifting to suit every budget. Get all the details at mytbr.co.

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Discussed in this episode:

Walking with Sam by Andrew McCarthy

Taste by Stanley Tucci

Oh My Mother! by Connie Wang

Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

From Scratch by Tembi Locke

How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

Wild Girls by Tiya Miles

Sex, Death, and Fly-Fishing by John Gierach

Hidden Mountains by Michael Wejchert

Ross Gay

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters of Note by Shaun Usher (volumes on Art and Love)

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

World of Wonders by Johanna Basford

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars by Kate Greene

Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh

From Hollywood with Love by Scott Meslow

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib

Sigrid Nunez

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Blackouts by Justin Torres

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis

The Wager by David Grann

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

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Bonus: Our Favorite Books of 2023 [Teaser] Dec 05, 2023

Show notes

Rebecca and Jeff run down their favorite books of 2023 and a few highlights from backlist reading.

Listen to the full episode and see our full list of favorite books of 2023 on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bookriotpodcast

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Holiday Recommendation Show, Part 2 Dec 04, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca wrap up their annual holiday recommendation extravaganza.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

For more industry news, sign up for our Today in Books daily newsletter!

It’s happening, readers — we’re bringing paperbacks! Whether you (or a reader you know and love) hate carrying around bulky hardcovers, you're on a budget, you want a wider range of recommendations, or all of the above, you can now get a paperback subscription from TBR, curated just for you by one of our Bibliologists. The holidays are here, and we've got three different levels for gifting to suit every budget. Get all the details at mytbr.co.

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Discussed in this episode:

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Possession by A.S. Byatt

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman

The Miniature Wife by Manuel Gonzales

Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai

The Vanderbeekers series by Karina Yan Glaser

Meet Yasmin! by Saadia Faruqi

Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty

Forward by Abby Wambach

One Life by Megan Rapinoe

Uphill by Jemele Hill

The Rivals by Johnette Howard

The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson

2 A.M. at the Cats Pajamas by Marie-Helen Bertino

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

Chemistry by Weike Wang

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

Post Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

The Guest by Emma Cline

Instead by Maria Coffey

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

If We’re Being Honest by Cat Shook

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Wake, Siren by Nina MacLaughlin

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

Babel by R.F. Kuang

The Real Work by Adam Gopnik

The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Notes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi

The Golden Doves by Martha Hall Kelly

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

The Pretty One by Keah Brown

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

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2023 Holiday Recommendation Show, Part 1 Nov 27, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca respond to listener book recommendation requests.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

For more industry news, sign up for our Today in Books daily newsletter!

It's happening, readers — we're bringing paperbacks! Whether you hate carrying around bulky hardcovers, you're on a budget, you want a wider range of recommendations, or all of the above, you can now get a paperback subscription from TBR, curated just for you by one of our Bibliologists. You can also gift it (and the holidays, they are coming). Get all the details at mytbr.co.

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Discussed in this episode:

From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks

Together by Vivek H. Murthy

The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen

LitHub’s list of Midlife Coming-of-Age Novels

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

Joan is Okay by Weike Wang

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

Me (Moth) by Amber McBride

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

Snacking Bakes by Yossy Arefi

The King Arthur Baking School by King Arthur Baking Company

How to Bake Everything by Mark Bittman

No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol

Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington

Self, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed edited by Meghan Daum

Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Erasure by Percival Everett

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

There’s a Book Riot list for that!

The Hike by Drew Magary

The Last Final Girls by Stephen Graham Jones

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Good Life by Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Celeste Ng

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

"15 LGBTQ Haunted Horror Novels"

"8 of the Best Queer Horror Books"

"Great New Queer Horror To Read This Fall"

Queer Comics Database is a thing and has a list for this!

A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

Andy Weir

Michael Lewis

S.A. Cosby

In the Shadow of the Mountain by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

The Guide by Peter Heller

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraquib

Cultish by Amanda Montell

Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

Empire of the Sum by Keith Houston

The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel by Douglas Brunt

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Alchemy of Us by Ainissa Ramirez

The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

The Searcher by Tana French

The collected Patrick O’Brien on audio

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

NK Jemisin

Pico Iyer

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The Prepositional Phrase After Trickle Nov 20, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca talk Amazon's best books of the year, The National Book Award winners, Goodreads Choice Award nominees, and much more.

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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Discussed in this episode:

Book Riot’s Best Books of 2023

Rebecca’s victory lap for the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

A sigh of relief for Jeff, Paul Harding did not win the NBA

And Amazon editors agree - their best books of 2023

Goodreads Choice Awards kick off

Data Baby by Susannah Breslin

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

Everything I Learned I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin

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Inclusive Insider Baseball Nov 13, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca talk about Barnes & Noble's finalists for Book of the Year, a treasure trove of literary awards data, the stunning catalog of audiobooks from Spotify, and more.

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Discussed in this Episode:

Finalists for Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

WNDB launches Indigenous Reads Rising

35 years of National Book Awards data

A Look at audiobook economics

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Pop Diva Rumspringa Nov 06, 2023

Show notes

Jeff and Rebecca talk about the sales numbers for The Woman in Me, PW's best books of the year list, the Fourth Wing adaptation announcement, and more.

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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Discussed in this episode: