Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Time Names Its 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
There are three broad ways of doing a year-end list: best, note-worthy, and Time’s strategy–the vaguely imperative must-read. This is sort of a mash-up of the first two, the “must” can mean that you have to read this to get something out of it and it can be superlative. I more and more think that it actually does neither, and we here at Book Riot have backed away from this sort of language. Either go full-throated recommendation or literary journalistic with something like “newsworthy” or “notable.” Aside from that, looks like a pretty normal looking list, light on both genre and non-fiction, while heavy on upmarket commercial. A few of my personal favorites of the year are here, as are a few that really didn’t work for me. So it goes.
Most Texas school board candidates who support book bans lost their elections
I have zero-interest for woulda-shoulda election post-mortems, but extreme curiousity about issues and tactics that worked. In Texas, where Democrats had a very rough cycle on the top of the ballot, it appears that the more local world of school boards, things weren’t quite as bad. In fact, of the 15 school board members who opened campaigned on book banning and censorship as a good thing, nine of them lost. Not exactly a wipeout, but generally in line with opinion polls about these issues. With their team having won a national-stage trifecta, I wonder how much juice local idea cops have for continuing their rapacious and dumb crusades against schools and libraries having books with actual ideas and experiences in them.
The Onion wins Alex Jones’ Infowars in bankruptcy auction
If anything has proven to be true over the last eight years, is that straight-forward reporting on MAGA’s retrograde circus moves the needle much, much less than one might hope. It seems a lot of more this war is fought in the internet demi-monde of message boards, social media memes, podcasts, and conspiracy theory. Perhaps The Onion has it right: fight fire with a clown-shooting seltzer.
On the most recent episode of The Book Riot Podcast, Rebecca and I make our picks for locks, likelies, and would-like-to-sees ahead of the release on Nov 28th of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year list (we have this date confirmed, btw).
