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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.
The 39 Most Anticipated Books of 2025
It’s time. 2025 is two weeks away, 2024 new releases have slowed to a trickle, and the books calendar stops for no reader. I have spent some time looking into 2025’s slate, and while it is not the strongest early season I can remember, there are some notables. Onyx Storm will be a world unto itself, but a new Han Kang fresh off her Nobel win, Nnedi Okorafor’s highest profile launch ever, and a couple of other things means January will have plenty to consider.
The Black List Launches the Read the Acknowledgments Podcast
The Black List has long championed great, unproduced films, and recently turned it’s attention to the book world (check out the interview Rebecca did with them on the BR pod). Read The Acknowledgments is their new podcast series for writers who want to learn more about the “publishing ecosystem.” These guys are smart and very well-connected, so this is worth a listen for you would-be (and even already-are) authors out there.
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.