AI Disasters, Amazon's Best Books of the Year So Far, and More Book News
58:52 Share

At Sierra, I discovered top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward.

Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. With a Venmo debit card, you can Venmo more than just your friends. You can use your balance in so many ways. You can Venmo everything. Need gas? You can Venmo this. How about snacks? You can Venmo that. Your favorite band's merch? You can Venmo this. Or their next show? You can Venmo that. Visit venmo.me slash debit to learn more. You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply.

This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. Rebecca is still out traipsing around some bucolic Eastern European country that I couldn't pick out on a map if you paid me $10,000. But I'm delighted to have Danica Ellis join me again after our slightly unhinged but much enjoyed Beach Read episodes that Erica joined us for. Danica, so welcome back. I'm glad to be back.

do you think we're going to be it's it's hard not to have a good time with erica you know yeah it's true it's true i said beforehand that it was dangerous to get the three of us on a podcast together because i think we're the chat possibly the chattiest people yeah we almost had vanessa too and that really was something yeah i don't think i think we'd still be recording

But that was a lot of fun. So thanks for those of you who wrote in. I shared with Danica and Erica, and I think it made our day a little bit that we made some other people's day here. Points of order. Rebecca will be back next week. We'll have a regular news episode. Today's just sort of a regular news episode. A lot going on. We are doing a live event at Powell's again, July 9th. Rebecca and I and Vanessa will be there for that, along with Keith Mossman, who is the

I think the head book buyer, one of the honchos of book buyers over at Powell's to talk about the best books of the year. So far, there'll be a link in the show notes here to go get a ticket. Also join us on the Patreon. Rebecca and I did a recent reading catch up and other media diet and we have other stuff coming up next week.

I'm Chaka Black on First Edition. I had Damon Young and Susan Choi earlier this week. In the main feed, you heard I did the Hey, I Just Might Jeff books of June. I've got Oliver Darkshire and Pete Mendelsohn and Kate McKean and a whole bunch of people coming up next week and the rest of the month because there's a lot going on in June. So check that out over there. I'll

Let's see what else. Yeah, I guess that we're gonna do a sponsor break and we got it's kind of a couple weeks worth of news to catch up on Danico. So let's go that way. If like me, you love travel as much as you love books, you're into stories that sweep you away and stay with you like a favorite souvenir. Check out Strong Sense of Place.

It's a podcast that explores the world one destination at a time. Think Morocco, Iceland, or New Orleans through five handpicked books that bring each setting vividly to life. You get culture, food, history, and the kind of texture that makes you want to buy a plane ticket on impulse and pack a bag. It's not just about geography, though. It's also about the atmosphere, the kind of storytelling that lets you hear the music from a street corner in Havana or smell the spices in a Thai market without ever having to leave the comfort of your couch. The podcast is a podcast that explores the world one destination at a time.

The hosts, Mel and Dave, are a writer-photographer duo with great chemistry and a real curiosity about the world. They're in their seventh season now with more than 60 episodes to dig into. So if your idea of a perfect escape is a great story in an unforgettable place, Strong Sense of Place might just be your new favorite listen. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or head to strongsenseofplace.com.

Today's episode is brought to you by Paratex Publicity and The Middleman by Mike Papantonio, out now from Arcade Publishing. From nationally renowned trial lawyer and legal commentator Mike Papantonio comes The Middleman, a gripping legal thriller that pulls back the curtain on the dark money fueling corporate corruption.

When a young whistleblower exposes a powerful pharmaceutical company, attorney Nicholas Dekatomis is drawn into a high stakes courtroom battle where the truth could cost lives. Fast paced and deeply informed by real life legal battles, the middleman explores the dangerous intersection of justice, power, and the media.

This is inspired by Papantonio's real courtroom fights against major corporations. It's a legal thriller that's great for fans of John Grisham and the like. And it pulls from real world issues like dark money, whistleblowing, and pharmaceutical abuse. So make sure to pick up The Middleman by Mike Papantonio. And thanks again to Arcade Publishing for sponsoring this episode.

Today's episode is brought to you by Kanopy. Stream smarter, use your library card. So if you're not familiar, you need to go ahead and get to the Kanopy app. Streaming services are getting buck wild with their prices, okay? But Kanopy, Kanopy is here for us. So on the Kanopy app, you can stream thousands of movies or TV shows for free 99, okay? F-R-E-E.

And that's thanks to the generous support of your public library. So all you need is a library card to access popular movies and TV shows, read-alongs, and kids programming on your smart TV, tablet, phone, or browser. Visit Canopy.com. That's

K-A-N-O-P-Y dot com to find a library near you and stream Smarter for Free today. And just in case you're curious, they have movies like Moonlight, I Am Not Your Negro, which is a James Baldwin documentary, Lady Bird. They've got some hit little joints on here. I'm not mad at it at all. All right. Check out Canopy. And thanks again to Canopy for sponsoring this episode.

Okay, this is one I think that's been in the, I'm not sure there's much to say about it, but Salman Rushdie's attacker was indeed sentenced to 25 years.

in jail. This was from May 16th. We had several people email this to us. I think I have this here just so you know that we saw that. So there we go. Janica, we don't have to comment on that unless you've got some crazy hot take and real insight to the English legal, the American legal system and attacking people. And no, I don't think there's anything else to do. Okay. Here's one to do because you and I, we've written a list or two on the internet about books in our life. Yeah.

And when you saw this story about the Chicago Sun-Times running an AI-generated summer reading list with a bunch of fake books, what was your first thought? Do you remember what your first thought was? I think, honestly, my first thought was just like, ooh, this is such a good book gossip. The content, our content.

Because like everybody was talking about it, but I think, I think I originally saw it just kind of in isolation. And then when I found out it was part of, you know, 500 recommendations for summer where there was this, and then there was like albums and snacks and music, like whatever movies, everything you could possibly recommend. And,

obviously that doesn't excuse using AI. That was a horrible move and many people would have liked to write it, but it was sort of like, oh, you're, you're kind of setting yourself up for fluff, you know, like nobody's going to be an expert in all of these things. Yeah. What about you? Yeah. I think what I wrote about in today in books, I said a couple of things and my thinking has evolved a little bit. A,

The reputational damage, I think, for something like this is real at this point, right? People aren't going to think about these things differently, these places the same. The second thing I thought was maybe more of an insider situation where

This was a freelancer from a third-party content company running in Chicago sometimes. And so a couple of things happen when you lease out your reputation, right? You don't know who these people are. So we've seen things like this happen before when it comes to journalists making stuff up or other kinds of misbehavior because journalists and writers are like other people, flawed and have motivations and can get out of their skis. But this is one where I think people who...

don't make the internet, don't understand how common these sort of syndication deals are. And a banner can, you know, a company like the Chicago Sun-Times can be, I don't know, more of a content holding company than, you know, a newsroom like you're looking at in All the President's Men or something like that. Right. And ours, the people running these pieces on their properties may not know, have any idea who wrote it. Yeah. Right? Right.

And so they don't know if they can trust them. And then the perverse incentives from the people who don't really have any accountability or a long-term relationship with that corporation or masthead, they're motivated to make it as quick and cheap as fast as they can. Because here's the other thing, Annika, internet writing doesn't pay great.

No, and especially with the rise of AI, it's harder to get those kinds of freelance jobs. And I think it's paying less because people are like, you could just use AI, which as we've seen, you can't really. But it's interesting too, because I think some of these stories are also revealing like

I'm not sure if the person who wrote this kind of didn't really do a defense, but sort of put out a statement that said, I use this for research. I should have double checked. I always double check. Somehow I didn't double check. So if we take him as word that it was just, you know, the selections and that he actually wrote the descriptions, then,

Like how, how many of these lists have gone out where they just Googled summer reads and they copy and paste to the first 10 results, you know, but you'd never catch that. Nobody would ever notice it. So I think some of this, these stories are maybe revealing something that was already there and making it more obvious. I think that's right. You know, there's a follow on story and I did a little bit more writing and telling books about this one too, but,

I'm of multiple minds about AI and LLMs, maybe beyond the scope of this particular conversation. Maybe not. You haven't really talked about that, but there's some stuff that it can do that's pretty powerful. I'll give one example of something that I did last summer that is kind of how I'm using it, if I use it at all, where I did an analysis of the most anticipated books, I think of the summer. And so I had like 25 tabs of various lists. Yeah.

And what I did is I copy and pasted all the text into ChatGPT and said, can you make me a spreadsheet with just organize this for me?

And it did it. And so then I went back and looked and I double checked because one of my early experiments with chat GPT is who are the 10 most important living American writers and three of them were dead, Danica. And so ever since then, I've been very gun shy about the truth. But in terms of organization and data manipulation, it's pretty powerful. And that's a little bit more like really fancy spell check to me. But having said that, so I think there are some ways to use this

ethically in terms of stealing people's work or however you think about that. And the climate stuff is another kettle of fish, which I think bears keeping in mind. But having said that, what I do think is it is the greatest tool for cheats and scammers in the history of the electron age. There's no doubt. That I believe. Whether or not you can use it ethically, I think is an interesting conversation. And those things I think can live side by side, Danica, because it can be really used in interesting ways and you can do some stuff

that really I wouldn't have had the time necessarily myself to do all that work, especially for the amount of money it would have made the company, just to be perfectly honest. But if it takes me five minutes rather than two hours hand logging them, I've made something and I wanted to make it good. And that's where the distinction is. Are you trying to make something good or are you trying to make something fast? Right. It gets you to fast faster than anything ever has. And it's a little mind boggling. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it definitely supercharges any existing problems. Welcome to technology, I guess. Yeah. I think I have been thinking about, I don't know if it made it onto the pod, but the writers who accidentally left the prompts in their books. And those were like Kindle Unlimited type prompts.

books, right? Where you're, you're paid by the page essentially. So there's a lot of incentive to write books quickly and, you know, volume play. Yeah. Yeah. And like there were already people who are taking advantage of that. And obviously people who weren't putting in a lot of work and then some people who are putting in a lot of work, but now that there's the AI factor, I don't know if that sort of like,

Like if it can even keep existing because it was already hard to sort out, you know, the scammers or the really low effort stuff. Right. But now there's just going to be so much of it. Yeah. The volume is really incredible. And that was one of the early stories. I remember Rebecca and I talked about where,

people getting submissions. I think especially like short story science fiction magazines. Yeah. It was getting inundated with so many, the volume was so changed because people could take more shots because it was, the cost of taking a shot was trivial before. So the thing about the Chicago Sun-Times one is it was so glaring that I think it may teach us the wrong lesson or not the wrong lesson necessarily, but we may miss the forest for the trees a little bit.

This was only caught because it was so bad, right? Yeah, exactly. I think what we're not seeing is the 1% of stuff that's untrue or hallucinated that you're not going to see necessarily. Because this was so blatant. It was books by famous authors that literally did not exist. Very common authors. You don't have to be you or me or Rebecca who cover this for a living to see like,

Andy Weir did not write. That is not an Andy Weir. That's not a Min Jin Lee book. I will say this, though. I would kind of read the summaries of some of the books. Like if Andy Weir or Min Jin Lee wrote that book, I'm like, I could have been duped if the piece was, here are the next books by authors you like. I'd be like, wow, those are, that's what, okay, I guess I'm excited for that. Wasn't the Andy Weir one about like an AI who achieves consciousness or something?

Maybe the AI was trying to get Andy Weir to write a book about the plight of AI. There's like a little bit of something else going on there. So that was another piece that I was struck by. I don't think anyone commented upon, at least to my, I was like, these are very plausible descriptions of future books. Like if this came out and published as much as it was the next book, I'd be like, that kind of makes sense, honestly.

Well, there was another story I read recently. I can't remember if I shared it or not, but it was someone, it was a writer who tried to use chat GPT to put together a catalog or what, what do you call that? Your best stories. Oh yeah. A collection of your portfolio and, and not, not using chat GPT to write it, but just to give advice about which stories to include. And, um,

was sending links of these stories and chat GBT would come up with these really in-depth analyses of the, the strengths of each of these. And she was like, wow, how are you? So you're actually reading these. And they said, yeah, I'm, I'm reading every word. And,

And then about three more exchanges down, she was like, that's not what the story is about. And it kind of slowly reveals that it hasn't been able to access any of these links. And it's just fully like kind of horoscope style being like, yeah, your voice is really strong in this one. It shows your unique style. It could be anything, but yeah,

But it continually said, well, this one I couldn't actually read, but the rest I have been reading every word until it was prompted. And then was like, okay, I did lie about that. That is nuts. That part really is nuts about how easy it is.

For it to fake even someone who's looking for fakes out. That's really disturbing, to be honest. Yeah. Well, that's honestly why I have many concerns about it. But in terms of practicality, because I just can't trust it could make things up, then you have to double check everything. And if I'm double checking everything, that's taking more time than if I just did it. Yeah. I can't use it for truth.

Yeah. But like I said, if I have a bounded data set that I understand, it can do some stuff that's pretty interesting. I meant to link to this. I think that I put this... It doesn't matter. I'll put this in the links here. This was a really good piece on Subsect by Sean Kiernan from last month. And it went kind of viral on Subsect because you're going to hear why. 13 sign, you've used ChatGP to write that. And it's not satirical. And there's some... So if you're interested in having a...

I guess if you're interested in having a filter, a human meat filter for, wait, does this feel like it could be chat GPT? These all give specificity and voice to things I kind of understand. It's propensity for lists, for example, lacking depth, em dashes, a lot of parallelism. There are no typos, longer complicated sentence structure.

Another one is lack of specific details in talking about something. It doesn't use numbers. It can't use descriptions because it doesn't know anything. And it's crowdsourcing interpretation and everything else. So I thought this piece was pretty cool. And maybe there's an LLM plug-in you can key this in and say, look for all these things, and these things advance all the time. But you can...

You can tell. And there are some very, very plausible fakes going around in a way that's very difficult to manage. It really is difficult to manage. Well, and it becomes this like weird cycle where I've, first of all, I've heard of students saying, I can't use em dashes because then my teacher will think. That's a tell, right? Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Which is a shame because that's a perfectly valid way. I love an em dash. Yeah.

Yeah, to write. But also I've heard of, again, like I think the cutting edge of chat GPT writing is student papers. We're trying to get away with that. Just going in and adding typos, you know, like this is the advanced way of doing it. I mean, you can do stuff like say, hey, can you rewrite this so that it looks more like I wrote a human wrote

this or a 16-year-old wrote this. So it's pretty wild. Be careful out there, I guess I should say. We here at the BR, we're handpicking. These are human-selected lists. We're not using Chachapie to create lists at this point. I can't imagine that happening anytime soon. There was a follow-on story, I think in the wake of the piece about the Chicago Sun-Times, some people had the, I don't know, gave them cover or gave them realization that there was a story here. I think you shared this one. Yeah, I think so. About Canadian authors who

I'm talking about AI dupes of their books. So here's how this works. You have a book and you write like kind of normal style, like the normal publishing thing. Let's do that. And it gets put on Amazon. And what someone can do now, if they think there's any heat at all around your book, is make a fake looking cover quickly using, you know, LLMs for images and

Retitle it but very close to it, especially if it's nonfiction. You can do the memo. I think this is a memoir of a wannabe PM, I think, or a biography of a wannabe PM. This is a Canadian PM in this example. And then you have ChatGPT write a book, right? I mean, this is seriously what happens about that topic. And you put it on Amazon SelfPub.

And you charge $3 for Kindle for it. And then you can also have a $5 audiobook version that you've made with an LLM. And you're basically tricking people looking or interested in the legit book for your thing. And it's cheaper and it looks plausible and let's give it a go. And this is terrible, Danica. This is one of my least favorite books in a long time.

It's, it's again, one of those things that was already a problem when I worked with a bookstore and I ran the online side of it. We, we would like list books that were good.

It's complicated, but we listed books that were getting printed somewhere else from Ingram, but we would be the sellers. And one of the things that they would print were these summaries of books, which I feel like should not be legal, honestly, because they're...

There are such scams, but it would be like a new, especially like business or self-help new hardcover. They'd publish this 20 page summary in paperback and people who were just looking for the paperback and weren't looking very closely were like, oh, great. This is $8 for the paperback. Instead, I'll buy that. And then got very angry at us. Yeah.

Because they didn't get the actual book. Except again, now it's even easier. But the one in that piece that was horrifying was that one of the books was a woman who wrote a memoir about her late husband. And someone did this. Literally grave robbing essentially is what it is. It's wild. Yeah.

And kept her husband's name and son's name the same. And did a prequel? A prequel to her memoir? That is ghoulish behavior. Oh my god. That is really disturbing. I do think your comment about Kindle Unlimited's business model groaning to the point of breaking possibly under this. Amazon being the principal purveyor of this, at least in the United States. I'm sure it's different in other countries. But

There could come a day where there's a huge class action lawsuits about Amazon not doing enough work to keep these from the buy or sell side, right? Yeah. Because there's a lot of fake crap out there. It was, I think in the early day of the Kindle, I fell for one of those summaries. Or no, the early days of doing VR when I was trying to teach myself how to run a business without going up in flames. Mm-hmm.

I was looking for one of these business books and I was like, oh, a Kindle edition for three bucks. And it was a summary of the thing. And I was like, oh, now I have to watch out for that. I only got taken for three bucks. I did learn to watch out for it. It's, yeah, like one of the most common scams on Amazon. But I also think even outside of lawsuits, like Amazon's going to be so hard to use if...

for every legitimate title. There's what? 20, 100, a thousand AI versions? It could be that way. You're right. The other thing they're dealing with too is there's so many ads on Amazon's pages now. So a combination of ads and then fakes and then recommendations that are sort of like the thing. I mean, it's kind of the Google search problem writ large, to be honest with you. A similar kind of dynamic at the same time where

The cost of bad content is effectively zero and it competes with decent content that's hard to make, which drags down to the value of that and you get into this recursive cycle. That's extraordinarily difficult to get out of. So like say you wanted to support something and they had a Patreon, that would be a good way to do that. I'm just throwing that out there for the kind of companies people might like. Another one was...

The Business Insider is another story where this really hit me. I think you and I had a little back and forth on Google Chat about...

This was a manager at Business Insider who wanted to, I guess, motivate or somehow show, give, offer a list of books to employees about good journalism writing. And they clearly used some sort of LLM because there were fake books on it. There was mistakes about some of the books that were legit and there were some fake books on it. And that's another one like they actually didn't want to provide a good list. They wanted to be seen providing the list and they forgot about the good and doing it fast.

And much like the Chicago Sun-Times, their reputation is gone in that setting. I don't know how they would be trusted by an employee again. Well, we were talking about, because here's, I think if you're going to assign, or definitely if you're going to assign, but even if you're just going to recommend a book to an employee, like for the average person, a book is an investment. You know, you're spending how many hours of your time on this? 10, 12, depending. Yeah. And the...

To recommend they read a book that you haven't even read, you know, it's bad enough. It's obviously worse that it doesn't exist. But why would you recommend they read a book? You don't even know if it's good. You don't know what's in it. What are they? It's just so performative to make yourself feel

feel better by just wasting your employees time, like just showing that you do not care about their time at all. So disrespectful. It is really disrespectful, especially for people like us on the book recommending side where I'll hesitate to recommend a book that I just kind of like.

Right? Yeah. I really need to feel like it's, or I'll go out of my way to caveat and say, here's strengths and weaknesses on the whole. I like it. But just to blanket recommend is pretty tough, I think, for those of us who know the fine art of book recommendation. So anyway, that's a lot of AI is bad. And I don't have a lot of AI is good for you today. That's not what I'm doing here today. I gave you my one couple of use cases. But other than that, pretty tough out there. All right, we're gonna take another sponsor break.

Today's episode is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. So Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is starring Camille Rutherford. It's a new romantic comedy about a Parisian woman who dreams of becoming a successful writer and experiencing true love while attending a Jane Austen writer's residency in England. It's a new romantic comedy about a Parisian woman who dreams of becoming a successful writer

it is all types of like cozy bookish rom-commy goodness and I think I feel like we need that right now

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is now playing in select cities and opens nationwide May 30th. For more information and tickets, visit janeaustenwreckedmylife.com. Again, that's janeaustenwreckedmylife.com. Thanks again to Sony Pictures Classics for sponsoring this episode.

Today's episode is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. From the title, you can tell that, yes, it is about Jane Austen, or I should say a Jane Austen lover, but it's also like grown. It's a romantic comedy. It's like the perfect little rom-com that is bookish when you want to watch a movie when it's rainy. You know what I mean? All right, follow me.

So it is a new romantic comedy about a Parisian woman played by Camille Rutherford who dreams of becoming a successful writer and experiencing true love while attending a Jane Austen writer's residency in England.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life opens only in select theaters in select cities, May 23rd and nationwide May 30th. For more information and tickets, visit janeaustenwreckedmylife.com. It looks fun. I'm going to go see it. I don't know about you. I think you should. I think you should. Again, check out janeaustenwreckedmylife.com. And thanks again to Sony Pictures Classics for sponsoring this episode.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, Prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail-biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast, free delivery, Prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to learn more.

We're right smack dab in the middle of best of the year so far season. And Danica, you've been on the internet for a while, like I have around books. It's not just me, right? That the of the year so far has never ever has been as prevalent. Like we've been doing this for a while. And again, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, but like there's lists from all kinds of places on not just books and movies and music and everything else. So far is a big deal right now.

Yeah. No, it used to be a lot. And it definitely didn't start in May before. At least not that. I have some thoughts about that. Well, okay, because Amazon lists the best books of the year and Goodreads has their most popular books of the year so far. And even a couple of the popular books, I think the Schwab isn't even out yet. It doesn't come out until next week. So I guess it's just people shelving it. It must be how they're doing it there.

Our best books of the year list is coming out the 24th, which is through June, and all the June books will be out because I think the 23rd is the last Tuesday of the month. That's a hill I'm going to – I'm not going to die on it, but I'll kick some dirt at the top of that hill. I'm not shoving. The books should be out. Wait until the books are out. At the end of the year –

In November, in October even, again, if you're not a trade publication but a consumer publication, Us, The Vulture, other places like that, wait till mid-November or even the first week of November because most of the books are out just because the way book buying happens. But you want to put a list out where people can go buy the book right now. So that's my meta commentary there. Amazon's best books of the year so far. So Charlotte McGonaghy's Wild Dark Shore is the best book of the year so far. I wrote about that today in Today in Books.

I'm here to tell you it is a good book. Have you read any of her books? Do you know her at all? I haven't. I've been meaning to. They're definitely on my list, but I haven't read any yet. That's okay. You don't have to apologize here. I'm not going to check your list either. So you don't have to say, you know, I'm not going to knock on your door and say, Danica, I need to see the list you said exists. But she has carved out a very interesting place. It's her third book after Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. And

They are literary climate fictions with strong family relationships and strong family vibes and relationships, often a little bit of a mystery. They're a little more literary than you might think, and they're packaged as such. These books are good. I'm glad she's a thing. She's an official thing now. This book is selling very well.

And I think I drafted it for the fantasy draft. So I'm not sure I'm going to say it's the best book of the year, but when I saw this, I'm like, this book is good. And this makes a ton of sense. It's got a really good hook too. Like I think it's a little easier to sell than her earlier books because she

Yeah, the idea of just like a strange woman washes up on the shore of the island that you live on with your family. Like that's interesting. I don't think I told the story of why I first put this book down when I first started reading it. Have you heard this story? I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, listeners. So I picked it up because I was excited to read it and I heard it was good and I like her work.

And I was picking up from my Hawaii trip. And the first page is, and this is important thing to know, we were staying on the beach and my daughter's name is Rowan. And the first page is like the chapter heading is Rowan. And it said the first time I drowned and I put it down immediately because I can't do that. That's too close.

That's not fair. Spending a week with your kids playing in the waves. I can't read a book about a kid named Rowan or someone named Rowan drowning. Anyway, I got over that. We got landlocked. We came inland.

Yeah, and it was safe. It was safe, yeah. Because I don't know what kind of reverse magical thinking that was, but I wasn't there for it. But it's a pretty quick read, but it's very evocative. The sense of place is really cool. I'm thrilled that this is a person who's going to sell a lot of –

Of the more popular commercial literary stuff that's come out recently, I think this is my favorite. I like it better than the Kristen Hannes of the world. And I'm trying to think of somebody else. No slag to those people, but I'm trying to give it a recommendation is what I'm trying to do. Yeah. By shading other people. On the rest of the list, anything that jumps out to you? I don't know if you saw anything that you wanted to talk about for a minute. Yeah. Some obvious ones. Yeah. Like Sunrise on the Reaping, Atmosphere. Though, again, did that even come out?

come out yet. It's just out. It's just out. Yeah. And then some I haven't, I don't think have heard of. Dead Money? No. Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride by Will Leach. No More Tears, The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson. That's a surprise. I hadn't heard of that either. I will give it up to the Amazon Books editors. They all throw a non-fiction curveball every now and again, which I like. I was going to say that.

They actually, Amazon surprise. If I were to guess with no knowledge of any of the lists, which one would be the most eclectic? I would not think Amazon, but they actually do have some more unknown picks, which is kind of surprising. Like you would think it would just be absolute bestsellers.

Yeah, I've been interested in their project here because, again, King of Ashes, Emperor of Gladness, Sunrise on the Reaping, Atmosphere, Matrix by Tina Knowles. There's Mark Twain by Ron. I'm not saying these books aren't really great. They might be. I haven't read all of them. But some of them...

are familiar, but then some of them aren't. They just aren't. Yeah. Waste Wars, the wild afterlife of your trash. I think maybe that's for me. They're like, we need one for Jeff. How do we get Jeff to talk about this? We need Jeff to talk about trash. You know what? I tip my cap to folks over at Amazon. So I'll be curious to see how they stand up for the year. I didn't notice...

There hasn't been a real standout seller. I auditioned by Katie Kittimer as my favorite book of the year. Again, it's pretty literary and I don't know. Again, these are people. This is the other thing you could tell with the Amazon list is these are people's favorites. This is not the algorithm's favorites, which I like. Say what you will about Amazon and there's plenty to say. It maps to some degree on the most popular book.

books that Goodreads listed. Right. Dark Shore's on here as well. So if Rebecca was here and Danica, you've heard us talk, we might need to have Wild Dark Shore is now in the chat for It Book of the Year contention. Yeah. People are reading it. It's selling well.

I'm interested. I can see this getting, I'm surprised there hasn't been an adaptation. I can very much see like Elle Fanning walking on a moor somewhere in these kinds of books. So I don't know. I've got my eye on this. The Wild Dark Shore train seems to be living the station. Did anyone pick that for the fancily? I feel like I might have, though that could just be regret that I didn't.

I don't know if you saw, I made my own all queer picks for our queer show. Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes. That was really fun. I would like to see it easily beat us. Other notables, and I think, did you write up this piece for us? I can't remember the most popular books on Goodreads. Is that you? I think so. So a couple of those that you picked out, Bare Bones in the Midnight Soil, again, not out yet. It comes out next week. We've got an Emily Henry, Asher.

atmosphere is there. No surprise. I'm trying to look for some surprises. Oh, the Dream Hotel by Leila Lamy. I was glad to see that. I think we're going to return to that when the year is over. The Night in the Moth seems to be the big non-Yaros romantic-y release of the year. They did some ads with us. Sometimes that's indicative. Of course, Sunrise at the Reaping. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against Us. So this is a hundred, they gave us 144

Which is a really random number. I have no idea. I guess that's all I've got to say. Anything surprise you here? Yeah, so Goodreads put out two lists. One was the most popular books ever.

or the most read books of the year so far. The most read had 144 books. Oh, I'm conflating two lists. You're absolutely right. Yeah. The most popular had 51 books and those actually have write-ups for each title, which now I'm looking at it, No More Tears is also there. Really? I guess it's a big book. Didn't know about it. But

But most of the others are pretty straightforward. I always feel like I want the expose of what it's like behind the scenes for the Goodreads editors because I feel like they're always just fighting tooth and nail with the most popular. I feel like they're trying to put in a more diverse list like in the first round of the Goodreads Choice Awards. But the math is so hard for them to fight.

And then as soon as the actual, you know, voting goes in, all those interesting picks are gone. They just get complete. I mean, this is, this is a bit of a jag I've been on. Like the readers are no picnic either on this stuff. You know, the industry's got industry things and media's got media things. But when the rubber meets the road of people reading and buying books, it's,

Hearts and minds are the last thing to come. I think a lot of the structural stuff has changed. I think the world of books and reading around diversity has certainly changed since we started doing this 15 years ago with BR. And sales and the common reader's reading is a little bit different, but it's much less different than one would think or hope given the amount of work that's gone into it. Yeah. Yeah, I do. And I wonder...

I'll just say allegedly. I don't know what happens in the scenes. But I feel like even in these most popular lists, I think they're putting their thumb on the scale a bit to make it slightly more interesting than it would actually be. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, but...

Yeah, the way they're ordering, say, sci-fi novels, it says it's an order of popularity, but that doesn't seem totally reflective. You wouldn't be interested in the polygraph test on that? Well, we used to do more polls on VR around what's your favorite book.

And it was just so uninteresting because like your favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird. Again, it's not, again, if your favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm not here to adjudicate that, but like the answers are so, it's like, what's your favorite kind of ice cream? And you get enough and we would get enough response that it was vanilla. Like essentially we're getting vanilla ice cream answers and that's not interesting. So anyway, I think they have that kind of a problem too. And they don't have, they don't really have a editorial mandate at Goodreads where they're doing like

Under the radar pics, things you should add to yourself. I don't see anything like that come from them. Not that they should, but they just don't do it.

No, I don't think so. It seems to be mostly just a reflection of readers' shelves. Yeah, that's right. Big book announcements. You know, Danica, I don't know where you are, but a big fashion coffee table book is not something I'm excited about. And it doesn't mean that's bad, but that's what Michelle Obama's next book is part of the fulfillment of this giant deal Sheena Barack signed with Crown a while ago. It's called The Look, and it is a lookbook project.

about her outfits and the stories behind them. 200 photographs, never before seen images, and some thoughts, I guess, about how we present ourselves to the world.

Is there a topic she could have come up with that you would be less interested? I didn't want to say that. Is there a more disappointing version of this? I don't think so. And that's what I said in Today in Books. I'm like, I'm sure this is not for me. And that's okay. Yeah. I don't know what I would, my own reading experience. I said this is a becoming kind of did the memoir work. There doesn't seem like there was a lot there. Yeah.

And so I was interested about what would be next. And I guess this is, I guess this is what it is. And she gets to live her life. This is not about trying to criticize what she's doing. That's I'm just talking as a reader's point of view, it is a pass for me. Yeah. I think if it was any other celebrity who had signed on for a multi-book deal, this, you know, wouldn't be surprising or disappointing at all. I think it's more because her books really have this,

been respected as books outside of her celebrity. Right. Yeah. I don't, I mean, she does, she wants to be in the public eye clearly, but she doesn't want to do politics and that's okay. So I think she finds herself or we find her, maybe she feels perfectly comfortable where she is.

From the outside, a pretty strange of like Oprah plus in terms of profile, right? Feels like more of a player on a global political cultural stage than Oprah is at this point. But then not wanting to do much with it on the book side, at least. I held out a scintilla of hope that we might get a here's what I believe kind of book that

or something else, or the 10 most difficult questions in America, like just something where I could sink my teeth into a little bit. I don't know that there's a person in the world that the look that is this, that's the same packaging and it's a different human in it. It's not about Michelle Obama. Like, I just don't care about this for any Lady Gaga. I don't, I'm, I'm trying to think, I'm struggling to think of anyone I would remotely, and actually probably it's Michelle Obama. If anyone's going to write this, I have any interest in it might be a Michelle Obama. So that's another way of looking at it.

So she did the workbook with becoming, I'm not sure how many she's got left to write. I don't know what she has to do to fulfill. I think Obama has another big one coming is my understanding. So I don't know. I'm sure it'll be beautiful. It'll probably cost $80. Yeah.

A real glow up, though. I was thrilled to see the forward is by Farrah Jasmine Griffin, one of my old teachers at Columbia in the English department there. So a forward by an English scholar that I used to know a little bit. I'm going to be more interested in Farrah's introduction than the pictures, to be honest with you.

Okay, it takes a lot to get me or Rebecca to talk about adaptation news anymore Danica for reasons I think you understand. And I guess I'll throw it to you before we say what this is. Does this pass the smell test to you of talking about it for four minutes? That's a no, it's okay, you can say no, you don't have to say yes.

I guess personally, I'm not super interested, but I think once it's made, I think it'll be one of the big adaptations. Right. So the news here is that James Cameron, Jimmy, Big Jim, as I call him when I see him, is...

has announced that he will co-write an adaptation of Joe Abercrombie's The Devils for the screen. Dark fantasy novel, classic horror. Sounds like a pretty good fun time. He writes a little explanation of why he's interested. An alt-universe Middle Ages romp where best hope for survival is the monsters themselves. So Cameron is in the middle of this sojourn into the Avatar wilds for like two decades.

and that he would pop out of it to work on this seems like a real boost to the idea of this book and Abercrombie himself. I'm not sure this will ever get made, right? Who knows if this will ever get made. It seems also weird that Cameron wouldn't himself direct it. He's talked about maybe passing off Avatar directorial duties to somebody else. I'd imagine he's tired. So maybe this will be his life raft off the water that he always seems to be filming in or around. Yeah.

I think more than anything, it got me to look at Abercrombie differently again, because this is a name I've seen recently. And there was recently a profile. And this book has gotten quite a bit of early buzz. And horror is such an ascendant that we're looking, we're not looking for. There's room for more big time horror authors. And it looks like Abercrombie is really, his hat is in the bloody ring of being one of the top tier AAA folks. And I would imagine if this movie gets made, it's,

That will really cement the deal. So I don't know if we have horror readers in our listenership, but if you do and you know Joe Abercrombie, I'd sure like to know what the kind of vibe is for horror lovers for him. So anyway, well, thank you for humoring me on that, Danica. This didn't get into the show notes today, but I think that I was thinking about and related to this as I was trying to think of something interesting to say about it is there was a piece in Publishing Perspectives, I think it was, about

about romance sales to date year over year, still up 24%, the whole category, year over year even now, so it's not slowing down. But one thing that might be changing is a turn into dark fantasy, not just romantic, and some of them are romantic, but dark fantasy.

fantasy where there's more horror and anti-heroes. And that vibes with the larger horror and mystery thrillers are really dark right now on the whole, it seems like. We're in a dark place. There's an appetite for dark stories. I can't imagine why at this point, but this also suggests to me that there's an undercurrent here of interest and attention and appetite for darker stories, which you don't have to be

you know carl jung to figure out where that may be coming from but it seems is that going on in lbtq books where's that where are the lbtq books on the dark stuff i think i've been noticing more gothics yeah queer gothics coming out so i think that's interesting all right yeah all right we're gonna do uh frontless foyer we've invited danica over we're not even gonna make her take her shoes off you can come right in presented by thriftbooks which has over 19 million

titles, new used movies, books, games, DVDs, other kinds of gifts. If you're looking for something for your own summer reading, Father's Day, you got a new grad in you, thriftbooks.com. They've also got a loyalty program that every purchase gets you closer to a new book. I have certainly cashed several of those in with their reading rewards program and free shipping on US purchases over $15. Danica, what have you been reading recently? Danica

Yeah, one that I finished recently that I loved, I talked about it on the All the Books podcast, is the Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vashonavi Patel. I saw this on the shelf the other day. I'm so excited you're picking this.

It's so good. I think it's my, I think it's my first, no, I think it's my second five star 2025 book, but it's an alternate version of 1960s India where the previous rebellion was violently quashed and they're still under the control of the British. And,

And we are following Kalki as she is kind of slowly, as she gets older, beginning to lead the new rebellion and fight for India's freedom. And it's alternate history. It's not the real history of India, but everything is inspired by real events. And it is extremely...

complicated and thorny. Like there are so many very difficult decisions to make. There are some very dark moments, but it's also kind of,

inspirational. It made me think about how we have all these dystopian novels about fighting back against an oppressive government, but they're always set on different planets. They're not talking about actual oppressive forces that exist on earth and what it looks like. At least for me, I haven't read a lot of books that talk about what it actually looks like.

to fight back and the kind of conversations that are happening. You know, what is the role of violence? What do you do about existing inequality that was there before British rule? It's, it's so good. Huh? Yeah. It's adult. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Hmm. I may have to check that out. Yeah. Highly recommend it. I just finished listening to proto how one ancient language went global by Laura Spinney. It is about, um,

recent efforts to deduce PIE, which is Proto-Indo-European, which is the language that half of the world's languages have come from. The other is Afro-Asiatic, I think, but this is Indo-European, all language starting in Africa, with this one jumping up to Indian, Indus River Valley, and then promulgating throughout Western Europe. And then, of course, English and the Germanic languages and the Romance languages. But

So I'm into language on the whole, but this one is about using a combination of extant historical linguistics that have tried to deduce origins and relationships among languages with modern breakthroughs in genetic testing of old human remains, where we now can get a better sense through genetic testing of

the biological dispersal of people. And then you can try to map onto that what we know about languages. And there are some rules about how languages work and disperse, where you can understand sort of get a family tree all the way back to the, you know, the Adam and Eve, again, Garden of Eden, whatever, that's a metaphor, or if you believe that, I guess, congratulations to you, but like kind of go back to the source and figure out how this thing happened.

It gets a little in the weeds because each of the chapters in the middle is about one of the 12 branches of Indo-European and how it promulgated in its history. I read the first, I think, I'm glad I listened to the whole thing. I listened to this thing.

I think there's a version of this for people. Check it out from the library, get it from Libby or buy it. That's fine. Read the first and second chapter, the intro and the first one about Proto-Indo-European and then the last chapter and you're going to have a great time. And then if you want to go back and go in, you don't need that. I mean, they're each interesting by themselves, but it's a big ask.

to do if you're not really, really into this. But that's... I listened to the whole thing, but I would recommend even just the first couple of chapters about what they're doing to understand these things is pretty fascinating. So that's Proto by Laura Spinney. Also a wonderful narration. I don't know that it's her. If it's her, she...

I'm now jealous because you shouldn't be able to write and do this and sound like that narrating your own book. Anything else on your list, Danica, you want to shout out right now? I feel like I should mention the other five-star 2025. I was going to say, I was about to throw back to you because you can't. Check off five-star recommendation.

Which is Awakened by A.E. Osworth, which I'll just say is about a coven of trans witches who take on an evil AI. Do they win? That's all it is? Spoiler alert? I can't tell you. Okay. Who knows? Danica, if the AI wins and kills these witches, we're going to have words. We're going to have a Patreon where you have to account for your recommendation if that's something you did. Don't hold it against me. Okay, all right.

After the show we've done, you recommending a book where AI takes out some witches would be a real heel turn for you. Unbelievable. That's great. Okay. Mine is the, my other thing that I read recently, The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. I have followed her from Rabbit Cake to Unlikely Animals to this book.

It is a road trip novel, and I don't even know how to describe it. I didn't know how to describe Unlikely Animals. I didn't know how to describe Rabbit Cake. I think this is someone that Liberty actually turned me on to. She really loved Unlikely Animals, and I did too. So this one, there's a cat named Pancakes, and he's orange.

And he can sort of tell when people are going to die, but he's not the main character. He's sort of a familiar to this found family that goes on a super ill-advised road trip across the country, and they're all flawed and in pain. And...

For those of you who listen to my, and Sharifa and Rebecca and I sort of middling response to Run Fry the Hills by Kevin Wilson, I think The Road to Tender Hearts is maybe the book I was hoping that book would be, which is zany, heartfelt, strange, inventive, and kind of hard to recommend to people who aren't a little weird themselves. I don't know who buys these books because they're not commercial enough to be commercial, but they're also not weird fiction.

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's me and Lib. That's who it is. We're buying and keeping the road growing. I think there's actually more of a market for it, but you can even maybe hear me struggling to –

Talk about what it is. I think if you like a book like and I said run for the hills I was hoping to be like a little bit more Little Miss Sunshine. This one's a little bit more Little Miss Sunshine There's a very light speculative element into it that heart and it has no problem just sprinkling in not explaining It's not important. It's not about the speculative piece. It's just I don't know it's it it's these little supernatural or even just sort of across barely across the veil elements and

Give it an air of zaniness, surrealism, and anything can happen that I really like. But then ultimately it's grounded in pretty basic need for connection and human desire and wanting to be seen and loved and heard and try to do something interesting with your life. So that's The Road to Tender Hearts by Hartnett. I read this in like two days. It's out from...

Oh, who publishes? Why PRH homepage do you make it so hard to see? Like the publication date. Listen, Danica, I'm on it right now. This is the page for Road to Tenderhearts. This is where they want me to go, right? Yeah. And I don't know. The publication date is tiny. It's like the sixth smallest font, right? But the imprint is nowhere to be found. I don't even know. I don't think I can find the imprint on this page.

I don't think I can. So many publishers pages just have the month that a book is published. And I, I don't know about you. I don't know what your behind the scenes organization is, but I have a big spreadsheet of new releases and they're organized by date. And I'm like, I cannot plug this in until you give me the date. I have to know the date.

I have to because you're doing it. We're doing it for this show. I'm looking at for it books. We need to know the date. April 2026 doesn't help anybody. No. And with all the books, like it's I'm looking for the first Tuesday of every month. If you can't tell me what Tuesday it comes out, I can't. I can't. I know. I know. I know. I know. So this is from Ballantyne, which I had to find out by clicking through to bookshop.org. Okay.

Because it's not listed there. So if anyone works at Ballantyne, you might want to talk to your webmasters and say, can we get our imprint on here? This is like, this is exhibit A for people who don't care about most imprints. This page right here. All right. Choose an email, podcast at bookride.com. Bookride.com slash listen for the show notes. Check out the Patreon. There's a...

link in the show notes there as well. Also the pals event. Danica, people can find you writing our queer shelves. You're once a month thing over with Lib on all the books. Is that what your rotation is? Once a month thing over there. Working on the Read Harder Challenge, writing news stories for us and having a good old time. Anything else you want to plug while you're here?

You can also find me at my book blog, The Lesber. Right, still kicking. I think you're the only one that still has a thing that we used to make. It's amazing. Danica, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you. Welcome to Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, a narrative podcast series that explores why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus.

This season, we're getting a look at the year and the life of teachers from across the country through their audio journals. Look for Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, Season 2. A different kind of the same thing.