Late Show Book Clubs, An Anti-Book Ban Lawsuit Wins, and More Book News. PLUS: How You Make a Best Books of the Year So Far List
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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. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Today, it's going to light summer news week. I'm getting ready to head on vacation for a couple of weeks, but we've got a first half of the show, we'll do some news and frontless way. But in the back half of the show, very cool conversation with Al Woodworth, who is the managing editor of Amazon's books team.

And we're talking about their list of the best books of the year and maybe more or as interesting in that some of the nuts and bolts of how they make that list and what they do over there. Not unlike the conversation we had with Gilbert Cruz about their best books of the year, best books of the century so far list. That one again was a huge aggregate list of hundreds of people.

Because I did this, I think it's interesting and I've wanted to talk to someone over there for a long time because I actually didn't know how this stuff was put together. I'd listened to a podcast interview that she did a few months ago with someone because I was curious and I was like, this is really interesting. And it was confirmed to me this would be a good episode because I did a short form video around Amazon's best books of the year so far. And there were a couple of comments like there's anti-Amazon stuff, which I understand and that's your bailiwick fine.

But there's one, what do they know besides selling millions of books a day? And I say, oh, people don't know. And the nine- They know a lot. They know a lot. And the nine people that work on this, their whole job essentially is these books of the month lists and best books of the year so far and books of the year. And then they have genre lists within that.

And they've read more than you have. I mean, and you being anyone out there. It's the dream. You were telling me about this offline a little bit. And we were also talking about our friends at Spotify who said like they have dedicated listening time because their entire jobs are putting together the Spotify audio book listening lists. Like,

For people like us who are reading in and around the edges of our professional lives while making bookish content, the idea of your whole job is to make the lists and to do the reading for them is fascinating. And I couldn't make that interview, but I can't wait to hear it. Yeah. And Al's reading...

predilections in mind line up very well. We got to nerd out about trying to get people to read Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks because they have the whole list, like the team's list. And then I think this is something started a couple years ago. The editors also have their own personal list. So there's a lot to see there.

So anyway, you may, whatever your feelings about Amazon, that's valid and I'm not here to try to dissuade you one way or the other, but the work that these particular individuals are doing are interesting and enviable for sure. So that's in the back half of the episode. Coming up later this week as this is being released in the main feed, we're going to be releasing for everyone, bringing in front of the paywall, the event we did at Powell's, the most recommendable books of the century so far, as an enticement, as a preview,

as a FOMO-inducing digital experience. That's exactly what we're doing here. For you to think about, consider, bemoan your inability, if it comes to that, to not join us on July 9th at Powell's, 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. They get you 10% off a purchase there, I think up to 100 bucks worth. Vanessa Diaz is joining Rebecca and I. Rebecca's flying back out. We're also going to be joined by Keith Mossman, the book buyer extraordinaire.

You know what we should get? We should get Lib, Al Woodworth, this guy, some buyers, the people that really do the reps that cover some of these places that read hundreds of books in a given year and make us look like they're amateurs, that we feel like we are in certain contexts, but in other contexts, of course, we read a whole lot. But that's coming in the feed. So when you see it there and you're like, oh, they already paywalled this. No, it's out from the paywall. Come listen to us and come see us if you can.

And we have seen requests. We hear you. We want to make it to places like LA and New York. We're working on events in other cities. If you have connections to like event spaces or bookstores, that would be good possibilities for that. Or if you work at a bookish event space or organization or bookstore, and you'd like to have us just email us podcast at bookriot.com. Put something about hosting an event in the subject line. Finding a good space for a thing like this is more than half,

the battle. And if y'all have leads or you've seen great stuff happen, then you can make some connections for us. That would be super appreciated. And it helps take some friction out of the planning. Yeah. And just us paying for our travel and lodging and whatever, like we're not trying to make a bunch of money on this, but

The budget does not include paying a few thousand bucks for a space for a couple hours. That's just not going to work. It's hard enough for us to do this. Anyway, but it's not a tale of woe. It's just the realities of what's going on into places like this. Over on First Edition, it'll be out by the time this comes out for everyone. I talked to Peter Mendelsohn about his two books are coming up a couple weeks of each other.

a polymath, aspirational creative person and thinker. Fascinating guy. Book designer, musician, now painter, writer, of course, has written several books, but two very different books. Out already, the book is called Exhibitionist, and it's a catalog slash diary of his experience taking up painting during COVID and during a really horrible pandemic.

round of depression that he experienced. And the diary of that time and the art that he made, this is not I made a bunch of art and felt better. That's not the story, but a fascinating conversation. Then the novel, which comes out from FSG on June 17th, is called Weepers.

And it is a, I guess, semi-speculative in this regard, which is there's a group of people in this unnamed southwestern town, and they're professional mourners. And they're unionized, and so they go around to these events where they could use some mourners to

And the narrator's a really wonderful inventive and worth the time alone to read the book. It's not very long. But into their midst comes a figure who has some sort of other ability when it comes to getting people to get in touch with their feelings and what does to them, what does the narrator.

I thought the book was terrific, but we get into some heavy stuff because we talk about depression, we talk about the state of the world and this idea of like where does the emotion go and how do we work with this stuff? But talking with him is – I've talked with him before on Reading Lives a Million Years Ago, but I find him to be an inspiring and aspirational person. Of course, I don't envy the struggles that anyone has with depression in his regard,

but as a thinker and a maker and an erudite elucidator of the human condition, it doesn't get any better. High praise. High praise from Jeff O'Neill. For a full hour. We went for a full hour. We could have gone longer. We started before recording. We were just talking. I was like, Pete, we got to start recording here. You got to always be recording, man. So anyway, go check all those things out. You want to do some summer movies with us, you can hang out with us in the Patreon. We are also talking about one of our shared favorites, Lovecraft.

Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, which begins with Before Sunrise, carries on to Before Sunset and Before Midnight. I rewatch it most summers. I think you've probably seen it a million times. Well, we'll get into this, but the middle one is mine. Okay. But that's, we'll talk about why that is. I like them all, but the middle one is the one I gravitate towards. Yeah. Okay. Let's get into the show after a quick break.

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This episode is brought to you by Paratext Publicity. The Middleman by Mike Papantonio is 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.

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This episode is sponsored by With a Vengeance by Riley Sager. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio. In Riley Sager's chilling new thriller With a Vengeance, a story of justice, revenge, and what happens when the hunted becomes the hunter, Anna Matheson lures her enemies onto a luxury train to make them pay for what they did to her family. But when one of them turns up dead, justice turns into survival.

The clock is ticking. The bodies are piling up. Can Anna catch the killer before the train reaches Chicago? Riley Sager is back with a vengeance. This is one train, no stops, a deadly game of survival and revenge. Riley Sager, of course, is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, most recently Middle of the Night, The Only One Left, and The House Across the Lake.

With a Vengeance is narrated by Aaron Bennett and is available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Listen now before time runs out. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of With a Vengeance by Riley Sager. Do I have to do all this political news, Rebecca?

What are we going to say here? You know, we'll do just quick hits because we've got a short little news segment here before we get to your interview with Al. So on the upside, a lawsuit that was filed in response to a book banning policy in the St. Francis School District in Minnesota has resulted in the end of the book banning policy and in a bunch of books being returned to their shelves.

In March, the ACLU partnered with Education Minnesota St. Francis to file a lawsuit against the district that had enacted a policy that allowed the district to remove librarians and teachers from the book approval process.

And they had replaced that human process with the website Book Looks, which if you've been listening to the show for a bit or following Kelly Jensen's coverage on Book Riot, you know Book Looks was a website affiliated with Moms for Liberty that rated books based on their content and was heavily skewed towards the kinds of conservative and anti-LGBTQ content.

you know, anti-progress values that Moms for Liberty was standing for. So now more than 30 titles, including The Bluest Eye, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kite Runner, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, Night by Elie Wiesel, have been returned to the shelves of that school district. Lawsuits work.

You know, the book banning stuff when it started four or five years ago was really alarming, continues to be really alarming. And we have been waiting for more of the lawsuits to make their ways into and through the courts. We're starting to really see that pay off. The lawsuits work. And in most of the cases, they are coming down on the side of liberty and real freedom to read, real freedom to access information. So that's a win for us this week.

You know, I wonder how the AC, I mean, is this the great moment of the ACLU? I don't know. I'm sure they've had other times in the 60s and with other kinds of civil rights. But in terms of First Amendment, I wonder what they would say. I wonder how they're doing over there. You know, I remember after September 11th, a bunch of people like joined the military or whatever. Oh, yeah. I hope there's people out there in law school and coming out of law school and feeling the call to,

I wonder. You know, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think it's also a wonderful volunteer opportunity. One of the things we hear from people is how can I be involved in fighting book bands if I'm not going to run books?

for my school district, or maybe you don't want to be connected to a local political party, there is an ACLU chapter in your state. If you're in a big city, there's definitely one in your city. And like all nonprofits, they need money and they need human hands who are willing to do things. So local ACLUs might be a great place to reach out if you're looking for a way to get involved in this. I will say too that one of the many quirks of

And a lot of places have quirks like this too, but the folks that professionally or they're hired by these organizations to stand outside with a clipboard and get you to sign stuff or give money, they have found that the doors in front of the Powell's on Hawthorne, that's real close to me, is a really good spot because as you might imagine, the people that go into Powell's are, I don't know if they're a soft touch, but they're amenable to at least the kinds of people that hold clipboards there. I'm guessing there's other places for the other side of the aisle that they find amenable

And I now have like clipboard guy with clipboard blindness, but the ACLU asking me to sign something, I will stop for them almost every time. Mm-hmm.

in that particular case. Did I ever tell you my story about, I was, this is what I was teaching in New York and I was walking down the sidewalk as one does in a beautiful fall day, had my, you know, had my tweed jacket on and my messenger bag and my little page boy cap, really feeling like that. I can see it. I can picture it now. Had my headphones on.

And, you know, I thought there was a person outside of their store with like a tasting tray of cheese, right? Just outside the store. Have I told you this story? I don't know. What store is this? Well, just wait for it. And I'm like, all right, I like cheese. I take that. I take the bite of cheese off the tray. Not cheese. It was soap. Then I take it a big couple of bites of it before I realized it was soap. And I gagged and spit it all over the sidewalk. Have not heard this one.

Yeah, so that's a running joke in my house. What were they doing? That's not cheese. I guess they wanted you to just smell it. They didn't want you to eat it. I don't know. I wonder if I was the only person to eat the cheese that day. Was it a cosmetics company or something?

or something. Yeah, it was a little cosmetics company. And a little high-end cosmetic company and a little high-end cheese place, the branding kind of, it's not dissimilar. All those high-end places at Booboo Teeth, are they selling soap? Are they selling jewelry? Now are they selling weed? You're brave to take sample sidewalk cheese. I was feeling good. This was pre-COVID. It was a different time. It was a different time.

That's my story. People are going to say we didn't used to lock our doors in the 40s. Oh, yeah. You're like, I once ate what I thought was sample sidewalk cheese. Yeah, I ate street soap. Anyway, it's not cheese. I have not heard that one before. Yeah, I don't have many left you haven't heard, but there's one before you there. Yeah, so ACLU, that's a great place to volunteer, donate money, maybe even something. Also a place, I found a couple places, times in my life where people don't want to, even Republicans that I know-

They're not interested in sort of joining the ranks of the Democrats, but they're looking for something else to participate in. And the ACLU...

theoretically could be a really nice meeting ground if you've got someone in your life that doesn't agree with some of the things going on, maybe all of them, but they're also not going to like, I don't know, get on the AOC TikTok or whatever's going on. The ACLU might be a bit of a warm bath rather than jumping into the ocean. You might try that out. It's an interesting idea. In other follow-up, former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has made her first public appearance since being fired by Surprise. Yeah.

Last month, she appeared on CBS Sunday Morning. We'll put a link in the show notes where you can watch the whole interview. But she basically confirms what we and the rest of bookish media had suspected that she had no warning about this. The dismissal did come in a two sentence email that she says in the video she thought was fake because it comes from someone she's never really spoken to before. And it just starts, hi, Carla.

Like thought maybe it was spam and she needed to report it. She has that is the only interaction she has had with the administration regarding her firing that that email. That's it. And she addresses the apparent confusion in the administration and from White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt about what the Librarian of Congress does and doesn't do. The fact that the Library of Congress is not a lending library, that's

that puts books into children's hands. And she also speaks out about how concerned she is that we might have, that we do have an administration that views diversity of ideas and access to a diversity of ideas as a negative thing. And that's one of the reasons that they have given for letting her go. It's worth a watch. She will continue to have our support. So if you've been following that story, just a true class act, like,

There is a real, I'm sure that she's got some other feelings on the inside that she didn't bring to this interview, but man, watching it, it must be so hard to not just be like, I want to burn this place down. How could these guys? Where do you think someone like Carla Hayden is?

It's like university administration, though that's no walk in the park right now either. Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know. University administration or... Why don't you come talk to us? Do you think Carla Hayden would come talk to us? She's got free time on her hands. Well, I'm sure she's got other things. Can't hurt to ask. Yeah. I'm not exactly sure. Book deal? Book deal. Book deal.

Book deal for sure. Book deal for sure. It's a fascinating story. Yeah, I mean, there's no way I would give an interview with such grace. And yet substance. She's not mealy-mouthed. You know, she could move into a more activism, you know, freedom of speech, freedom to read. Does the ALA need a president? Something like that, maybe. I don't know. Yeah.

know. Interesting. So Stephen Colbert is launching a book club, which is interesting news by itself, but Sharifa wrote a good mini piece on this for Today in Books about why are these late, why do they do this? Fallon does it, Myers does it, Colbert does it, and I guess it's not that different than why Good Morning America or Jenna Bush Hager or, well now Reese, do you see that Reese partnered with Hyatt? Like that's a business, like so I kind of get that, but I don't,

I don't understand the late night book thing. I think Myers himself is a book nerd. And Trevor Noah was, yeah. Yeah. And so this is like them... For them, this is like me doing first editions, like their hobby within their job to some degree. I think it might be as simple as content is hard and you've got to fill a slate of content every single day. And one more thing you can do is talk about books. But in all fairness to those of us who like books, this is the best they can... I mean, I guess I...

I don't get it. I really don't. I think the other side is kind of validating. Like we have spent almost 14 years trying to figure out a good way to do a big virtual community book club with people who are diffuse and, you know, geographically diffused, diffuse across time zones, aren't just meeting up.

in somebody's living room and the fact that like, this is the best that someone with all the resources of a major television station can come up with. Like, yeah, I, I find it confusing as well. Like maybe they just enjoy, they have platforms and they want to call attention to books that they like and advocate for them. The simplest example. Yeah. It's,

And this one is interesting because Colbert picked Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which came out in 2023 and won an award last year. So this is not, at least it doesn't appear to be at launch, a straight up new release feature in the way that Jenna and Oprah and Reese produced.

pretty consistently, not always, are new release features. Like the Jenna Pick Every Month is a new book that has come out that month. There have been a few exceptions in all of them. Well, Oprah is the best one, but she's like, Faulkner, I'll never think, I need the oral history of that. Let us all go back and read Faulkner. But yeah, I think he just likes this book and was like, let's do it. And it

it's unclear what this book club is going to consist of. Like that was the most interesting part of Sharifa's notes. I thought of like, so he has announced a book club, but what are people supposed to do other than go read the book? Yeah. There's not a like follow the hashtag. There's not a live chat that we know of.

I mean, if we take it as read that this is not like getting a bunch of people to watch the show, nor is it an amazing, I wouldn't think, Samantha Harvey seems like a wonderful person and interesting writer, even though I was kind of lukewarm on Orbital. Not a bad book, just I was looking for something a little bit else.

Samantha Harvey on The Late Show is getting approximately zero new listeners. Probably a net negative experience for their watch. For the most part, I don't think tapping an author is going to be a top-of-the-funnel increase for someone who already has a networked TV platform. I do think, though... Is this a Patreon episode? Tell me if this is a Patreon episode. What if we did the programming, had programming ideas for one of these late-night book clubs? Like, okay, you're going to do...

you have orbital for the summer or maybe for whatever, and you're going to do five or six segments about it somehow. Like what should those say? What would be the most fun, interesting version of those segments? Because they do this programming professionally and, um,

To be perfectly honest, I do not get this. This seems like a nothing burger to me. We don't even know if they're going to do more programming. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's why we have Blue Sky. Let's do it. Let's pick a book we both really like and invent late night programming. Oh, we actually pick a book. I was thinking more abstractly. Well, we could do both to some degree anyway. Yeah, I think that's a fun feature. It's fascinating. It's kind of a strange...

And everyone thinks that this is a good idea and then they stop doing it or don't. When you start off with something so nebulous, there's not a shape to what this book club is, which makes it really difficult from the outside to get any sense of what their goals for it are. How will they know if this has been successful? If there's no way, there's no participation that we've seen yet, at least. So...

What are they looking at? Is it just Stephen Colbert likes these books? He wants to talk about books more regularly. So let's give it a book club kind of structure. How often will they happen? Is it, will it really just be whatever he likes? Yeah.

Right. Yeah. It's like, I, and again, I believe Colbert is an interesting person. I think, I think Myers genuinely likes to read. That's the one that I understand the most in terms of it's not about something else. Fallon, I have no sense of, you know, doesn't mess with this. So, I mean, we're down in the pre Tik TOK days, like in my early blogging days, 2008, 2010, um,

when Colbert had the Colbert rapport, there was a known phenomenon of the Colbert bump that authors who went on the show could chart a spike in their book sales in the couple of days after that appearance. And I remember some titles that that happened for, um,

But pre-TikTok days is like the key phrase in that story. I don't know that that happens anymore. Like people are not, the people that are in the target book buying demographic are not watching late night TV, at least sitting down at night to watch the whole episodes. Like,

Most of the folks that are online, millennials and Gen Z, are encountering little snippets and clips that come across as short form videos. So you've got to care about Stephen Colbert or the algorithm has to think that you're going to care about something related to this or to the book.

to serve you one of these videos. And then what happens? I find it genuinely confusing. I'm happy to see people with these mainstream platforms talk about books anytime. Oh, I don't begrudge it. Yeah, I don't think you do. I'm quizzical more than anything. Yeah, it's like furrowed eyebrows. I just don't...

I don't know what they're trying to do here. If there's a goal beyond just talk about books because we like books, which is that's good enough in itself, but maybe, I don't know, say that I'm curious. I just, I'm curious and confused. You know, speaking of, it's an observation I made when we were watching the last season of hacks, but it happens all through it. That Jean smart. I mean, Debra Vance, Jane smart. I just use them interchangeably. She is reading throughout. Like when she's just herself alone with the dog, um,

It seems like what she likes to do is read. And she, of course, in that show, if you don't know, is a longtime comedian who's always wanted to host the late night show. I'm not going to spoil it, but even built into that character of a late night show host is something about books. And I don't know what... Is there a story that Carson was a huge nerd? What is this? I don't know. Or it gives the character something to do in their alone time. I guess so. It's relatively common on TV. You see...

I don't believe that many of the characters on White Lotus actually spend much time in their daily lives reading books, but people got to do something while they're laying around the pool. So give them an Emma Straub and call it a day. Yeah. Cause like, you know what, there's, there's been some, well, like, you know, Mad Men was a famous one. I think Girls 2 were like books were included. Yeah. Lost 2. But,

But someone was deciding this is the book. And it's like sometimes she's reading an e-reader. Sometimes it's like a used book. Like I cannot. In the old days, we would have already had a post on the site about like all the books that Jean Smart reads in half. I think the last title or the last show that we did that for probably was like Orange is the New Black had a lot of characters reading books. And in that, like that's another situation where like they're literally a captive audience for books because those characters are in jail. Yeah.

But it does come up on TV. I just think the audiences, like since we don't have monoculture anymore, the audiences for everything are so diffused that having your book featured on a TV show just reaches many fewer people than it used to. I don't know if you know anything about this or you know Colbert's PR agent who's going to talk to us for 15 minutes about his favorite books or why we're doing this. I remember reading Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge because it was on Lost and I was trying to like do all the puzzle box business. Yeah.

That's like the most early 2000 thing that you've ever said. I'm still mad about the Lost finale, but we don't need to go down there.

Yeah, all right. Let's do the Frontless Way, which is brought to you by Thrift Books. You know, you could get Orbital there. I bet you could go find all the books mentioned on Gilmore Girls or Mad Men and go through them. Those are things people do, the Gilmore Reading Challenge. I know people know about this. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. And those are all backlisting classics. I'm not sure there is maybe as inclusive as they would if they were making the show today, or at least I certainly hope so. But whatever book you're looking for,

Go give a crack at thriftbooks.com because they've got 19 million copies, really any book that you're going to be looking for, not just used. A lot of people know thrift books for great used books, which they're the best in the business at that, but they've got new books too, DVDs, music, board games, gifts, gift cards too. Father's Day is coming up here. Actually, by the time it's for most of you listening, this will already be over, but always a good gift, a great gift. And they have a reading rewards program for every purchase you make. Sign up for an account, you get closer and closer to

Two of free books. Just got a couple things from Thrift Books in the mail the other day. Rebecca, with that, we talked about these books somewhere. I mean, we were just talking about a couple of these books. I don't remember well, but tell us again about it. I mentioned them on a show we recorded yesterday that will come out in two weeks. Okay.

Gee, no wonder I couldn't keep that straight. Because time is a flat circle in this land. Brought to you by Back to the Future. Yeah, where I'm just back from PTO and you're just heading out on PTO. So on my flight out a couple weeks ago, I read Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I really liked it. I went in, like, I knew it was about space, but I had tried to not know much else. It's

subtitled A Love Story. And so I wondered like what kind of romance were we going to be getting into? It's about two women who are astronauts in the 80s at a time where you could not be gay in the military or in NASA. They enter astronaut training around the same time. They fall in love with each other and of course have to keep it a secret.

Or they think that they're keeping it a secret. And it opens when one of them is in space on a mission and the other one is like working mission control as the primary comms contact for the folks on the mission. And something has gone wrong up in space.

And as the sort of bounces back and forth in time between trying to problem solve this thing that has gone wrong, and then the story of their relationship unfolding. So the more that we learn about their connection to each other, the higher the stakes become for the, you know, later time space mission where one of them is in peril.

I thought it was really wonderful. Like, it's warm. It's funny. It's kind of sexy. They have a nice dialogue with each other. It was nice to see Taylor Jenkins read you a queer love story. And, you know, I read it on a long flight.

It kept my attention. It was good company. I think this is like good vacation summer reading. The people who market Taylor Jenkins read have figured out exactly when to put her books out. I don't think it's changing any lives, but she's not out here trying to change lives. These are good books that will keep you entertained. And sometimes that's all exactly what you want.

Nice. That was a good one. And I also finally got to Wild Dark Shore, which I read right before I saw the Amazon and Barnes & Noble best of the year so far. So that was really interesting. I liked it quite a bit. I didn't love it. We talk about this some. You'll hear me talk about it more in two weeks, I guess.

That it has this like kind of mystery element. There is some, some like suspense and higher stakes that get pulled together at the end. And I just loved the literary writing of it. I wanted to dwell on this Island, like in sub Antarctic places with this family, just thinking about their lives and thinking about the ecosystem and trying to understand their dynamics. Like all of that was more than enough for me. McConaughey's writing is excellent and,

I understand the pull to like loop in some mystery elements or some more like page turning kinds of components. I sort of wish that she hadn't, but I think I'm in the minority there. So I really liked that. And I have started Jeff Hiller's Actress of a Certain Age on audio.

It's not out yet. It is. It came out on Tuesday. It's out. And it is included in Spotify Premium. Well, I know what I'm listening to on the plane. If you want three alternate ways to refer to your butthole in the first chapter, Jeff Hiller will tell you. So just maybe that's a warning. Let me check my notes here. Let me see. On my alternate phrasing for my body parts. You know, I'm good. I'm all full up. It's just my, if you're going to have kids in the car, Jeff Hiller is not fully family friendly. Yeah.

Let's see. I haven't been doing a lot, though I was totally enchanted by the book of alchemy by Sulika Jawad on audio. Is that one about journaling? Yeah. So I am interested in creativity, and I know this person well.

Like, her story is pretty amazing. It is. She had leukemia, and then she wrote this best-selling book called Between Two Kingdoms, had an essay, a column in the New York Times about her experience as a 20-something with leukemia. Not your favorite kind of story, which for reasons that make sense, but as part of that, she developed an artistic and creative practice that she talks about here, but then later...

I think it was a sub-tech or newsletter. It's a newsletter community around journaling that blew up during COVID especially, and has become a bit of a phenomenon. And I was interested in what it was going to be like. But then, so what this book is, each section has an essay intro by Jawad, but the actual chapters are by other writers or artists about a creative practice or a prompt, like something to get you thinking that might actually do something.

And I just found the prompts and those little essays remarkable. There's like a hundred of them and they're pretty short. It was really amenable. Um,

They're not narrated by those people, but they have a cast of a bunch of different narrators. I was a little confused at first, like that's not what Lena Dunham sounds like. But anyway, maybe it was Lena Dunham. That's probably the one that was actually her, but I'm just using an example. But I found all of these little slices of creative practices and sensibilities so fascinating. And it's like George Saunders, John Batiste, Mavis Staples, Ann Patchett, John Green, just all kinds of, Gloria Steinem, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Abdurraqib, like I'm selling past the clothes here.

- Batiste's prompt is about awkwardness and he tells a story of like having practiced all day off the piano and like having showered and went to go see a friend's show. And it turns out Jay-Z and Beyonce are in the hallway and they invite him back to the green room to give Beyonce a hug. And he's like so stanky. He's like, "I done fumigated the queen." And I started laughing so hard. My kid's like, "What is happening?" - Man, he is so funny. And Jawad is married to him. Like you can see them together in a Netflix documentary. - Yeah.

I found it pretty amazing. And I'm not deep into the, and I don't know what to call this, like the creativity journaling ecosystem sort of situation, but this worked for me. Okay. This is exactly the pitch I needed to hear for this book because I had been like holding off thinking like, I don't,

creativity journaling prompts. I love Suleikha Juwad, but I don't know. But if it got you over the hump and worked for you, and I think we're kind of mutually allergic to the washy tape, bullet journal porn kind of thing. Yeah, let's annotate everything. Yeah, that's exactly what I needed to hear. And it worked for you on audio. Absolutely. I mean, I think if you're going to actually use it for journaling, you want a hard copy because you want to see that you can use the prompt, which people do.

but I just found the listening experience enough. Like I don't actually need to do anything with it, but I was going to ask, so do you, you just absorbed, there weren't like any particular practices that you were like, yeah, I'm going to take that. And I mean, I don't have a creative practice.

I do things, but I don't have a... And maybe I've thought... Actually, listening to this made me think, is there a version of get a journal, open it every day for five minutes with a coffee, and just put an idea down? Maybe something like that. It's...

This is a whole other pod. Maybe we could do this some other time. But I'm always cooking. You know this about me. I'm always kind of cooking. It feels to me like... I would say the same of myself. I don't feel like I have a creative practice other than coming to work every day and making stuff. I think, though, we have a lot of opportunity in our daily work life to flex these particular muscles. But if you are...

I don't know, let's say I was trying to write a novel at the same time I was doing this. Some of it would be a container to put that effort. Like, is it just sitting down for an hour every day and like typing into a Word doc? That can be difficult. And I think some of these ideas are just to get you moving. Like, there's a lot of different ways you can- That's helpful. I am trying to write an essay currently for an anthology that I was invited to participate in. And you would think I have never written a paragraph in my life. Well, maybe you're ready. Maybe you're ready for some alchemy. Okay.

I'll give it a try. That sounds great. It was pretty great. And again, like I said to Al Woodworth and I said on the show before, there's two kinds of books. The kind you are finding time for and the time you don't. And I found myself finding time to hit play on the audiobook. It's the highest praise, I think. It's kind of like the driveway moment of a podcast or radio thing. Like if I will make time and carve out excuses, there's nothing better. Yeah.

I guess as segue, this was on the editor's picks for best books of the year so far from Amazon. And Al Woodworth, who's coming up right now, is going to talk to us about that process. I don't think we talked about this book. We talked about some of the others in the process. So give that a listen. And Rebecca, we'll talk to you later. All right, here with Al Woodworth of the Amazon Books team. So I was just saying to you before we started recording that I've heard you talk about how these processes works in the past, but a lot of the listeners hasn't. I'm a junkie for this kind of stuff. So Al...

The best books of the year so far, the best books of the year, the best books of the month. Your team is doing this all month, day in, day out. You're reading. It's a wonderful grind, I could imagine. So can we get the, give us the top level view of what you guys are trying to do and then how you go about doing it.

Sure. Yeah. So I am on a team of Amazon book editors, and our goal is to help readers find their next favorite read. And so we've got our best of the month program. So every month, we are reading, we're writing, we are picking the top 10 or 12 best books of the month across all genres. And then we'll pick the top 10 in popular categories like romance and history and nonfiction, literature and fiction, science fiction, fantasy, YA, and

Mystery and thrillers, you name it, we've got it. And the goal there is just to help those romance fiend readers provide a list of the top 10 that are the best. And so when it comes time to put together the best books of the year so far, we look back at our best of the month list.

lists. We look back at those category lists. And we have all of these like pretty awesome discussions about what are the books that stuck with us? What are the books that we actually recommend? What are the books that have like stuck in our heads that we can't stop thinking about, that we want to talk about, that kept us up late reading, much maybe to our chagrin. And then we sort of take it from there. And so we are sort of in this like very privileged position where our job is really to read these books to recommend the best of the best. And we take that

very seriously. So we're reading, you know, essentially a thousand books and then we debate a hundred and then we come up for the best of the year. So far, we've got a top 20. And then again, we've got the top 20 in those popular categories. Can we talk about the word best? Because does our list of the best? I have tried different adjectives, adverbs on adjectives to sort of figure out a way, my favorite, most popular, there's all the ways of doing this. So best is

You're trying to do something with these lists. We talk about this all these shows that when someone makes a list, they're trying to do something with it. Maybe it is the highest achievement in capital A art. Maybe it's the books we want to sell the most of if you're a bookstore or something like that. So maybe it's something else. So what are you guys looking for when you look for the best? What are the features that go into something that's a good candidate to make one of your lists?

Yeah, I mean, I think for us, we really think about the books that have sort of changed our mind, changed our hearts, made us feel really deeply that compel you to action. And compel you to action could be you want to call your best friend and talk about this romance that you've just read. It could be that all of a sudden now you are going to recycle. You know, I think that there's a very sort of like wide range in books.

compelling you to action. But to me, that's what I think for our team, that's what it is. It's the books that really like put you in another person's shoes and take you out of your own life and that you can be, you can learn, you can be entertained. You can, again, put yourself in somebody else's shoes and learn something. And so for us, to me, I think the greatest part and the most unbelievable part of reading is that

all of a sudden you then can create this community of people that have read the same book and you can have really interesting discussions. And so for us, like this idea of what are the books that make you want to talk? What are the books that you want to recommend? What are the books that you want to be like, hey, mom, let's read this together or best friend or whomever? Because I think that that sense of community, which then sort of fosters an excitement for reading and more reading is absolutely what we're after. And I think our list too, it's like,

Folks have called it sort of a list for readers. It's a reader's list. It's not necessarily for authors. It's not necessarily for critics. This is a book, or sorry, excuse me, our list. You'll see some hidden gems on there. You'll see some big blockbusters. We're trying to represent all different kinds of readers. So those that read 100 books in a year, those that read one book in a year, really trying to offer sort of the suite of it all.

So even to go from a thousand, I mean, to say you start with a thousand for those of, even that's gotta be tough, right? Cause I'm kind of interested in that. I look at Edelweiss all the time. I'm looking at publishers weekly in terms of getting to that thousand. Is that as hard, which is the hardest stage? Is it zero? Is it going from infinity to a thousand, a thousand, a hundred, a hundred to 10, 10 to one. Is it all equally hard? Cause I've had some of these experiences. You guys do something a little bit different. You do have a top 10 and you order it. I want to talk about that in a minute, but like where, where,

Is it differently difficult at all stages or how would you characterize those gating moments? It's a great question. I mean, I think we are well set up for our team to do the best of the year so far and then the best of the year because we sort of have this best of the month program. So we're reading kind of, you know, a couple of months in advance, but we sort of have this consistent track.

And so we're looking at, you know, 150, 200 books for the best of the month list. And that gives us like a pretty wide net. And I think what's cool or what I think is cool about our list are these are books that have been read and loved.

by our team. It is not just because they have big print runs. It's not just because it's buzzy, and it's going to be made into a movie. These are books that on a sentence by sentence level, on a narrative arc level, have resonated, have excited us. So I think, so to that end, I mean, it is all, all the different parts of it, I think, are really hard. You know, someone

And authors and publishers spend so much time and effort on these books. And so our goal and our small and mighty team, you know, is to try to find the right reader for the right book. And not every book is for every reader. And we respect and understand that. So it's really about, hey, like...

you know, this book about cults, like I know Sarah Wilson on our team is going to love it. If we've got like old folks who are fighting crime, Vanessa Cronin on our team is the person that is going to love that book. And so this, we have a really tight team where we know each other's reading tastes and stuff. And so that makes it very satisfying. But the greatest fear always is that you've missed a book or you had a bad day when you're reading. And

you didn't see the beauty, you didn't see the genius, you weren't patient enough for the payoff. And so that is why we always try to have sort of multiple readers on the books that we think are going to be big or the books that we're really excited about it to make sure that

all different kinds of readers, which is our hope that our team represents, can find something that resonates with them. But yeah, it's all hard. It's all hard. Yeah. And I guess in that there is the, you know, how do you navigate

Books that you know authors you've heard of before right because like the number one pick it looks like it was one of your picks I really like wild dark dark shore by Charlotte McConaughey. We talked about that book in a minute Were you a McGonaghy fan already? Have you done migrations and once there were wolves there were once wolves I always get that screwed up like is that something to come into play like maybe this is just one of my authors or do you how do you think about someone you have experience with for good or for ill both Mike so migrations

We loved, I think I was the first reader on that book. It was a debut. It came out in 2020. And we actually named that the best novel of the year in 2020. So I think we, I knew that when I found out that Wild Dark Shore was coming out, I think me and the rest of the team were very excited just because you could understand her abilities. I mean, she's an extraordinary writer, her ability to build tension, her dedication to writing.

these big, full emotional stories that are dealing with family, that are dealing with a warming planet in the most extraordinary way. I mean, she's just, she's so talented. People talk about kind of like climate fiction and cli-fi. And I think that she does it with,

it's both the point and not the point of the book, if that makes sense. And so, yeah, so I think we all, all of us editors, I think any reader probably has favorite authors that they're really excited about and can't wait to get their hands on a certain book. And I think in some ways,

Those books have even more to prove to us, you know, because you have such high expectations. I think Sean Cosby, King of Ashes, our number two book, this is, I believe, his fourth book. And we've been fans of his since then.

since the jump. And again, like you have just such high expectations and then that they can meet them and yet again, and yet raise them again, which I think is something that a lot of these authors that we love do. And we're also not afraid to, if we don't love a book by one of our favorite authors, then like,

That's maybe why it's not in the top three, top 10, top 20. I think the point is we're trying to really surface the best of the best of a given year to make sure that we are earning the trust of readers, you know, that you can trust these recommendations. They're not just books because they're not just on our list because they're big or they're successful or they're on social media. They're

So we're recommending them because we love them, that the read is extraordinary. How do you guys get feedback? The list comes out. Are you seeing people's reactions? Do people email? I'm not sure where you get some sense of whether or not you did a good job is different than the feedback you kind of get. But do you have a sense of agreement, disagreement, or appearance on the list from readers or people that are looking to you guys for recs?

I mean, I think like so many other businesses and so many other people, I mean, social media just is such a great tool for that when we really, you know, and we do a lot of sort of social media around these campaigns. And it's very cool to see people saying, yeah, I love

that book too? Have you read this book? I just think the engagement of it, to me, like reading books is about starting conversations and that we get to do that with these lists on a monthly basis and then the semi-annual basis. I mean, there's just no greater honor, really. And so I think to...

hear directly from readers. And the best way that we can see that and do that is social media. And, you know, we're in conversation with publishers. And so to get their notes, too, that this is just so exciting. And whether that's from the publisher, the editor, or directly from the author that we get, it's very satisfying. You know, we share that within the team. And there's just something really special about that.

championing books and championing authors. I always think about it as, you know, your publishers are pushing these books up a hill. There's so much going on. There's so much other media to consume. It's really hard to make a book work and that we get to be part of the megaphone on top of a mountain shouting about the books that

are worthy of six hours of reading or listening is such a fun and satisfying lens on what it is that we get to do. So you're in the room and you have some subject matter or genre experts and people come into the arena with their sword and their shield and they're going to keep up for a book or two.

Does it vary in terms of how easy it is in a given year or a given cycle to decide the list or decide the top book? Or does it kind of have a similar shape from cycle to cycle?

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Yeah, no, it's a great question, Jeff. I would say that it really varies. I think for this year, I think we all came into the room. So before we all physically come into a room together, despite sort of living and working across the country, we come into a room together and we have a day long sort of discussion where we discuss.

figure out the top 20 and we order the top 20. So that's when we pick the number one. And a few weeks earlier, we have had essentially a reading week where we are reading and we get on the phone for an hour every day and we're talking about what we're reading. And the point of that reading week is really to make sure that the team has read like the entire

of the team has read parts or all of the books that are going to be in contention for those top 20 spots. So again, so that the romance reader is reading nonfiction, the sci-fi editor is reading romance, you know, all of it just to make sure that we are...

finding books that are really above and beyond. So do people have veto power? If someone's like, there is no way on God's green earth that this book is made, like what, you don't have to get into the inter-office politics of it, but like, could someone be like, over my dead digital body is this book making it in? Again,

I think books are so emotional. That's what I'm saying. You see my art movement here. I got big feelings, Al. 100% there are big feelings in this meeting. And I think this year, for best of the year so far, I think it's so hard to pick a number one. I think it's for exactly what you're talking about. And like...

We want to think about sort of the climate and where we are. What are readers looking for? Are they looking for an escape? Do they want to learn? You know, and like, I think that changes. And the best of the year so far list is released in June. And so that's summer reading too. So it's like,

like, what are you gonna fill your beach bag with or your commuter bag with or whatever? And so it can be really kind of contentious because it's emotional. People love these books, you're connected to these characters. And I think for this year, Charlotte McConaughey made it easy for us. Everybody loved that book. Everybody read it in one to two sittings.

Interesting. Interesting.

is sort of extraordinary, right? You know, one person is a parent talking about the portrait of fatherhood and what it would be like for your kids to grow up on an island without social media where they are actually engaged in the environment around them. Another is talking about sort of the mystery and the dark thrilling aspects of it and that atmosphere. Another is talking about sort of this sense of

it all of a sudden makes you realize that you can't take everything around you for granted. You can't take this earth for granted. And this sort of subtle slash knock you over the head feeling of like, we have to protect this world just as we have to protect our families and the people that we love. And so it's,

To me, we sort of chose it and then it felt like this room then validated it because everybody wanted to talk about it. And it's like, guys, you know, we've got 19 other books to talk about. We need to, we've done it. We've got to move on. But it's very, absolutely.

Absolutely can be contentious. I bet I can go the other way too. I've had this happen where I come into a discussion or a classroom when I used to be a teacher or whatever, and there's a book I love, and it's like crickets from the rest of the room. And I feel like I'm out of my goddamn mind because I'm the only one that liked this book, and everyone looks at me like, my crazy, that must happen too from time to time.

It certainly does. And I think even to me, even those books are really interesting because if they ignite like kind of fire in you, like if you love it and I hate it or vice versa, and you're still having a conversation to me, it's,

That's provocative. Like, that author has maybe done its job. You know? And so there are certainly... The benefit, too, I think, of this small team of ours, and it's eight of us, and we've been working together for a good amount of time, but also, like, there is such deep trust amongst one another. And so just because...

Abby likes a book and I don't, it doesn't mean that it's a bad book. I don't think that it's a bad book. It's just, I'm not the right reader for it. And then it's trying to understand, okay, I'm not the right reader for it, but then, um,

how many readers are out there that are going to love it. And so I think that it is this, the list that we create is very much a team decision. It's not one person's view. And that's why we have added in the campaign and in sort of this feature, like our personal picks. So I was just looking at those. Yes. Yeah. We all have our personal picks, which is so cool. Cause again, you're talking about like the emotion of these books. We feel so strongly. And so that is a very, um,

fun moment, I think, for each of us that we get to share a little bit more about the books that we loved. Let's talk books specific. We did some Wild Duck Shore. I want to ask about a couple of your own picks because there's a couple that are mine, I think, for best of the year so far. Probably the most under-known book, he says. I mean, because there's a couple books that aren't yet. But

A nonfiction book about Johnson & Johnson at number three, Al. Yeah. Talk about that book. Because I'm a candidate to check this out. I'll listen to almost anything in nonfiction. I don't think Sight Unwrecked, I guess, is one way of putting it. I would have picked this up myself. But what resonated with you all about No More Tears, The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardner Harris? That's interesting.

pretty excited about this book. I don't know if you've read or your listeners have read Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain, all about the Sackler family. ERK is one of my personal favorites, so you could probably stop there for me, but maybe keep going for the others. Yeah, so this book has those vibes. So Empire of Pain was about the Sackler family and opioids and just this family dynasty that pushed

essentially, and created marketing for drugs. And this, to me, Johnson & Johnson is sort of an expose on one of America's most trusted brands. It's baby powder. Look at it. It looks like stuff you put on babies. And you smell it. You can conjure that sense of hope that babies inevitably bring, right? And yet, what is in talc

will give you cancer. And this is known, and then there are all these lawsuits about it. And so Harris Gardner, who's a New York Times reporter, just goes deep on Johnson & Johnson and all of these different moments throughout the course of the company's history where there was sort of bad doing. And it is shocking, and it is disquieting, and in the way that Empire of Pain was unputdownable, so too is this. It is unmooring, and it makes you question

the things that you automatically trust. And so for us, this was a book that just stuck with us. And you just, you kind of want to talk about it because again, we've all, maybe not all of us, but all of a lot of Johnson and Johnson's products, Tylenol, baby powder, that sweet smelling baby shampoo. We're really familiar with it. So there's this immediate connection. So for us,

picking that as the number three best book and our number one nonfiction. I mean, we had a lot of discussion about that because there are so many great nonfiction books this year that are on our list. You know, Tina Noll's memoir, Matriarch,

extraordinary. And that's not because she's Beyonce's mom. It's because she is a force of nature in her own right. And her childhood and her sense of family is extraordinary. Who doesn't want to read about that? She doesn't even need to be famous. And that just adds like the little carrot at the end of it. Help me. This wasn't on the main Amazon list, but it was on your list. Help me get more people to read Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. How can we do this, Al? How can we get more people to read this book?

Okay. I'm with you, Jeff. Let's do it. So should we trade turns? Why don't you go first and we'll play racquetball trying to get people to read this book. Why don't you take a first crack at it? Okay. So Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize winner. She is known for her fiction. This is her first ever foray into nonfiction. And to me, this book is...

a love letter to her husband, who is a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and then author. And it is, she is buoyed by their relationship, by their marriage, and that helps carry her through her grief after he suddenly passes. And so to me, this book is a reminder that grief is not linear.

that our society doesn't allow often for you to take time to grieve, but how important it is. And there are these just stunning passages that she, like, I think, imbues his joie de vivre. And she gains energy and comfort, even though he's no longer with her, from who he was and their mutual respect and curiosity for stories and their sort of relentless pursuit of that. So to me,

yes, if you're grieving, this is a book that will help you through. But it's also, I think, tremendously hopeful. It offers so much light. I read it in a sitting. I don't know about you. I did it on audio, but it's one of those... I mean, there's... I say there's two kinds of books. The kind you don't have to find...

an excuse to read and those you do. I mean, like either you're gonna fill it with whatever available time or you aren't. Like that's the big bifurcation. In audio, it's like, do I have seven minutes to press play? I'll even put my headphones on for four minutes if I had four minutes. Also, I didn't recognize that she was Australian until I listened to this, but that's neither here nor there, that's on me. Like you do a lot of memoirs. And so like grief memoirs, food memoirs, travel memoirs, like you need to do something a little different now. Not to say that's bad, but like I've read enough of these that I kind of have a sense of the field now.

And Geraldine Brooks, the two things that elevate it to me are she can write a better sentence than most people writing grief memoirs. There's just no question about that. And it's, like you said, it's as much of a book about a character study of their relationship as it is a grief memoir. But then she does some things interesting with structure where she's coming back to, she's like going to this little island off the coast of Tasmania or Australia, I can't remember one of those places down there.

to kind of deal with this thing that she hasn't dealt with in the after effect. And that's interleaved with sort of a tick-tock of his death, like literally the minute by minute of, how did she hear about it? She went to the morgue, and then what do you do with the body? And those two timelines offer a kind of binocular vision to the grieving process that made it felt like

I guess it gets depth. I guess I'm going to continue this vision-based metaphor, but I felt like it gave it a... It's not very long either, I guess that's another reason, but it had a heft and depth that is unusual, even for a grief memoir, I would say.

Completely agree. I mean, to me, there's something almost practical about this memoir. You know, I mean, as you said, it's sort of the two sides of the binoculars, you know, one right after his passing and she's dealing with the paperwork of it and how challenging that is. Am I going to call my son now or are we going to wait until tomorrow because he has a final and then we've got to get on the plane and all that stuff?

Right. And what are the passwords? And I don't know anything. How do I get my credit cards? And it's just like, oh, my goodness. You know, there's so much. And then you go into, I think so many of us in that situation, you go into autopilot. You've got to get through. And then this, it wasn't until two or three years later that she could take stock of it, that she could actually...

I'm going to get it wrong, but unleash the howl in the basement of her heart or whatever that line was. That if that doesn't give you goosebumps and stop you in your tracks, I don't know what. But yeah, I think this memoir stood out because I think it took a subject that can be very challenging, but then offered both this sort of pragmatic approach

like tool set for what you can do and remind, and I think giving everybody permission to say like, great. Yeah. Grief is not linear. You're going to feel these things. And like, that's okay. Whether it's in the moment, whether it's two years later, but take time, take stock,

realize the beauty of it. And to me, I think that that was just, I'm so glad she wrote that book. I can't wait for her next novel because the horse just blew me out of the water. But I mean, March horse people of the book, like, I mean, she's an under known person for for the book world, I would say like,

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I think one of the great, I don't want to say reliefs, one of the great positive, I'm not even sure surprises, but like people who've read Sunrise on the Reaping are so glad it's good.

Wouldn't you say? Were you all so glad for it to be good?

That's where getting at before sort of you know like are we're really reading these books. We're gonna tell you if they're good We're not gonna put them on their list if they're not and I think for us that sunrise on the reaping was what is it a really good example of that like You know so many people are gonna come to that book with high expectations slash like they're just gonna feel nostalgia for what it was like when they first read those Hunger Games or watched the movie or whatever it was and so

that people picked, you know, like our team kind of picked it up with a little bit like trepidatiously, you know, like how is it going to deliver? Or do we want to go back in time and sort of revisit a slightly minor character and get his whole story? And yeah,

And the answer is a resounding yes, that it's packed with action. The explosive ending, like all of it, it's so satisfying. And I think, too, this idea of nostalgic reading, you know, there's comfort in that. There's so much to kind of take away from and revisit something new.

that is a little bit familiar. So yeah, I mean, we named that our number five best book of the year so far. And like very excitedly too, I would say. I was looking, cause I was thinking about it cause I know it's been so positively considered. My son ripped through it. He just like, you know, did it in 12 hours while we were on vacation. And a lot of the people that listen to the show and read this and read Book Riot have been raving about it. So I went to go look on Goodreads just to kind of get some sense. Like it's the highest rated of all the Hunger Games books.

in terms of the star rating. Now, recency bias may be things, but like, I have to do my homework, but it may be one of the most successful prequels of all time, commercially, critically, reader reception. Like we just don't get this this often. We're used to sort of a, you know, kind of a warmed up leftovers. Like it tastes like the original thing and, you know, we're glad to have eaten it, but it wasn't the real dish.

This one feels like it ranks right up. Where else do you want to go? So I did Sunrise. I want to talk about that. What else do you want to talk about? Maybe on your own list or the bigger list, I'll go anywhere you want to go. I haven't read all of these, I should say, but that can be interesting in its own right.

I mean, I think, let's see. I mean, like Layla Motley. Yeah. The Girls Who Grew Big is our number six book. She, of course, wrote Nightcrawling a few years ago. That was one of our best books of the year. That's an incredible book. An incredible book. It was an incredible book. I love it.

And it's not fair to say, how is she so young and so talented? But come on. But I just said it. And here we are. And The Girls Who Grew Big was a book that was sort of like wildfire for our team. It just, one person read it. And it is a story of these three young,

young women, teens who are in various stages of motherhood. They live in Florida and it is about how society judges them, how they judge each other and

And like, you'll judge them, right? Like, and you might even judge this book by its book jacket, which is a woman with a big belly that's pregnant. And this book, there's levity to it. There's humor to it. This sense of community that these teenage girls just

protect each other and love each other and help each other get through this period in life where everyone thinks that they are sort of less than. And to me, the best part about this book is just this like fierce agency that they all then develop.

And yes, they're young to be mothers. And yes, that compromises certain things, but they also are taking life by the horns. And so to me, this was a book that our team just sort of one by one, we were reading it and loving it and couldn't put it down. And I think because you come into it with a judgment, and that's what the book is about. And so that is one we were very excited to

to share with readers and hope that hope that people find it and read it and have their expectations subverted as well.

There's an El Capitan on Readers of 2025's list, and it looks like it made it onto your list and the top list overall. It is, of course, Mark Twain by Ron "Opportunity Cost" Chernow. Make the case, Al! I'm not sure I'm ever going to make it to this, but as a former literary person and someone who cares about literary history, even I quail at the thought of 1,200 pages, even though readers are telling me it's only 1,000 because of footnotes. Still, still, still, Al,

talk talk cherno did it again what can we say about mark twain by ron cherno again i mean he is an extraordinary writer his ability to weave these narratives of these figures in history and pull in all of these sort of salacious and good details that make these characters who are larger than life in our imaginations but really come to life i you know i

I read this book. I couldn't put it down. I'm also the person that read the King biography by John of Ague that won the Pulitzer Prize in one sitting on a plane ride. You're just built different. That's what I'm hearing here. I recognize that. But to me, it's the level of detail about this sort of –

figure in history who he was sort of like the first modern celebrity author, right? Like there's so many interesting pieces of his life. He was a riverboat captain. He sort of became obsessed with that and then what the Mississippi offered him and then to like

see that then emerge in his fiction. So cool. His sort of, and I think Chernow doesn't shy away from his sort of his, his dealings with racism, with slavery, with his feelings towards women who were younger. He doesn't hide from that. He goes right after it. And so to me,

I think it's an extraordinary biography. It's long, but I don't think there's a wasted word. You know, I think if you want to learn about Mark Twain, and I think so many people have read James, which was one of our best books of the year last year, and our best book of the year so far last year, our number one pick, that there's maybe more curiosity from this figure in history and what he wrote and how then Percival Everett sort of flipped it on its head.

But then to go back and to say, well, what is Mark Twain? How did that come about? Yeah, I mean, these big figures in history, you know, it's so interesting to go back into their lives and feel sort of that atmosphere of it all. So you're mostly, you know, focused on literary fiction, memoir, big biography. So then when the genre kids come to you with one of their favorite books...

Do you find it easier to come with it with a general reader's eyes? How do you come to, I don't know, Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride or One Golden Summer, which is more commercial fiction? Do you put on different kinds of glasses? Does it activate different parts of your brain? What's it like to have someone else come to you with the book and say, hey, Al, we really need to pay attention to this one? To me, it's really exciting. I think that I all of a sudden can appreciate

a different sense of, like, in a different cadence of a story. And to me, like, what that offers, and it's, to me, that sort of sense of, like, sheer entertainment and the pace of some of these books, too. Yes, if you're like me, maybe you can read Mark Twain. But, like, I admit that that's not true for most. So when you get to a Carly Fortune, when you get to an Emily Henry, when you get to, like, Sean Cosby, too, I mean, these pace

page-turning books that have so many different hooks and characters. And to me, like, I am reading it with the expectation that I am going to be juicily entertained, you know? And to me, that's something that's so satisfying to understand. I have not... So Emily Henry, which is on our romance category list, her latest, I'd never read

her before. And so it was like, everybody was sort of talking about it, loving it, trying to decide, you know, I think she's sort of is famously maybe trying to do something a little bit different in this book, sort of expand, go beyond the romance category. And I read it kind of excitedly and just very quickly, you know, kind of inhaled it in a way that like, on a sentence by sentence level, maybe it's not as appealing to me as like a Geraldine Brooks

But there's something undeniably magnetic about the story and the characters. And so to me, that's what I'm always looking for is how do you, what do they make you feel? And like, do you want to, like, are they going to get together? Like, are they going to find out how they're related? Like, whatever it is, who did it? Who's the killer? You know, whatever it is. Yeah, each book has their own pleasures. Each kind of book has their own pleasures. None of them can do it all. Maybe if you're Percival Everett, but that's a different conversation for

I think that's right. We could talk all day about that too. Yeah, let's get you out on this. I just did a social media breakout for Book Riot about this week's new releases. And one of the first comments was like, it seems like it's been an awfully good summer so far for books. I felt like the beginning year to me was a little slower. You don't have to agree with that or not. But is this an A year for books? B plus? Do you think about it in those terms at all? Do you feel that going into these rooms? Like, goddamn, this is a hell of a year. Or it's like,

It's going to be easier for our favorites to rise to the top, maybe another way of putting it, from season to season or month to month.

It's so fun to both have these monthly checkpoints for our team and then the best of the year so far. And then ultimately we put out a best of the year list in November. And so the best of the year so far list is such a fun opportunity to take stock of what has come already. You know, like last year, James, I think came out in March, I want to say. Leader in the clubhouse, yeah. Yeah, right? I mean, that was extraordinary. And I think there are always these moments like,

We were talking about when we were putting together the Best of the Year So Far list this year, the 2025 list. Like, last year there was Kristen Hanna's The Women, which was just a fantastic, historical, atmospheric, commercial read that thrusts you into the Vietnam War and the unsung heroes of the nurses. And so this kind of, like, commercial, historical fiction that, like, just...

ticks a lot of boxes, you know what I mean? And that was a book that... I don't know that there was a women this year so far. And so it'll be interesting to see if there is one in the back half of the year. But that's something that I think we think about. I would say that this year has been pretty terrific. I'm excited for what's to come. But I think what we've seen and putting together this list, I think that the team...

was able to get to the 20 with relative ease, I would say, and excitement, too. Like, that I think our top 20 list, I think there's so many different kinds of books on it that reflect so many different tastes and kinds of readers and the reasons why people read that that, to me, is also, like, really indicative of

Is it a good year? And like, does your romance reader like the nonfiction? Like all of that. I just think that speaks to the strength of the books overall. Al Woodworth of Amazon Books Editorial. What's your official title? I should know this. I should have this in my notes. Managing Editor, I think. Managing Editor. Okay. I'll put a link in the show notes to all the lists, but I'm sure people can find out there. Al, thanks so much for your time. This was a real treat.

My pleasure. It was so nice to talk to you, Jeff. Could do it all day long. And that is our show today. Find show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. Shoot us an email, podcast at bookriot.com. In the link in the show notes, you're going to find our pals event on July 9th, the best books of the year so far. The Book Riot Podcast is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network.

Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of With a Vengeance by Riley Sager, read by Erin Bennett. Available now wherever books and audiobooks are sold.

Anything to make her look like she's not afraid, when in truth, she's been scared for so long that fear has seeped into her marrow. Still, when she begins to speak, her voice is firm and clear. You know who I am, just as you know why I've gathered you here. If you haven't figured it out yet, you will very soon.

Anna pauses, just as she'd rehearsed. The length timed to the millisecond to allow any unlikely stragglers to catch up. By now you've recognized each other. Maybe you've even had a chance to chat a bit. Likely long enough to suspect that you've been brought here under false pretenses. That suspicion is correct. The reason for this journey is simple. I'm here to- Just then, the train lurches, sending Anna off balance.

In the tiny bathroom of her room, she watches her reflection sway in the equally tiny mirror. The first time she'd been on the Philadelphia Phoenix, everything had felt enormous. Not just the room, but the train itself. Every car seemed endless, as if walking the entire length of the train constituted a journey of miles. Then again, Anna had been 11 at the time, and trains loomed large in her life, especially ones run by the Union Atlantic Railroad.

Unlike most rail lines of the day, Union Atlantic had been privately owned. Her father had inherited the family business when her grandfather passed away. In another bit of unconventionality, it hadn't relied on an outside company like Pullman to build its cars and locomotives. Union Atlantic designed and manufactured its own in-house at a facility in Philadelphia, including the Phoenix.

Anna's mother had even designed the interiors, filling them with her favorite fabrics and colors. Velvet drapes, chenille upholstery, damask walls, all in shades of peacock blue, emerald green, and rich ivory, surrounded by walnut and gold leaf and bronze. After her mother, her brother, and Anna herself, the Philadelphia Phoenix had been her father's pride and joy.

Debuting in 1937, it wasn't the first streamliner train, nor was it the fastest or the most famous. But those superlatives didn't matter. The Phoenix was still a gleaming marvel that offered both jaw-dropping speed and unparalleled luxury. Plus, her father loved it, which is the main reason Anna chose it for the night's journey. It serves as a reminder to the others of all that had been taken from her.

The train lurches again, this time with purpose. A moment later, someone raps four times on the door. Seamus, here to tell her what she already knows. The train is in motion. There's no turning back now. Anna hurries to the door, feeling the train picking up speed beneath her bare feet. A strange sensation that, for a second, wreaks havoc on her balance and makes her reach for the wall to steady herself. No matter how many times she travels by train,

It always takes Anna a moment to navigate that unwieldy combination of standing on solid ground while also being in motion. Train legs, her father had called them, removing her hand from the wall. She stands in the middle of the room, waiting for her legs to learn how to absorb the gentle rocking of the train. Once they do, she's able to reach for the door, unlock it, and pull it open.

As expected, Seamus is on the other side, filling the narrow corridor that runs the length of the car. The windows behind him show nothing but blackness. They are now in the tunnel on their way out of the city.