The Books To Watch for in 2025
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Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was. That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it, and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers? eBay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful.

Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And today, we have officially flipped the calendar in our hearts and minds, if not literally the calendar, so we're still in December here when we're coming to you. But it's time to look ahead, Rebecca. No more year-end reviews, best ofs.

I think we can use this opportunity to wipe the slate clean for one Barack Obama and give him a pass on a truly inexplicable list, which I guess our first news shows of 2025. We can come back and take a look of that. Check, check our Instagram to see how that all turned out. And the reactions of the readers was rarely have we been that wrong? We're wrong often because we are people, but we were, man, we were super wrong. Yeah.

And somehow I think we're not wrong still. I don't know how it can be that his picks for himself were wrong. How can it be to express an opinion in the immortal worlds of the great John Cusack and high fidelity? But still, it feels a little bit like I have to edit myself now. He zagged. He's pretty predictable. He's got a like...

like relatively regular formula to his book lists, whether he thinks about it that way or not. There are some sort of like consistent categories that he comes up in and it tends to be relatively predictable. And he just completely went, you know, out of that lane this time around. Anyway, we're going to, well, let's save it for a real show, but that's maybe he has checked out like 2024, like we have. And he's like, you know, he's writing down a napkin,

Hit blast it out, hit send, have the assistant throw it in Canva, and we're off and running. What we're doing today...

Again, we're sort of starting to slice and dice 2025 a little bit because we've been recording some stuff. And I'm honestly not sure what order these things are coming out, even though I'm editing and everything. But what this episode is... This one is... Go ahead. I can tell you, this one is our first coverage of 2025 titles. Oh, okay, great. Following it will be our personal most anticipated and some special guests. And it books and we've done a winter draft. So it's a lot of getting ready for 2025 time. So what this is, is we have...

at least 10 picks for not our most anticipated, but books that the wider reading world is paying attention to. It is not just the top 10 books

for nerds. It is also not just the top 10 for people who are going to shop at Target or get on Goodreads. It's kind of a blend of all those things in there. And maybe we put our finger on the scale for some things rather than others. We have one, Rebecca, we have one that we're taking off the board. We're just going to put it up there. It's the most anticipated.

I don't know, by the whole internet, it's going to sell the most copies. It's the biggest story of the first part of the year. And it is, of course, I was going to make a joke, but I didn't want to make fun of all these other people I have on the list. So what is it, Rebecca? What are we moving on? It's Onyx Storm. Yeah. The third book in Rebecca Yaros' Empyrean series. It's going to have sprayed edges. It's going to have dragons. It's going to have sex. That's all I know. People are excited. I'm trying to think.

And I'm not sure what to do about this writ large, right? Where generally when there becomes a huge hit, eventually we get around to reading it. We did it with Crawdads. We did it with Colleen Hoover and something else that I can't recall at this point. We have not yet dipped our scales into this.

I don't know what to say. We are less interested in this than the Colleen Hoover thing, I have to say, for both of us. Oh, really? Oh, what was that? No, it's the series nature of it. The Crawdads and Colleen Hoover were normal novel-sized books, 300-ish and some odd pages. That's a weekend. I'm happy to give a weekend to doing science for why do people like this book? What's it all about? That whole...

that whole thing. We've done it for several at this point. But this is two existing really big books. And then this will be the third. Onyx Storm will be the third really big book. And I understand that they read fast. A friend of mine just told me that she took down both Fourth Wing and

Iron Flame. You tell me offline. I need to know who this is. Not even a book industry friend. Like a civilian friend. That's how this happens. Yes. It's friends and neighbors that murder you. Yes. A civilian friend who reads a lot of fantasy read the first two in like three days. So I feel like if I could saddle up, but also my friend read them that fast because this is like her genre and she likes this stuff. And if I get into it and I like it, I'll be off to the races. But if I get into it and I don't like it, I'm going to be staring down like almost 2,000 pages.

Yeah, not my genre. O'Neill's Razor is very unhappy about this, just quivering in the toolbox over here. But having said that, it is the book of the... I mean, it's hard not to see that it's going to be the biggest selling book of the year. We don't know what the fall is. We should say this most anticipated or the books to watch. I'm going to screw up that. I'm so sorry, everyone, especially to Rebecca, who knows what she's talking about today, as in most days.

We do not have the fall catalogs yet, which actually will probably come out in like five weeks. Random House, I know, is early February. And once that falls, a lot of the abdominals fall into place. So in six weeks, we'll have a better sense of the year. This is really through June, I should say. I think there might be one on my list that I saw. I've got one in July. But Onyx Storm is certainly going to be the book of January, not to spoil the It book draft for you, but...

You can hear from our voices and tap dancing around it that we kind of wish it wasn't so. Everyone enjoyed themselves, not mad about it, not excited about it. It's not interesting. It's just predictable. Now it's a question of just how long. Once these big phenomenons become this thing, we kind of know what they are. It's a question of how long they're going to last. Okay, Rebecca. With that out the board, you have yours in order. I'm asking you to on the fly 10 to 1 power rank them because that's what I have.

What would be your number 10 just looking at your eyeballs, using your eyeballs? My number 10 using my eyeballs is...

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let's go with wild dark shore by charlotte mcconaughey um she is the author of where did it go migrations yeah which was a big book a couple of years ago this is about a family on a remote island a mysterious woman washes ashore there's a storm on the horizon she deals you know with climate and also with family and secrets the

The first book was very popular. There is a quarter of a million copy first print run announced for this. So maybe it should have been higher up on my list, but this is a literary novel. Migrations was literary. That's where McConaughey writes in that genre. And so because it is in the more literary vein and not likely to get, you know, nearly the kind of readership of something like Onyx Storm, and because you asked me to power rank them on the fly. Yeah.

We're going to drop that in at 10. We have all the grace, all the plausible deniability, all the we're doing the best we can here. Yeah, that makes sense. I read Migrations. I really liked it. But it's one of those books that kind of like...

It just ran through me and I get it confused with, wait, this is this Catherine May's wintering? No, no. It's like kind of in the same, weirdly the same vibe space. So I'm having a trouble getting myself, but it'll sell well, do well in independent bookstores. What's the release date on that? Did you have? Oh, you know, I just closed my tab. It's March 4th. Okay. So we've got a little bit of time left from there. This got a big advance and we know it's being made into a series and

And he has been in the batter's box for breaking out for a couple of books. And I feel like if it's going to happen, it's going to happen now. But King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, I have it number 10 on my list. He writes these sophisticated, gritty, rural...

political in a real, but also sort of embedded rather than overt way. I had him on First Edition a while ago, really interesting person. And we are still waiting for the first, I mean, honestly, the first person of color to become a grocery store mystery thriller name writer. And I think this is our best candidate for

I think so too. It might be a little too dark is the only thing. I think he's a little too real and a little less anodyne than, and I don't think he's ever going to, I don't think he's going to dull the razor as these things go. But I think it's going to be very anticipated in many parts of the bookish community. So I have number 10, King of Ashes, Essay Cosby. I think that's June. That's my memory of this. I just learned about that one this morning. Oh, nice. You were doing your homework. At the Goodreads most anticipated list that just came out. And that was after I had drafted this list.

So Cosby's not in this particular document, but it would have been otherwise. It's inspired by the Godfather. Yeah. He's, I mean, he's great. I will be reading the crap out of essay Cosby. All right. Let's see. Number nine. I'm just playing like tab roulette. Saving five, a memoir of hope by Amanda Nguyen. This is also a quarter of a million copy print run. She,

was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a memoir about her healing and her activism in the aftermath of being raped at Harvard. That was in 2013, and it was quite a big story. So this is survival, hope, activism. Also, she's an astronaut.

I got the publicity pitch for this a while ago, and I was like, is this the most interesting person in the world? It might be. She might be. And I don't know. I don't have any sense of it's any good. I need to look at the digital galley and take a look. I've got a point of order on this. Okay. And no shade is in the Everglades here to Amanda. Okay.

What is the finalist for the Nobel? Where is that list? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, we don't see the shortlist. If I send an email over to Sweden, am I not? Again, if I'd love to be wrong, but I was like, hmm. Do they tell you? What does that mean? Yeah, I don't get this. Is it like, oh, you were nominated? Because they don't release a shortlist or a longlist. I don't know what that is. I'd love to know if that has any...

teeth, that idea. But putting that aside for a moment, even if it didn't have that weird little pseudo-honorific, I'm not even sure what you would call that. I'm still very interested in this. I just didn't know if people were watching for this or not.

I just don't know if has any public awareness and maybe there'll be, I think there'll be a big publicity campaign and that can move the needle. But right now the Q rating on Amanda Nguyen and saving five, I think is fairly low. Yeah. It's March 4th. So like, and March 4th is a big release date this spring. One of the biggies.

I think she will have a huge press tour. We'll probably see her on all the pods, NPR, all that sort of stuff. Memoirs aren't really chosen for the big book clubs, but you kind of never know where else she will get publicity. A quarter of a million copies. The publisher has a lot of faith. What publisher? It's Macmillan? You got to stop asking me questions after I close tabs, man. Keep the tab open until we've moved on. It is Macmillan. Yeah, I figured. Okay.

Number nine for me, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. A lot of things I just said about S.A. Cosby I think could be applied to Okorafor just in the sci-fi space. I do not think it's any mistake either that they're both black in terms of having not broken through. I'm very salty about the anticipated, the Goodreads Choice Award nominees, the best-selling books of the year.

I need these people to sell books. I need people who just quote unquote read for the stories. And I have, there's no amount of vitriol that is not included in the air quotes you didn't see me do right there. To start picking up some of these damn books, Rebecca, because these books are good. They're not scary. They're great. They're going to improve your reading life. Just pick up and buy the damn books. Yeah.

Yeah, I made the mistake of dipping into our iTunes Apple podcast reviews recently when I was doing something else. Why did you do that? It was right there. And I got to say, if you interpret us talking about how readers need to intentionally and purposefully pick up books by people of color as disdain for readers, you can just carry on to the next podcast.

Leave your one star review and get the hell out. That's fine. That's fine. Book Talk will let you know right now that some people are just discovering that reading is political, but we've been on that tip here for a while. And we do believe that books are about more than a good story. So I'll come off my horse on that one. Yeah, I mean, so anyway, I mean, that they're nine and 10, they're on this list. And I can say that with, you know, I think the publishing industry loves and is interested in these two authors.

But the people that don't work in the industry don't follow specific genres and pay attention. Do they know them as well yet? Not as well as they should be. So anyway, that's number nine for me. Where do you want to go next? Number eight for me is going to be this debut novelist I'm not sure you've heard of, Taylor Jenkins Reid.

All right, this is five. Atmosphere, a love story coming out June 3rd. I'm going to slot it here in eight on the fly because the last couple Taylor Jenkins reads have not popped.

in a really big way, but the name is still very sticky. And like, I am still seeing people reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in the airport. So I don't know what the demand or excitement for this new one is going to be, but it's set in the 1980s against the backdrop of the space shuttle program. The main character is a woman who's a professor of physics and astronomy, and she has been happy with her life like adjacent to

to space until she sees an ad that NASA is looking for women scientists to join the space shuttle program and she wants to be one of the you know first women one of the few people ever to go to space and maybe she falls in love while she's doing that

It's weird because with Reed, the last couple, the last one was about tennis, right? And this one is about space. And she kind of, I don't know, kind of picking topics that already have had a bit of a run. Like, so we, I don't know if people know that For All Mankind is a fifth season on Apple TV. Yeah.

has an alternative history where women are integral to the astronaut program, which they actually were. And Adam Higginbotham talks about this in Challenger, for sure. But actually going into space and being a, become a people, that's already kind of happened. And with tennis, we got challengers, like,

I don't know. Weirdly, after Daisy Jones and the Six, she's kind of been off the zeitgeist by like six months or a year. Yeah, it's interesting. Or it just takes longer for books to catch up to the zeitgeist than movies. Maybe these are done. That's actually right. Though, For All Mankind's been out for five years. I can't imagine doing that. One Fly Me to the Moon was out last year, but that's like all the astronauts are dudes.

All the dudes. And I don't know. It's up in the air to me that Taylor Jenkins Reid is a name or that the seven half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, whatever the name of that damn book is.

Like, is it kind of a that's the book and I don't know who, I'm not following up on reading it, the other ones? Yeah, you know, when Daisy Jones and the Six came out, it felt like that was going to be the biggest thing she had had. It was everywhere. Of course, that's the one that already has a Signal adaptation. The Evelyn Hugo adaptation has been in the works for long enough that I am starting to suspect we might not actually see it. Yeah. Have you read that one, by the way? No, I was going to wait until the adaptation came out. Me too.

And every time I see people reading it in the airport, I think like, oh, maybe this will be the trip. But I was just going to hold on to it.

It's kind of looking to me now like I don't know if we're at make or break point for Taylor Jenkins read. Where is she going to end up in the pantheon? But it's totally possible that rather than becoming like a real go to name brand author, she'll have the pair of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones. So I'm going to be watching what happens with Atmosphere. Yeah, very interesting. I like Malibu. The only one I've read is Malibu Rising, which I liked, which is about surfing.

Which was cool. Okay. Number eight for me, I could have put this higher, but I wasn't really sure. The disparity between the amount of press coverage this will get and the number of people who read it all the way through is the biggest gap we have on the board. Because I like history. I like American literature. I know where we're going here. I like Mark Twain. But 1,200 pages, Rebecca, is...

That's a big ask, and I'm not sure what to do with this. It's going to be in a lot of tables, a lot of Father's Day books, I'm guessing. May 13th, right in time. But boy, oh boy, is Chernow flexing. Yeah, this was my number seven for the same reasons. It'll get a ton of coverage. There will maybe be interesting excerpts. Chernow will do a huge press tour.

I think this is one of those that will sell a lot more copies of it than will actually be read, which of course we can never know. But that's how those big biographies tend to go. What has Ron Chernow turned up about Mark Twain that we don't already know is, I think, one of the hinge questions for this. If there are new hooks to hang a publicity campaign on, that would be interesting. Imagine if you were a Mark Twain scholar right now.

I know this got announced several months ago, and I texted our dear friend and former co-worker Amanda Nelson, like, Ron Chernow, 1,200 pages on Mark Twain. She was like, I'm in. Is she really? She was in spirit. We'll see. Well, if she can get herself pointed at it, she'll read it, because I know Amanda and how that will work. The question is, can you get started? Like...

I wonder if this will never happen because Lin-Manuel Miranda is getting paid too much. But I would love the Lin-Manuel Miranda Mark Twain musical. It would be so wild. It would be amazing. Yeah. Coming off James and everything. Maybe Percival Everett should write it. I'm not sure where he is on where he's at on musicals.

That would be the great zag that he's like, it's a Broadway, you know, Hello Dolly style 1950s musical. Just straight ahead. Yeah, just a Percival Everett shot straight down the middle would be so surprising that we wouldn't trust that it was actually straight down the middle. I would spend the whole time being like, what am I missing? Yeah, Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry co-written with Percival Everett. That would be the weirdest thing that could ever happen. Sorry, I'm tipping my hand here. So that was your number seven? That was my number seven.

Okay, so my number seven is, I need to remind myself what the hook for this is. So Amal El-Motar's new book, The River Has Roots, is coming out again on that titanic March 4th. You may know her from being the co-writer from the wildly successful, weirdly, in one of the great stories of 2023. I think that was a 2023 story.

The Biggless Dickless and all that stuff? Oh, yes. Was that 2023? We didn't talk about it for a year in review, so it must have been. Yeah, no, it wasn't this year. So solo debut. And this river goes to the edge of this fairy town. And for those of you who don't know, this is Faerie, F-A-E-R-I-E, which is a little bit different than whatever. It's this magical land of the faerie and the fae.

fantasy book this family is there and they take care of plants and

And I'm guessing something goes wrong because otherwise it's just people tending plants on a magical river, which, hey, that could be a good time. Sure, that sounds lovely. I don't feel like that's what Amal El-Motar is going to be interested in. Probably not. Very, very interested to see what this... This is one of my probably five most anticipated books of the first half of the year. Just going to see what she wants to do and then the sales and do people pay attention, all the thing that goes into it. So that's...

The River Has Roots. A very cool cover, kind of a mix of fantasy and sci-fi-ish element going on here. I don't really know what to make it. A murderer's row of fantasy spec fic writers on the blurbs, which you wouldn't suggest. Also, the two main characters are sisters with singing something like a complicated relationship.

Sisters do well, whether it's Frozen or Best Friends slash Sisters, Wicked. This is one of the things people underestimate. Bad sisters, somebody somewhere. And this could be a real hit. I don't know, depending how weird it is.

I don't know if the BookTok crew is going to pick it up. And I'm curious to see. I have so many questions, Rebecca, about the River Azurite. So that's why I have it here at number seven for me. Okay. My six is going to be The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Comes out May 13th.

Big novel, more than 400 pages about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. There is a corner of the bookternet for whom I know this is the number one most anticipated title. The folks who love Ocean Vuong really love Ocean Vuong. I'm in the camp, you know, not my number one, but I will really be looking forward to this. Novels by poets. I'm just going to go ahead and say we're probably going to see Ocean Vuong get nominated for the National Book Award.

Wow. Okay. Interesting. All right. My number six, then, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. Okay. These books have been more successful than I anticipated. The Hunger Games fandom has held up better than I expected. I do wonder how much of that, this is not something you could know, is...

Yeah.

but the song of songbirds and snakes did very well as a book, surprising. Well, as a movie, I'm sure this will get a movie as well. This is hunger games prequel. I'm not sure which part it is. I really don't. Oh, actually I do remember it's young. Hey, Mitch. Um,

which is the character, if you don't know the books as well, was played by Woody Harrelson in the movies. A really cool part, actually a very hard part to cast, I would think, but a very cool part for someone. One of the more, if not the most beloved character from the movies, I would say at this point. Everybody knows Woody, why not? So that's going to get a big release. It's going to sell a bunch and sort of no one will talk about it. I think it's kind of how this is going to go. But it's certainly at this point, one of the books on the radar and on the calendar for the year.

Okay, so that brings us to five. We're halfway through here. Mine is Catabasis by R.F. Kwong.

Coming out August 26th, 560 pages, 500,000 copy print run for a deluxe limited edition. Katabasis is the ancient Greek word that means the story of a hero's descent to the underworld. This is about two graduate students who have to put aside their rivalry and journey to hell to save their professor's soul, perhaps at the cost of their own dark academia fantasy that's billed as Dante's Inferno meets Susanna Clarke.

If I'm going to do a five, this was my two, this is my two. All right. If I'm going to do a dark academia, 560 page situation, I'm going to do it with RF Kwong. Sounds a little bit more like on the babble tip than yellow face, which is fine. I liked babble and I think this will be really interesting. Yeah. People are very, very excited for this. Kwong, we talked about maybe the most interesting single writer in terms of the breadth of what she does. Um,

her prolificness. Is that how you would nominize her prolific? I don't know. And can kind of do, and you know, she's still working on, or maybe she finished, I don't know, a PhD in East Asian languages over there at one of the Oxbridge institutions. I can never keep track of which one. In the sky's the limit territory here. Very, very interesting. If I had to bet, and this is too long of a bet, if we had to pick a Stephen King character

A descendant who's going to have every year, every two years, a big selling genre adjacent kind of book. Do you pick anyone other than her? I'm not saying that she's going to. I'm saying do you pick anyone other than her? I don't think so. And I'm looking at the rest of my tabs and realizing I should have saved this one.

Why? Oh, for what one is? Yeah, for what would be up higher. So that's all right. We're on the fly. You're going to walk away with a list of books to look for. That's fine. And I'm making you do something. You didn't get the homework in enough time. And I really didn't have this locked down either. That was my number two. So my number five is Atmosphere. And then let's take a sponsor break and we'll get into our top fours and round it out.

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So since my number five was atmosphere, which you already talked about, that then kicks it back over to you for whatever you have. Whatever your four that you have left. Whatever my four that I have left. Yeah. In no particular order at this point. Matriarch by Tina Knowles, the mother of Beyonce and Solange. I think this is going to be the celebrity memoir of the spring. Comes out April 22nd from One World Press.

A glorious chronicle of a life like none other is the billing here. Tina Knowles has seen some stuff. Her daughters have fascinating and pretty divergent stories.

And Jay-Z, unfortunately, in the news recently for associations with P. Diddy. So who knows how that is all going to turn. But there's a lot of time between now and April 22nd when the book comes out. So the grimacy face you're making right now, I imagine, is the one that the publicists for this book have been making of like, what are we going to do? How's it all going to shake out?

But there is a world in which this is a huge book with like lots of headlines, gossipy revelations. I have no idea what direction she's going to go in this, which I think will draw some readers into it. She is, of course, like much less of a draw than it would be to get a Beyonce memoir. But Tina Knowles is a known figure in her own right. And as I looked through, like, what are the celebrity memoirs of the spring? This is a real standout.

It was a weak crop, I thought, of celebrity books. I was looking for something to put there. I don't know. The history of you're not the person, but you're super adjacent to the person for these kinds of books, I couldn't think of really in a lot. Well, there's the one about Venus and Serena Williams' dad. Yeah, right.

I guess, I guess when the parents are like, I mean, Tina Knowles was like integral to the creation of Destiny's Child and Beyonce's early career. Yeah, I watched a lot of 1990s MTV, so I can tell you that much. So I think she's got some interesting stories. Yeah, I think there's something about Richard Williams, like even just the visual of him on the tennis court is different than in a studio, send an email, just kind of a different visual. But that's a that's a good example. Um,

I didn't have that on. I'd be curious to see how that's going to end up. Number four, I have We Do Not Part by Hong Kong, which comes out in January. That is, of course, the reigning Nobel Prize for Literature laureate who has extremely well-timed new book coming out in January. Sounds like it's a ghosty thriller vibe, which is you could do worse to have for a

People maybe want to take a spin with you. If they haven't, The Vegetarian sold very well, so I think she has some name recognition. This is a four-quadrant kind of a situation, potentially. Has all this, I don't know, honorifics in the world, all the lit cred you could possibly get, has sold a book at scale, at least for a literary fiction kind of title. End-of-year prizing, very much on board. Be very curious to see if it's good or not good is the wrong word.

If it has a page-turner element to it, if it's got a little bit of that, then it could go really high. She can be so heady. Yeah. Right. So it'll really depend. So that's my four. So back to your three. Okay. That was going to be my two. So yeah, to my three, I'm going to pick... When am I going to pick? The Dry Season, A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Phoebus. June 3rd from Knopf. Melissa Phoebus, fascinating career. Yes. Yes.

Terrific, provocative essays. Abandon Me, Bodywork, Girlhood is the one that I have read most recently. That came out in 2021, talked about it here on the show. And this is exactly what it says on the tin, a memoir of a celibate year.

Why Phoebus, who had previously, like in a past career decades ago, worked as a dominatrix. And one of her first books is about that. Writes a lot about sex and sexuality and her relationships. And so this would be an interesting project for anyone to take on and write about it. But for Melissa Phoebus as who she is to choose to go to have a celibate year and why and what she learned from it. I cannot wait.

Yeah, a real twin in my boy. I'm interested in this, but I'm not sure if I can get there with Edmund White's memoir, which you're going to hear us talk about later. Even the desert makes me nervous. Let me just say the monsoon and the desert. I will go into both of these and let you know. Really good writer. Interesting person. Got her sentences. Very good writer. I always come away from her books like shaken up and thinking about them for weeks. And that tells you something. Yeah.

I think for this exercise, I have to put Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. Okay. I think it makes sense. It's number three. We're struggling what to do with these kinds of writers that do a book a year and they're right in their lane and they're blasting through the lane and people who like that really enjoy it. But you're going to get exactly what you expect and want. And for what you and I do and what we're interested in,

This is not it. Maybe one, get a taste of the flavor. But next time I come to the ice cream parlor, I want something other than the extremely good vanilla. Extremely good vanilla is great. I'm kind of looking for something else most of the time. This is going to sell a million copies. We've clearly minted the next romance grocery store commercial romance writer. She has emerged as the one amongst a very popular and growing audience.

in thriving genre, and it's not a mistake that like Daniel Steele and Nora Roberts before her, it is a little bit, you know what you're going to get. This is actually a little bit less interesting to me, I think, than Nora Roberts or Daniel Steele, which I think those have more of an edge, frankly, have had historically. But in this genre right now, most people that are buying these don't seem to be looking for edge. And there's other books out there that you can get a lot of different things. And this maybe goes down to, you know,

Some other things we're saying about bestsellers right now, but this is going to sell a million copies, it's going to be all over, and then in three months people are going to forget the name of the Emily Henry book that came out this year. Yeah, I left it off my 10 because I feel like we should have just put it on the list with Onyx Storm of like, there's a new Emily Henry, but I think all of your reasons for having it in three are strong. Okay, so our twos we've both mentioned. My two was We Do Not Fall Apart by Han Kang, and your two was Catabasis by...

R of Kwong. Yes. Someone please tell us how to say that. Yeah. If you know ancient Greek well enough, please let us know. That's how. Okay.

So I guess my one is going to be The Antidote by Karen Russell. I think Karen Russell came before her time. Like she hit before the literary genre mashup thing was really big. Swamplandia and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was her short story collection, her debut short story collection. Those are both great. And they're so quirky. And I think they're both great.

there's more appetite for what Karen Russell does now than there was when she first, you know, came onto the scene. She won a, or she was nominated for a Pulitzer. She won a MacArthur genius grant, you know, Swamplandia was a bestseller. And this is set in a fictional town in Nebraska during a dust storm in the great depression. And there's a prairie witch or a woman who is a prairie witch who

of some kind, deals with the nation's forgetting, deals obviously with some climate stuff. And it will all be more than a little bit slant because of who Karen Russell is. So that is March 11th from Knopf. My number one, and this is what it says on the Macmillan homepage, and I can't believe it's true because it's a 500,000 copy stated first edition print run. It says that all of them will be signed.

How is that possible? Book plates with a printed signature? With an auto pin? What's the math on that? Yeah. So anyway, this is my number one is Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, who...

It's kind of there with Leigh Bardugo and Kwong Tu of this next generation of genre-adjacent writers. I guess they're pretty genre writers. Fantasy-adjacent more than anything, but also you get a lot of different stuff. It's a little hard to describe what they're working on right now. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a giant hit. I really liked her. What was it called? The Darkness? God, what is the name? Anyway, it's been out for a while. Huge fandom fan.

You know, maybe Schwab I'd put on like, that's a, that's a patron episode. The king, the king, the Dauphin for this king, who could inherit that role? Cause Schwab is maybe on there as well, or I think is on there, but if we were had to pick one, what would you pick?

So this one, the synopsis is very short. There's three timelines, Santo Domingo in the 16th century, London in the early 19th century, then Boston in 2019. And here's the synopsis. Three women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories dangling like roots. One grows high, one grows deep, and one grows wild, and all of them grow teeth. And that's it. From Tor. Schwab does not like to write a short book. This is 500 plus pages, but...

That is kind of the rigor for these big fantasy. I think you're looking for that. Yeah, yeah. I think people want this. I am not people, as we are well known at this point. But this or the Kuang, I was kind of going back and forth. I think, I don't know. I'd love to know what will sell more at the end of it. Oh. But it's going to be close. It is going to be close. It all depends on which one is more fun to read, I think. Mm-hmm.

And notice I said not better. I said fun to read. More fun to read, yeah. Book sales come down to something other than better, at least in my estimation. So that's mine there, Rebecca. Okay. What do you think of that slate? I think this is a pretty interesting slate. Yeah.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was tough doing this on the fly. But I also am not like wringing my hands about it. Because as we've talked about in some of our other like prep for 2025 coverage, the spring looks a little soft, which means that you can move things around and end up with a list where it's like, ah, this could have been seven, this could have been two, really depends on how you factor in the big names, especially in some of those genre hits, I leaned a little more literary. I think these are solid lists.

I think you would win if we were voting on this one. You got some of the bigger names. Well, I took on my guess for sure. And I keep wondering, like, there's some way to do a...

Maybe when the fall catalogs come out, is there some way for us to do this long wondered about fantasy football equivalent for books? We tried something on BR or Greg Zimmerman wrote for us. It kind of blew up in a bad way because anyway, just let's just say that not all the categories were well thought out necessarily in hindsight. But like if we had a list, we could pick 20. Like here's our team. And you got point for if you're on the Circona bestselling books of the year at the end of the list, that's some number of points.

If you're a finalist for one of the major awards, if you win, it's more points. If you are on...

some of the major lists you get double points. If you get, Lit Hub does this, what books appeared on the most lists, maybe you get a point per, like, there's some fun way of doing this that wouldn't be a huge list, right? We need to work on this. It could also be like if you get picked for one of the big book clubs, if you get an adaptation announced. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah, let's think about that. And podcastbookright.com if you've got some ideas for categories and everything, because this would be fun. And I think it's also something if we did it right,

maybe we could have listeners fill out bracket or forms and I don't know how we'd automatically score. The scoring is the hard part. I think this is definitely a game for the fall when we can see the whole year's slate of books and you know, what's coming out in the fall, you'll have some heavy hitters. So we could either just do fall releases through that prism or look at the whole year and be able to like pull the data and, you know, retroactively. I don't know which one's the most fun, right? If we like, as soon as we know the fall books, um,

Because in fantasy, you pick before the season starts. And maybe we could do something where we have a list of 10 books. And then each month we get, because in fantasy, you can get someone off waivers. You can trade. So maybe every month we could say switch one. We'd have one swap a month for something that we come out and we love. Yeah, I'll put this into the sinker for the fall. Yeah, maybe that's a Patreon episode just to figure it. Just the rules committee's deliberations would be fun. Yeah.

And maybe we get Sharif and Vanessa to join us. We can have four players? Well, yeah, you got to have a fantasy books league. You got to have a league. Yeah, you got to have a league. So anyway, or yeah, some other way. If people have good ideas, I'd love to know this. Yeah, let us know. All right, a couple honorable mentions. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Vera or Faith, a novel by Gary Steingart. July 8th. I love me some. I love this. I wanted to, I wanted to find a way to put it at 10. I know 256 pages. You love to see that a poignant, sharp eyed and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly falling apart, told through the eyes of their daughter. Too soon. I mean,

I mean, dude wrote a COVID novel that managed to be good during COVID. So I trust Gary. And also probably the only writer that I'm in for a precocious child narrator because I don't think it's going to be straight ahead. He'll take the piss out of that for sure. Yes. Yeah. That'll be super fun. So I'm looking forward to that. That's much higher on my personal anticipated list.

Coming March 11th from Echo is Karen Feeding, a memoir by Lori Williver. She was Anthony Bourdain's longtime assistant. Gonna be potentially very interesting. We will see. But I have my eye on that one.

I think the internet is going to have a lot to say about one day. Everyone will have always been against this by Omar El-Akkad coming out February 25th, largely about the war in Gaza and, you know, perspectives that have been offered actions that have been taken or not taken and how Akkad sees this landing in the longterm. That this is one of those that internet discourse, I think is going to be much more interested in than broad, the broadsides.

the broader reading public, but I would like to see some big discussion.

of it. And then February 11th, Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which was shortlisted for the Booker, and it has been out in the UK, is coming out in the US for the first time. So I'm going to have my eye on that one. We got a couple of listener emails about that book saying, yeah, if you like the... I kind of think what we were comparing it to, but something where you just like to be in the world, like it feels interesting and good to be there, maybe not as plotty. I'm looking for that. I'm saving sort of my...

We're doing some more about my own most anticipated things that I thought could have been on this list if I dragged it out to 12 or 15. Stephen King has a new book coming out called Never Flinch. Okay. Allie Hazelwood has a book coming out. Again, not sure what to do. Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flashlight Boost by Susan Choi. Literary favorite that sold pretty well. We're going to see if they level up or if they're good or how that's going to go. So,

Source Code by Bill Gates is the other memoir I looked at. I'm not sure where we all are on Bill Gates right now. I'm making a face. I don't have to anticipate it myself, but it's going to be a thing. It will be a thing. And then Ray Naylor's follow-up, Where the Axe is Buried, The Mountain and the Sea, was a breakout, kind of a sleeper fantasy hit for all you octopi stans out there. This is his new book.

The book after the breakout, always interesting to watch. So I think, especially in the sci-fi community, that's one people are going to pay attention to. The rest are, I'm going to keep my powder dry on some other notes here. All right, Rebecca, shaping up to be a good year. What are book clubbable for us? Ooh, book clubbable. Kong. Death of the Author, King of Ashes. Oh, Taylor Jenkins Reid. We're going to book club that?

You and I? I think, oh, for us. Sorry, I thought you meant big book clubs. We haven't talked about the other thing that you're talking about. Oh, no, no. I thought you meant like what's Jenna. Both of us are talking about three different things that we're not supposed to be talking about. Or we don't know that we're talking about. I was making guesses about Read with Jenna. Oh, Read with Jenna. The Read certainly. The big book clubs. Book club-able between you and me. We got to think about this. Kwong. Yeah, definitely the Kwong. Probably the Karen Russell. Russell. Kitamura. Be fun. Yeah.

Not a lot of shared wheelhouse picks, I guess. Yeah. Besides the, well, Gary, Steingart. Yeah, the Steingart, that'll be a good time. Steingart, that'll be fun. Okay, podcast at bookride.com. You can go to shownotesbookride.com slash listen. Check out the Patreon. The winner draft is coming. Correct.

Even though we've already recorded and it's in the can, I'm going to edit it later today. We are so out of time and space right now. Yeah, we're trying to get it all, we're getting things put together. Thank you so much for listening this year. I really appreciate it. I hope you had a great reading year. I guess what we're really looking for is notes on how to assemble, how can we score in Fantasy Author League in a way that's not gross?

Yeah. Yeah. No, no. If they get canceled, we're not going to, if they die, none of that stuff. We don't want to plagiarize, no scandal related stuff. All positive. You don't get any points for scandals. Yeah. In fantasy football, it's all, you don't get any points for they fumbled or tore their ACL. We're not looking for that. We're looking for positive yardage plays for each of these authors here. Rebecca, thank you. And we'll talk to you in the new year. Y'all have a good one.

Thanks so much for listening today. Now, please enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook of Long Live, The Definitive Guide to the Folklore and Fandom of Taylor Swift by Nicole Pomerico. Thanks to Hachette Audio for sponsoring. I was a senior in high school in 2006 when I heard Taylor Swift for the first time. I've never been a big fan of country music, but my parents would listen to country radio sometimes. The local station was on in the car one day while I was running errands with my mom.

And when our song started playing, Taylor's voice grabbed me right away. This wasn't another man singing in a deep voice about how he lost his truck and his girl all in the same day. Listening to her lyrics, I realized the way she sounded wasn't the only thing different about her. When we got home, I looked her up on MySpace. And almost 20 years later, I became an entertainment journalist who gets to focus on Taylor Swift every day.

A Place in This World Anyone who's been a fan of Taylor Swift since her debut album was released on October 24, 2006,

probably has had the unique experience of explaining who Taylor Swift is to at least one of their friends. Today, Swifties joke a lot about their favorite indie artist, but back then, she actually was our favorite indie artist. She also sang with a southern accent, so a lot has obviously changed since then.

If it seems like Taylor is one of the most hardworking people in the music industry, that's because she is. And she always has been. Before and even after she signed with Big Machine Records, we'll revisit that can of worms later. Taylor did the legwork required to get noticed by the powers that be in the music industry from the time she was a kid.

I made up this demo CD of me singing karaoke music and went to Nashville with my mom, and she would park outside record labels and I would run in and be like, "Hey, I'm Taylor, I'm 11. I want a record deal. Call me," she said on a 2008 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. By the way, this was right around the time that Taylor sang the national anthem at the US Open in that fabulously patriotic American flag outfit.

just in case anyone needs an iconic fashion moment like that one to ground them in the timeline. That method didn't quite work for her, but she didn't give up. Two years later, her family left their home state of Pennsylvania in favor of Nashville, Tennessee, where 15-year-old Taylor would soon sign a songwriting deal with Sony ATV Tree Music Publishing.

Also around this time, Taylor and Scott Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine Records, met for the first time at the legendary Bluebird Cafe after she invited him to see her perform. But even though his is the name that always gets tossed around when we're talking about the people who were instrumental in launching Taylor's career, one country star may have had some special influence on getting her signed, Toby Keith.

who was working with Borchetta to launch Big Machine as a partnership with his own label, Show Dog Nashville. In 2005, Nashville's WSM4V interviewed Taylor at her high school, no big deal, ahead of the release of her first album, and she explained that she performed for him at her first meeting with Big Machine.

Taylor's first single ever, "Tim McGraw," came out in the summer of 2006, with her debut album "Taylor Swift" following on October 24th. It's impossible to know if she knew she wouldn't be sticking with country music forever at that point, but choosing to begin her career there really was a genius move. At the time, she was filling a huge gap in the genre. Successful young country stars were few and far between, and so were women.

And now for a mind-boggling fact, only two women in history have ever debuted on the Hot 100 country chart at number one as a solo act. Those women are Taylor Swift and Beyonce. And Beyonce didn't achieve this until 2024 with Texas Hold'em.

Starting out in this genre also gave her the chance to really flex the talent that makes the magic of Taylor Swift happen, her songwriting skills. Country music is known for its storytelling, and Taylor is nothing if not a storyteller. I wasn't a country fan when I discovered Taylor, but her words hooked me.

and I know I'm not the only fan who feels this way. Taylor knew how important writing her own music was too, even then. While talking to Entertainment Weekly in July 2007, she said, "'I didn't want to just be another girl singer. I wanted there to be something that set me apart, and I knew that had to be my writing.'"

While one of the biggest criticisms of Taylor's music at the time was that she only sings about boys, it was not true, not even on her very first album. Though Taylor certainly sang about love and heartbreak in songs like Teardrops on My Guitar and Should Have Said No, she also covered topics that listeners her age could relate to.