5 Fascinating Stats About Modern Reading Habits, with Laura McGrath
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This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And I'm Jeff O'Neill. Let's go back to you, Rebecca. If you're going to do it, it's back to you to intro the show.

All around here, Jeff forgot his name on the first take. Oh, because you screw up, so you have to go back to the... Okay, see, I hear how it's going. All right, sure. You threw me under the bus. You're coming under with me. I mean, you were under the bus. I just said, look at Rebecca down there. Listen, it's nice under here. We are joined today by Laura McGrath. We have been hyping up this episode for a couple weeks. We're going to be talking about

I'm going to let you introduce yourself because whenever I try to explain what you do, it turns into like 75 sentences. My job is really quite simple at the top level. I'm an English professor. I'm a professor of English or assistant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. Where it gets weird is what I study, which is not exactly normal, not in the sort of, you

I study contemporary American literature and I focus on the American publishing industry. And so I do that in some different ways. I spend a lot of time teaching a very traditional English course where we do close reading and we talk about the way that text looks on a page and how writers make us feel and make us think through what they write. You're very standard issue English class. But then I also study contemporary American literature by looking at big data and

So I'm a part of a kind of small contingent of scholars that we call ourselves digital humanists. And I study the large scale data that is produced by and about books in the contemporary publishing industry. So I'm writing a book about literary agents. My work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I will take every opportunity to promote as much as possible. We need to love and save the NEH.

And so I'm really happy to be here nerding out with you all who are really my people. We are so ready for some deep nerding. Yeah, what you really make is, for us, cocaine. That's what you produce when you really need to describe it. I guess as a former academic, though I'm older than you are, Laura, I guess I'm curious, was it an uphill battle to make this your field of inquiry and you're doing your dissertation topics and everything? Because when I was...

Back in grad school, no one was really doing this kind of stuff like that. The publishing industry existed was maybe something we acknowledged every now and again. But the realities of reading and text, there was some reader response theory stuff that wasn't very popular. But like, where did you find yourself in the tides and the currents of academia? Was it an upstream battle or not?

There were a lot of nascent conversations that were happening in a lot of different fields that managed to kind of coalesce for me at exactly the right moment. So there was digital humanities that was happening at places like the Stanford University Literary Lab, where folks were thinking about how we might use machine learning or large-scale data mining, natural language processing, to understand not just one book at a time, but a corpus of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of books.

So that was really interesting. But of course, the problem is copyright. All of those books had to have been in the public domain. So if you were someone like me who came in to study contemporary American literature, you hit an impasse of, I mean, at the time, 1923, which is when books enter into the public domain, 100 years after this, when books enter into the public domain. Then there was all of this really wonderful work that was happening in literary sociology that was really interested in the processes by which literature is made. And

And so I had these sort of mind meldy moments where I thought, well, I can't study contemporary literature. Like I can't, you know, crack open books and figure out what's happening in hundreds and thousands of millions of paragraphs. But I can also see that the publishing industry is producing massive amounts of data about books. There is a huge amount of metadata that's just waiting to be explored. And so those things kind of

in a moment that was a different moment, a different time. But it's been really fun to kind of forge my own little path here. Yeah. My past self is going, how did I not know literary sociology was a thing? And can I go back 20 years and do it again? I don't know it existed 30 years ago, Laura. It absolutely did. It really worked primarily in sociology departments and in American studies.

You'll think of scholars like Janice Radway. I don't know if you all are familiar with Radway's books about the origins of the Book of the Month Club. Radway embedded at the Book of the Month Club for a long period of time to write about how they produced these lists and how they went about making the decisions about what sorts of books they wanted to include on their monthly list.

And then she's written another book that's really wonderful about romance readers, where she embedded in several different romance reading clubs at different bookstores to really challenge the notion. And Radway was a real pioneer of thinking about romance as a genre, but to really challenge the idea that reading romance was this anti-feminist, regressive political stance that one could take, that actually readers of romance really understood gender identity and politics through what they were reading in really transgressive ways.

And so that kind of happened. And gradually we can do this more in English departments now as English departments are becoming a little bit more computational in some places. Yeah, that's really interesting. So all of this means that the part that I care about is you've got interesting stuff we don't know. And this is how formal this is going to be. Laura has brought five to seven Easter eggs, nuggets, little, you know, to hold in the hall of our hand and hold out for Rebecca and I to come sniff and see what we make of it.

Can you talk a little about methodology? Where is this stuff coming from? Do you want to talk about it morsel by morsel? Is there something to say at the very top?

So this is largely, I chose seven different statistics that come from five different research studies. I did not author any of them. These are by a number of literary sociologists, a number of people in cultural sociology, book studies, et cetera, who are thinking about readership, what it means to be a reader today. There are a million different ways I could have taken this. And I decided I really want to focus on readers because this is a group that we think we know a lot about.

And I'm not sure that we do know a whole lot about readers. So I wanted to bring us here. Okay. We are so ready. Let's go, Laura. Whenever you want to start. Yeah, okay. I want to start with the question of who is reading. And this is a bit of an assignment that I got from Rebecca, and it was a lot of fun to dig into. And so the first statistic I want to present you with, likely one that you have heard before, comes from the American Time Use Survey. Okay.

and the Public Participation in the Arts Survey, that in 2023, only 16%, only 16% of people in the United States over the age of 16 reported reading anything for personal interest yesterday.

So this excludes things that you might have read for work. This excludes things that you might have read for school. A much larger group than 16% was certainly reading something yesterday for work or for school, but 16% essentially reported pleasure reading yesterday.

And that's books? Or that could be a magazine or whatever? It could be a magazine as well. So it's books, novels, plays is how that's partitioned out. Physical media? Or could it be an e-book? I mean, I'm trying to think. I'm thinking through the ramifications. It could also be an e-book. It was about time use. It was less about media use or anything specific about how they were engaging with books. But how you spent your time reading for not but pleasure.

That's so interesting. I'm thinking about there are days where my answer to that question would be no, that I didn't read anything for pleasure. Yeah, because yesterday is just yesterday. So is it on a rolling three-day period, say, would that go up to 50%, right? Do 50% of people read yesterday or over the last week? That's a really interesting one. I guess, so that's one out of seven-ish, right?

16%, yeah. Yeah, one out of seven-ish. How does it change if it's like this week or this month or in the last year? Yeah, do we know anything about that? I do not know that. Their question was very specifically like, what did you do yesterday? I do know that the odds of reading anything for fun yesterday, this was not a statistic I planned to bring and I'm just picking it up here on my notes now, that the odds of reading yesterday were 46% lower in 2023 than they were in 2003. Right.

So there is a significant decline in the amount of pleasure reading that we see in the general American public. I have historically tagged that. I mean, I know, I don't know those specific numbers, but I know the shape of that number pretty well in the back of my head. It's like 2008 is iPhones. Right. And I really think that you can look at, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a difference in the number. Like I'm sure it's going down before that is the internet becomes more popular and more used, but I would expect a dog leg down there. Yeah.

And then the rise of social media that's attendant with it on your phones with Facebooks and the algorithm, especially that kicks in. 2012 is when the first Facebook algorithm kicks in. Twitter is becoming popular around that time. And then the last five years, of course, social video. I guess I would be curious, like, Laura, I have, there is the, you know, probably as well as anyone, there is the NPR PBS effect of people responding to these things and lying about how much they do. Do you think, Rebecca, that people are going to lie on the low side or high side? Because

Is the way I'm getting this, could this be people reading Vulture? Could this be people reading people.com? Yeah. I mean, if I'm understanding Laura's definition of it correctly, it's anything that you read that wasn't for a work or school. It wasn't for school. So that could be just an open internet. You're reading the Wirecutter. Sure. My sub stack addiction would qualify. And I think given the way that we think about reading culture and reading identity, most

more likely there's a status associated with readership right so I think if you're going to lie you're probably going to overestimate the amount I overestimate yeah which is oh yes of course of course I read vociferously yesterday yeah I mean I think also if the question had been if the question had been worded specifically about books I think you would have been much more likely to see inflation on the high side well inflation is always on the high side I guess

that folks would be more likely to be like, oh, yes, it's just as you were saying, like, I am a big reader because there's a sort of halo of like nobility around it. But if it includes like, you know, just your daily, you know, People magazine perusal, there's less incentive there.

To do that? So I'm certain then that if it's 16% read anything for pleasure yesterday, if they narrowed it down to books, the real number would be lower, but the reported number might be higher. There's no way even one out of 20 people read a book for pleasure yesterday. Like the book sales numbers just don't support that. That's 60 million people, 70 million people reading a book yesterday? Yeah.

I don't believe that. I can't believe that. I mean, if the other numbers we know, and Laura, you probably have better ones than I, we kind of use on this show, 12-ish books is the average number of books an American read last year. You can't have read every day. You can't have read one out of seven days. Most people read nothing. So I think this is way inflated on the upside. If you were going to try to make a book Bayesian prior about that, it just doesn't match up. I think this is a lot of internet reading is what I say. Because 16%, that is like...

maybe the 1880s, you know, of literate Americans. Like that's when you're talking about that many people reading an actual book. Again, they didn't have digital books back then, but one out of seven people reading a book for pleasure yesterday would be a completely different reading culture. Laura, does that make sense to you? Does that kind of jive with what you think? Yeah. I

I think it does. I think you're also getting at something that is really hard about these statistics, both this that has been collected by the Time News survey, but then also this question, I mean, Jeff, you flagged book buying. Now, I think these are really different ways of thinking about reading and of thinking about book engagement. So there are two studies that I'm going to talk about next come from Portland State University by friends and colleagues of mine, Kathy Inman-Berens and Rachel Norda. And I know you've covered some of these on Book Riot before, but I think they're really important.

both for flagging how we think about readers, but then also for what they tell us about readers. Which is to say that Inman Marins and Norda are not thinking about book buyers, and they're not thinking about book readers. They're talking about book engagers. So this is a really broad definition of what it means to think about or to take part

of reading culture. So that's also including people who take books out of the library. That's including people who are, here I have a list of all of the things that they have included. So people who are checking materials out from the library, that's not included in book buying surveys, whether or not they read them, right? You might have simply checked a book out of the library, which is participating in reading culture, right?

People who give books as gifts, but again, do not necessarily read a lot, right? Interesting, yes. Or did not necessarily read the books themselves. We know that that gift book buying is a major reason why book buyers are buying books in the first place. That says nothing, right? All we collect in that context, all that Nielsen's getting is point of sale data. We have no idea what a sale means about who that reader is and why they've come to a book, why they're engaging with it, and what they're taking from it, why they're gravitating toward it.

This includes people who discover books via other media, such as video games or films or TV. And this I think is really important. This is a separate finding that I hadn't really planned to talk about, but one thing I think is so interesting from this reading is that we're not seeing books and media in competition with one another. But in fact, what they're finding is that avid media engagers are avidly engaging all media.

They're avidly engaging books in as much as they're avidly engaging with video games or as much as they're avidly engaging with film.

A lot of that methodology is a bit confusing to me. So in this regard, I would highly recommend that you chat with them. But I think that's important. They talked about cross-media discovery as really driving forms of book engagement as opposed to sort of this winner-take-all sort of competition. So is this term, is book engage or book engagement, is this the broad direction that your field of study goes in? Is everyone specifically talking about

the sort of catch-all category, if you can be a book engager, if you buy a book, or if you read a book, or if you check one out from the library, or if you find it from a piece of media rather than the more specific things just about reading habits, or is that just one of the ways that academia is looking at it right now? Yeah, it's just really one of the ways, but I have to say, I don't think many academics are really thinking hard about readership statistics like Inman Barron's and Norda are. I think that is a real under-considered part of academic research. Yeah.

That cross media piece like both blew my mind a little bit and also felt really true. Like it feels intuitive when we think about like that books are competing with other kinds of media, or at least that was the conversation, especially like when Netflix was first blowing up, it was like, well, we got to compete with streaming books, have all this competition now.

But it feels really true to me that people who are avidly into one form of media tend to be avidly into multiple forms of media. And like, it's anecdata for me. Like that's my use case. But even like me and Jeff, like read a whole lot. We don't engage with TV and movies to the same degree that we engage with books, but we do engage with them. I think more seriously or consistently at a deeper level or something like that than like the average person.

TV viewer. And when I think about like the people in my life who are deeply into music, they're also deeply into some other form of media as well. Are there, I guess on the sociology tip of literary sociology, are there like theories about what that is? What's going on there with those people? That is a great question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. This is going to become a literary sociology podcast. I'm throwing a red flag. I should have said, I've got a red flag on this. And this is why, Laura. I'm trying to jive that sort of

or prior, right? That media consumers, they're not competing with other media. With the stat, we were just talking about the decline in pleasure reading over the last 22 years. So where's the time going, right? So what do we talk about media? Because I assume that all these thumbs down from Rebecca from the Zoom AI are just hilarious to me. I am not doing anything. It's like reading your mind or something. It's like the Dream Hotel has influenced our- You've got this big smile on your face too. I know my Zoom gestures are just-

I know, like it's like there's some other vibe that it's detecting. Anyway, but like, so where's the time going, right? People aren't reading for pleasure as they much, certainly as they weren't for 40 years ago. Because when we say media, that could be all kinds of things. Is it short form video? Is it Netflix? Does it include social media? Well, that's what I'm saying, right? Because if you say it's all media, they're not out there fishing, right?

It doesn't include those things. We're talking about engagement with the arts, basically, right? Not social media or the internet. Or at least maybe scripted TV or scripted movies. I would believe that. But Fox News is also media. And I'm just going to go out on a limb and say there may be not direct correlations in ways these things may happen. So if pleasure reading has declined and people who go across media, it doesn't compete with their time, then where is all that pleasure reading gone? Right.

Well, I should also say this is not just about people who move across media. This is about avid media engagers. Right. So this is a different sort of this is different population than what we were thinking about before with the time you survey. Right.

As a baseline, right? So you had to say, yes, I read books for fun. I read a book for pleasure in order to participate in this one. That was an entry-level screening question. Gotcha. Okay, okay, okay. I see. So we're self-selecting within that. Self-selecting, yes. And so within this group, there's also distinguishing between people who are, I guess, your average engagers and then the avid engagers, which is four or more books.

And so that is, I think, also a really important distinction. And here's what I think is massively surprising. When you get into this group of really high engaged readers or book engagers, I should say, not necessarily readers, but for people who are really highly engaged, avidly engaged with books,

which is four plus books a month, the group that you see that has the most sort of engagement or engaging at the highest levels is men, millennials, and non-white people of all generations. The highest and most avid engagement with books, which is at least four a month.

Surprising one there is the dudes. Like that's, I think the nonstandard read of, like if you were to ask, and I may have been a sales call yesterday when I was, you know, referencing the median American book engager, I think I was actually, I didn't use that term, but I was using that. I guess the dudes would have surprised me, Rebecca. What do you make of that, Rebecca? Because Laura just described me and I'm trying to like hide X,

Existentially. Well, yeah. I mean, I want to like, I'm feeling like I should crawl under my desk for the number of times that I've been like middle-aged white women, women drive the publishing industry. Like we're the ones who buy enough books to keep it alive. Um,

It's not buying. So remember, this is capturing some other kind of activity. But it includes buying. To be a book engager includes buying. So Laura's saying that the people who meet one or more of the conditions of buys a book, reads a book, checks a book out from the library, gives a book as a gift, whatever, are men, millennials, and non-white people of all generations. Yeah.

The millennial part, I believe, because we've just like our generation has aged into the place of like disposable income and free time now. So I love that we're not killing books like we've killed everything. I'm really glad that I'm not responsible. We can win the boomers or something. Yeah. Down with fast, casual restaurants, but up with bookstores. That sounds great. Yeah. Let's keep that. So I think we're just in that spot now. But the men thing.

I mean, I don't know. This feels like dangerous waters, but maybe they're buying a lot of books as gifts. Well, the only area actually where they are not engaging, where middle class baby boomer women are still dominating is gift gifting. Okay. So that actually is purely a boomer mom, white mom space is book gifting. But in every other dimension, yeah.

Yeah, non-white people of all generations, but then also men and millennials. I think maybe what we're seeing, Rebecca, there is so many of our book buying habits and stats does not include library use. And I think there's – this is the ghost in the machine for me here is like there's less I know about library use. We talk less about library use. So that's one that I'm super curious about too. Well, like a lot of –

Nonfiction is marketed towards men. Yeah. And I'm thinking about like, I mean, also certain use cases. But when I travel on a weekday, I notice that the airports are full of men, middle aged, mostly white men. Like to the point that I will notice, oh, there's only three women sitting at this gate on a Wednesday. And a lot of them are reading paperbacks of like James Patterson. Yeah.

And I don't know, like, I don't think that airport book buying could account for all of that. But I do think that there have to be like, clearly, because your numbers have it, there have to be like, men's reading habits are in places that are not visible to us. I think audiobook use is an interesting one, too, where, you know, audiobook has been such a huge growth. And we know nonfiction has been especially, especially big beneficiary of it. I wonder if some of that is being captured here of there. There's a lot of audiobooks that men are reading of this age, and

that aren't getting that aren't showing up in like a lot of circana stuff necessarily or even some historical kinds of data stuff that i'm going to sit with that one i'm very curious that's that that's going to be the big there's nothing else you can say laura that you brought today that's going to surprise us more than that specific okay do you have secret nuances yeah what do you think laura what do you make of that i think there's a couple things i think that

I mean, so also included another way that they think about book engagement is piracy. That's included here. That is certainly not included in point of sale data because there is no sale. There's no sale. I mean, now what the authors are also talking about. It's another POS point of data, but it just means not point of sale. Some of what the authors are talking about, though, is, you know, you might buy a book in one format and pirate it in another. So there might still be a purchase that's happening, but there's still other ways of being active with books.

So this is just- Isn't food book collecting, Laura? Do you know if- It does. It does. People who buy books for purposes other than reading, such as collecting or displaying. When I was talking to Rebecca Romney for first edition, we were talking about

There's not that many high profile women rare book dealers, but even there's not that many women who make book collecting part of... People have a shelf of books, but a collecting is a different kind of idea. And she even runs a women's book collecting prize, explicitly to engender, literally, more interest there. And I'm guessing at that level, you're doing... Because you're doing used book buying, you could be doing it scale in a different kinds of way, like...

you know, Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry's 100,000 book collection. You could start skewing data really weird. That requires enough

wealth or financial resources to engage with. Well, it doesn't necessarily. If you collect all the back issues of Louis L'Amour, you can get them pretty cheap, right? Like in used book data, talk about a black box. Yeah, I guess I'm just thinking like there can't be enough men collecting books to be that that's like the reason this is high. Look, Laura brought us a dead bird and I'm trying to figure out how it got shot. And you're saying it can't be that way. Well, if you've got a better idea, I'm all ears, Rebecca Kinski. I just want Laura to give us the reason. Yeah.

All right, we better move on from there. I guess, no, before we move on, I think we've talked about this before, Rebecca. Remind me if I got this wrong. We once did a game of like book data we wish we could have, even if we knew it couldn't come in from, like there's no source of it. And the one for me has always been the percent of pages read per book acquired, either as a gift, as a library, checked out the library, or bought themselves books.

And I wonder if we're maybe seeing a little disjunction here that people are engaging around books in a way that we don't think about as being standard ways of doing it. And I wonder how much that'd be a possible explanation here. Yeah, I don't think it's like a completionist mode of engagement. It's not reading a book from cover to cover. It's not even necessarily reading a book.

So it's trying to take what we know from publishing, the sort of conventional wisdom that we have about who's buying books, which is largely conventional, and is trying to broaden out the way that people are participating with books, what thinking about and being a part of a reading culture might mean. Yeah.

We better move along to the next one here. We could spend all day on this one and I'm very tempted to, but this isn't all you brought for us. I'm going to be getting texts from Jeff on the beach next week. Like I've had three pink drinks and I have ideas. That's what we call a thinker. Well, I think this is also, sorry, this is my last thing to say about this.

And then I'll have to move on. I think that a lot of this has got to be a business sort of self-fulfilling problem, which is to say it is more efficient from sort of, you know, McKinsey consultant space. It is more efficient to get your existing customers to buy more than it is to convert or cater to new customers. Right. And so I think it makes a whole lot more sense to say, we know that white women, white middle-aged women are buying a whole lot of books. Let's really continue getting them to buy.

buy more of them, right? Instead of buy one book, buy three books. That's much easier than, wow, and more efficient. That's more financially efficient than saying, you know, millennial Latinx men are this real growing population. Let's really devote all of our time and all of our energy to learning everything we can about this population that we have ignored for the history of our industry and really change

shift priorities here and really shift course. That costs a lot of upfront labor. That takes a lot of energy. So I think there's a whole lot of momentum and interest into maintaining the connection to the middle-aged white women audience. And is the DNC going to hire you and all of your colleagues based on that analysis now?

Well, I know we said the last one, but I do want to throw some insider, not insider, but some of our own experience on the back end, on the advertising sales side, Laura, to be honest with you, that we know a little bit more about. The way that publishing works, and this is something that we've been talking with clients about for a long time, is like we know that 80% of sales are backlist. And yet most of the energy in the publishing industry goes towards front list because you need front list to become back list. Right.

But that's, if we're looking at bestseller lists or best books of the year or like Reese's book pick sort of situations, those all tend to be more front list-y, right? And I wonder if...

the sort of ideal, not ideal, the representative buyer that we have in our mind of like the 41, Rebecca, I'm sorry, Rebecca, I'm pointing. It's fine. I am. I look great for my age. If we're looking at those people, maybe they're more inclined to engage with a new title, right on the front list side. But who's buying all those backlist titles? Because if you look at the best selling backlist every year, it's going to surprise some people. And it's often like,

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's how to win friends and influence people. And those are business slash professional development slash dude books. All kinds of people read those, but I would guess those, if we're looking at where are these big dark matter chunks of dude buying activity, that would be one I would look at is like backlist titles that are more nonfiction. I'd be curious to see how that shook out too, because front list attention is

belies the actual activity. And then libraries and used books are even more so on that regard. I have one more nuance-y question related to that. Does receiving a book as a gift make you a book engager?

Well, I don't know. I would imagine. I mean, if you then read that book, yes, you now own a book for collecting or displaying or I don't know. This is, I mean, I feel like really wonderful that I could bring to your attention the work of these really wonderful scholars. And I really, really hope that you spend some time with Kathy and Rachel because they are- Yeah, we'll put all links in the show notes. Laura will give us some links so our people can find out. Yeah, we're not expecting you to defend and know every ins and outs. Okay, let's move on to something else, Laura. We got- So the next thing that I have- That one's a stumper.

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It is fascinating. So the next thing I have also comes from an updated version of this study. So this is a 2002 or...

a 22 version of the same study from Kathy Mimberans and Rachel Norda. And I'm really interested in this question of where people are reading. So we've talked about how much and who to the point of where people are reading. Here's another thing that millennials have not killed. And that is the public library. 54% of Gen Z and millennials have visited a public library within the past 12 months, 54%, which is much higher than any other age demographic.

And so I think that's amazing. I think that's wonderful. I especially wanted to call that out as we're seeing the IMLS being dismantled, which is the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which funds public libraries nationwide. Sure enough.

For now, yeah, has historically contributed to the Libby app, for instance, is often funded by the IMLS, different public libraries. So as we think about what's at stake with public libraries, as we think about how to defend public libraries in our communities, I think it's also important to remember that we're talking about

potentially disenfranchising and destroying information infrastructure for younger readers, for Gen Z and millennials. And more than half. Not millennials or younger readers. I'm not a younger reader anymore, but Gen Z at least. 54% is, that's higher than I would have guessed. A majority.

of folks in those generations using their libraries. That doesn't surprise me at all. Like the library has the, I mean, we've said this before, the library has the highest Q rating of anything in the book related industry. Like independent bookstores, you know, people rightly so want to champion them. But in terms of what people love, who like books, who care about books, the library is way up there. I've done, you know, dozens of reading lives episode.

And I'd say 95% of the origin stories talk about, I went to the library. I went to the library. I went to, I mean, it's just, it's just so much more there. But like, if we were just talking about the 16% of people from Laura's first stat who like did read something for pleasure yesterday, if we were just inside that group, I wouldn't be surprised about this more than half use their library, but like,

We're talking about less than 20% of Americans. What's the age on this one, Laura? Remind me again on this. Gen Z and millennials. They've got... A lot of them have kids and a lot of them have younger kids. That's true. Okay. And one thing I know about having kids and kids...

You go to the library a lot. A lot. When my kids were younger, we would be there three times a week. Okay, that makes sense to me. But I couldn't square it just based on what small percentages of people are reading for fun and that the library is not just but primarily a source of reading material with more than half of folks in those generations. I think that they're in the ages of having kids now.

That's an interesting and important point. And to Laura, to your point about the IMLS, our colleague Kelly Jensen has written a great piece about all of the attempts and the stuff that's going on with defunding there. And we'll put that link back in the show notes for folks who want to learn more about what the IMLS does and why we need to preserve it and also the actions that the Trump administration is taking to try to get rid of it. I think people might be surprised too. I mean, I think I've seen studies and maybe Laura, you know them even sort of

qualitatively in your head versus quantitatively, that a lot of people use the library for things that are not books. Wi-Fi access, getting their tax forms, checking out movies from the library, all kinds of things that the library has become a sort of a junk drawer of social services in a way that's super helpful and super unfair to libraries and emergency rooms. Those are the two places that are really on the front line. But I think also when people start thinking about

not just going to check out a physical book from the library as being a locus of activity. A lot of other stuff happens there in those libraries too. I mean, just amazing community resources. Really amazing. You know, to your point, Jeff, I've got a five-year-old and a one-year-old, but he doesn't care about the library yet. But my five-year-old, I mean, we'll go for craft time, right? But we're not engaging books in that context. We're just visiting the library and we're there to make a little Ewok or something on May the 4th or whatever it happens to be. Amazing. Yeah.

And, you know, that was when she was younger. That was the only way during COVID that I got to interact with other parents. You know, they had outdoor story hour and that was it. You know, and so the library provides such amazing community services beyond reading books. Yeah. The kids are all right, maybe. That's good to hear. That's a good stat. Encouraging. Anecdotally, I love my students at Temple University. I always leave feeling like, you know what? The kids are all right. We're doing good. Yeah.

All right, Laura, where should we go next? All right. So we're going to go back to school. Another place where reading takes place is the public school and in particular in AP classrooms. So there are several books about AP English that are out. One that is coming out by a very dear friend of mine, Alexander Manchel. And Manchel was the person who really kind of

Keyed me into thinking about the AP English Classroom as a major site of reading. So in 2022, there were 389,000 student test takers of the AP exam for English language arts. So that's a huge group of people. I would have missed that. If you would have asked me blind how many, I would have gotten that up by an order of magnitude. I would have had no idea. Wow.

Yeah. So these are people who are currently reading, not for naught but pleasure, right? Keep that in mind. That's not included in that statistic of reading for something other than school. And also these are high schoolers, so they were excluded. But they do read a lot, right? These are future readers. This is everyone that I hope to get into my classroom to continue to drive up numbers for enrollment for English majors. And this is one that, you know, we're hoping will engage with libraries later on, that we're hoping will buy books, right? These are the people.

Yeah. That's so interesting. 389,000. We just did a Patreon recording yesterday about classics you need to read to be well-read. And we were both talking about our high school English experiences quite a bit. Like I'm thinking about all the books I read in AP English and it was not a few. No, they're meaningful. Okay. But here's, that was the background statistic that I actually wanted to talk about, which is what is getting read in AP English classes? Yeah.

There is a study that just came out this month. This is hot off the presses by David Baman, who's a professor of information sciences at UC Berkeley, and Jennifer Eberhardt, who's a professor of social psych, social psychology at Stanford, as well as a number of researchers that they've been working with. And they looked at all of the suggested books that were a part of AP exams.

So as you know, or you might know, AP doesn't provide book lists of like the necessary books that you have to read for an AP course. But in their questions, they might say, you know, compare and contrast the American Dream in one of the following novels. And they'll give a list of things that most students who have taken AP English can be, you can be relatively certain that they've read. The Great Gatsby will be on that list, for instance, of Mice and Men will be on that list. Yeah.

Trying to think of everything I read in AP English. The Bluest Eye or probably everything by Toni Morrison will be somewhere on this test, right? So Eberhardt and Baman and their research group looked at all of those books because they wanted to know if

fact, as is the prevailing narrative, those books are becoming more diverse. They wanted to know if these books are becoming more diverse in terms of the people who are writing them. And they wanted to know if they are representing diverse experiences. So experiences that aren't the kind of old white man I mentioned, both The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck. So things other than F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.

And they found, well, I'm curious, what do you think they found? Do you think it has become more or less? I think it has become more, but less than we might hope. Yeah, that's what I was going to say as well. That more, but not nearly as much more as maybe media narratives would, or our own political leanings would have us think about.

Yeah. Yeah. So you guys sound like you haven't been around the block before. No, no, no. It is. It is. It has remained relatively consistent with a few with some changes here and there. Yeah.

So it has wavered with inconsistent ranges over a 20 year span. So 1999 to 2021. So that part, okay. It depends where we started with. So that's kind of the sad part. Overwhelmingly, these books feature white main characters. 70% of these books that are consistently there feature white main characters.

And a few things about this. One, that is not changing in response to any U.S. sociocultural phenomena. So it's not like after Black Lives Matter, all of a sudden, there were a lot more books featuring African Americans as main characters. That is not true. It's remained relatively consistent within a margin.

And that 70% is not consistent with the U.S. population. And importantly, it is not consistent with takers of the AP exam, which is to say that the AP book lists are whiter than AP students. Interesting. These books are much whiter than the students who are enrolled in the AP program. Are AP students whiter or less white than the U.S. population on the whole? Do you know? Oh, I do have a graph. Let me find out.

Am I taking a little bit to find it? I'll vamp while you're looking up. No, I can vamp. So I'm curious about that 1999 start date, Laura, for this reason. So I graduated from high school in 1996. So this is a little bit before me.

I think if you go back another 15 years, you may see more of a difference from '85 to '99 than '99 to 2013. And that is Harlem Renaissance becoming more part of the AP curriculum, especially Their Eyes Were Watching God post Bob Inways and Alice Walker, but also post Toni Morrison's 1989 Nobel win because Morrison was in my AP literature curriculum, but it was new, right? It was new to have Morrison in that curriculum. So I wonder if

Now, I could be completely wrong, but I would expect the 1985 AP titles to look a lot different than the 1996 AP titles. I could be wrong, but I'm wondering if we kind of ramped up in that, because the culture wars in academia were happening now, like there was a lot was going on. And that trickles down to the kinds of people teaching AP exams pretty quickly.

And I wouldn't be, I guess I'm not surprised to hear that there may, again, this is not data we have, but my working theory would be 1985 to 99 may have a lot more change than 99 to today. It's really interesting though, like just because that goes against our feeling about how culture is changing. Like the feeling is that culture has changed and become more inclusive, especially like pop media has become more diverse and

But how much more diverse than academia, though, tends to lead the way a little bit on this. Like, I think what you're things you tend to see in academia, academic studies tend to lag sort of cultural uptake by quite some time. Anyway, Laura, so you were looking at I think this is showing us really. Yeah, I was. Yeah. But I think that also shows us really nicely the gap between the college curriculum where things are.

incredibly inclusive. I mean, when you think about the the cannon wars, like you were talking about, Jeff, I mean, that has led to the real establishment of African American studies, of Asian American studies, of Latinx study as being really, you know, deeply entrenched in universities. And I think that the difference of what we see between high school and and college is at least something I know a number of people are researching.

And hopefully we'll learn more about that. Fascinating. The population of white students who are enrolled in AP is very consistent with the U.S. population. Okay. That helps. All right. Where do you want to go next? Have we done 50? We've done two. I'm so in it right now. I have no idea where I am. The dopamine is firing. I'm like in the ball pit. Like there's this, I don't know which way is up or which way is down.

Oh, part of some... Well, yeah, okay. No, do it. Come on. We're here. It was more about AP, but I'm trying to decide if I actually want to do this. We just sit here and play stat roulette with you for another hour. Okay, I mean, one other thing I think is really interesting about AP is, you know, about the books that are there in this recommended set.

is not only are we seeing a relative match between the authors and the characters that they're writing, we're seeing largely white male authors, predominantly white characters, but they studied, Baman and Eberhardt in their group studied what's called homophily within this group.

So the racial homogeneity. So there are characters who are people of color, but by and large, how diverse of a cast of characters do we have? Oh, I see. Yes. And they found that 74.8% of books in the AP literature classroom are racially and ethnically homophilic or homophilic, meaning there is not much diversity within these texts either. So books by white authors have white casts. Right.

And not just white main characters, but predominantly fully white cast. A whole white cast. Okay. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's still pretty, it's still pretty rare to get a book that has multiple races written

kind of have with with interesting roles to play and some of that is marketing and some of that's just how we imagine in the american racial imagination i also think there's some stuff about writing across race and ethnicity that people are still thinking about like we're still not sure who can do it and when what's representation really look like so that one doesn't surprise that one really doesn't surprise me i'm not saying it's good but that one doesn't surprise me but

But if you think about it, the books that are on an AP curriculum, I mean, this is largely the canon. So this is a political climate for writers and for book marketing and book production that really lags behind the contemporary conversation. Right. So something like To Kill a Mockingbird is here. Yeah. You know, and that's, you know, a relatively not diverse cast of characters. It's predominantly white with the exception of Jim. You know, but that would be something that could be here. Even that is kind of an outlier in

Right, yeah. That makes sense to me.

With the exception, I think, of Star's boyfriend, right? It is an entirely black cast. And then I think her friends. Oh, and the cops, of course. And a couple of her friends, yeah. So I'm not entirely sure how they're kind of thinking about main and secondary characters. I know that that's using machine learning and we don't need to get into how that works.

But, you know, it's not 74.8% are racially homophilic and also white. But what you're seeing is not really a lot of interaction between characters of diverse races or ethnicities. Well, even, you know, think of the two probably I would guess amongst Black writers especially,

Like you think of the Morrison corpus or Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston, there's not a lot of white characters in there. There might be a touchstone. There might be kind of one of those characters. But when Morrison wrote Home much later and as a white protagonist, that was a big deal, right? That there was a white protagonist in a Morrison novel. So there is some, I don't know where the reinforcement comes from, but this does tend to happen where people are writing about a cohort of people and they tend to be racially homogenous for reasons that probably are explicable and...

Yeah, and I think this is a place where we see maybe the lag between contemporary book releases and how long it takes something to end up on an AP list. It's still not super common, but I don't really notice it anymore when I'm reading a novel and the main

and the cast is diverse. Like the main character is black and their best friend is Latino. And then like someone queer shows up, like that's just the shape of the world now. And it's the shape of the world in a lot of contemporary fiction. And I imagine some of those novels end up as AP books in 25 years. Yeah.

But 25 years ago, we didn't have that happening for books that are currently on the AP list. I think I would take a bet with you, Rebecca, if the bet was it's not as different as you might think. I think I would take that it's not as different as you might think. Now, that's just our own sensibility. Yeah, I mean— I think it's less different than you might think. You look at the Zadie Smiths, the Colson Whiteheads, the Sally Roonies. I think the mixes kind of look like the books we're talking about. I don't know that it's that different. Yeah, it's—I don't think it's—

think it's a huge difference, but I do think there are more contenders today that could end up on an AP list in 25 years than there were 25 years ago that ended up on the list now or 50 years ago that are now on the AP list. That's a really interesting one, Laura. And I mean,

part of what we know about at least how anthologies work is that once something makes its way into an anthology, it very rarely leaves. Or once an author is in an anthology, her work very rarely leaves. Some of that has to do the way that writes work. But you know, once a writer is there, there might be a reduction of the space that she gets in an anthology. There might be, you know, only five Emily Dickinson poems instead of 20. But Emily Dickinson's not leaving once she's there. And so I think that that is

is probably also at least one factor to consider when we're thinking about the lag between the contemporary book production space and the way that we're thinking about our own. Also, I wonder, short stories tend, they have a narrower focus, right? So a smaller cast of characters. So if they're a short story like The Lottery or The Gilded Six Bits,

is getting thrown into these machine learning things, it may spit out. I mean, there's just fewer characters. Those are even more likely to be homophilic. Was that the right term? Homophilic, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that could be a confounding factor too. There's just less room in those kinds of very easy to anthologize. They're often easy to...

and score. Very easy to teach. So those may have some weird reinforcing principles there. It makes me really want a list of like the last 20 writers to get pulled from anthologies and like how bad of a thing you have to do to get pulled out.

I can totally get you that list of at least for the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I know who has it. I don't know what would make you get pulled, though. Like, I don't. I think it might just be a reduction of space. I don't think it's probably a much more boring answer than I want it to be. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so and this is, I think, interesting.

The last kind of two points here go together. We're kind of moving from the space of where reading is happening and who is reading to now a rarefied group of professional readers. And this is where I am really interested in hearing from you two as two professional readers. I want to talk about a really fantastic 2023 study about book reviews.

about who is being reviewed and what review attention looks like. And you all have your finger on the pulse more than probably anyone else that I know. So this is a guessing game. How many books would you say, if you had to put a percentage point on it, how many books would you say in a given year receive any critical attention in a professional review outlet? So not Goodreads, not user-generated reviews, but receive a review in a traditional journalistic book review outlet.

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Adlassian.

What percentage of books published annually? Are we talking traditionally published books? We can be. Yes. Yes. We're talking about self-published, not self-published, not self-published.

And we're talking, so this could be Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles, like in terms of the traditional review outlets. New York Times, all those guys. New York Times, all those kinds of places. In the study coming up, they narrow down to think about New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. And so we're doing percentage. So we're thinking big. Yeah. Big journalism review outlets. I'm like a tenth of a percent. I'm going to go 4%.

I'm going lower. Price is Right rules, I'll take the under, but I'm going to take like 1% or less. Okay, well, Jeff is closer. It is 5%. Okay. 4% of books published in a given year receive any critical attention. I think 4% is lower than 5%, so I am correct. Thank you very much, Laura. Thank you very much. Your presence here is most welcome at any time.

You're welcome. You're welcome. So this study, though, is looking at so that's kind of our baseline statistic. This is kind of where we're coming at. This is our prior. This study is looking at that five percent and asking about books by women and books about and for women and how likely they are to be reviewed in comparison to books by men.

And so they took, look at two different things. They talk about what they call the women's fiction penalty, which is a penalty paid by writers of women's fiction or who are working in other feminized genres like romance.

where the writers or the readers are presumed to be and largely are mostly women. And then they also talk about the woman writer's penalty, which refers to the penalty paid by women who write in frequently reviewed genres, so who might write in literary fiction, but are still reviewed at a lower percentage than men.

So we've got on the one hand, the Emily Henry's, right? You're writing in a genre that's for women or you've got all of your romantic writers. And then on the other hand, you've got your Sally Rooney's who are writing in genres that are not gender specific. Right. But especially literary fiction, that's a high prestige genre that's reviewed much more often than something like romance would be anyway. So that's important to really draw the distinction between these two sets.

Are we guessing? I've told you. Okay. I'm trying to frame this as a guess. So I've told you it is a penalty. So obviously, women writers are reviewed less often than their male counterparts are. And also, books that are by and for women are reviewed less than genres that are considered to be genre neutral or gender neutral. Excuse me. So what percent less likely do you think books that are written by women are

are X percent less likely to be reviewed than books by male authors. It's not as bad as it used to be because, Rebecca, we used to cover the Vita stats all the time. Yeah, the Vita stats were not great. And they imploded like all these sort of NGOs in the book space tend to do over time. This is, I'm really fighting recency bias here. What are the years that the study looked at, Laura? This was looking, what's so, yeah, so 2023 went up.

was when it was published. But what's so great about this study is that they looked at every single book published in a given year to try to get a sense of actually how likely it was for any book to receive critical attention. And that's where that 5% number comes from. So they weren't simply looking at the population of reviews. They were looking at all the books published in that year. So the year that they look at was 2007.

And they chose 2007 because that gets us pre-online reviews. That gets us pre-Kindle. That's pre-us talking about this, Rebecca. That's pre-via. So this gets us purely a selection criteria from major review outlets. Do you want to go first, Rebecca, or do you want me to do my guess first? I'm going to guess that the split was something like

70-30 or 65-35 tort for men. So a 50% penalty. It depends on how we're thinking about percentages. You're half as likely to get reviewed as an equivalent male author is kind of what you're saying. I think so, yeah. I think that's what I'm going to say. I was thinking it was a 50% penalty. Especially in 2007. I could be way different than that, honestly, because like...

I mean, it could be a lot worse. It could be a lot worse than that. I don't have a good fire, honestly. Let's pause for a second because now we do have Emily Henry gets New York Times feature. I don't know. Did she get reviewed? I don't know. But like Sally Rooney is getting a lot of attention. There were a couple of those a year in like 2007, 2008. Marilyn Robbins. I mean, there were people. Yeah, but like a couple. Yeah.

It might be even worse. I think the stealth problem, well, there's all kinds of stealth problems, but I think even back then it's still bad. Nonfiction books tend to get reviewed more often than fiction books just because there's more of them and there's more review space for nonfiction. And that tends to be dude heavy writ large. And then I'm guessing that there's like a double penalty going on. So I might even go worse. I don't know, Laura, we're kind of thinking around the same thing. We're thinking there's a 50% penalty, but that's kind of where we are.

So, you are, if you are a woman writing a book, books written by women are about 37% less likely to be reviewed than books written by men. In 2007. In 2007. And this is strictly in the fiction space, I should say. Oh, strictly in fiction. Strictly in fiction. Yeah, I wonder if it does get worse if you throw nonfiction into that. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. So only 2% of those books that were reviewed were of, were in these genres like romance that were characterized as the like highly feminized genre. No one, no one. I mean, book right. Got started. Cause no one was reviewing YA or Rome. I mean, honestly, like no one was doing it. And that was 2011. That was four years. Even like 2014, the times started having a few reviews of romance, but it was like this old white guy reviewing romance novels and being like, I'm here to review these. Cause someone told me it would be good to remember.

this they're never gonna live that down that was a yeah i want to turn up his nose at it it was terrible and very unforgettable i like want to choose to believe that that guy was the one who created the spicy scales like very obviously he did not create the spicy scales but i would love to have seen kind of his engagement with spice levels relative spice levels so

I would not like to see that, Laura. I would very much not like to see that. Too snobby to acknowledge that spice levels are a thing. That man was never going to go there. Just ask me next time. So a 37% penalty for being a woman who writes fiction. Yep. So you see penalties across all categories. So books that are written by women.

So that would be women's writing. And then you also see genres that are traditionally considered to be feminized, such as romance, are penalized as well. So even, yeah, women that are writing in literary fiction, women that are writing in women's fiction, regardless, one way or another, no matter what you're writing, you are less likely to be reviewed than the men that you are competing with. Yeah. Great. Interesting. I wish that we had had the links to these studies 10 years ago when there were people in our comments being like, maybe men just write better books. Yeah.

And what's so useful about looking at the entirety of the books that were published in that given year is that it addresses that supply side question, not about quality, but well, maybe men are just publishing more. They're not. There's actually gender parity in terms of the number of books by men and women that are being published in any given year. So this is not a supply effect. This is a demand reviewer effect. Yeah.

which I think is a really important distinction to make. This research is related to this really fantastic book that I hope you all read. It came out a few years ago called Inside the Reviewer's Circle by Philippa Chong.

No. It is so fantastic. It came out from Princeton University Press. It is a really fantastic bright yellow cover. And Philippa did amazing interviews, all anonymous ethnographic interviews with major book reviewers in the United States to talk about the decisions that they make, the way that they're socialized into reviewing culture, the way that they decide which books it is that they want to write reviews about, how they think about what their audience might like to read. It is a fantastic, fantastic book.

So I would highly recommend you check that out. Yeah, that's going on the list. This is so interesting. Okay, this is my last thing to say. So keep this in mind, right? 2% of the reviewed books are coming from romance genres. So the last statistic I have is not looking at these professional reviewers who are making selections from big picture down to small, but it is about the mass of people who are actually reading books. Oh,

We were in these trenches. Okay, I'm ready. Okay, go, Laura. I'm sure you were. And this is research that's been done at the University of Pennsylvania by J.D. Porter, Angelina Imensberger, and James F. English on Goodreads.

And among active Goodreads users, romance is as large of a category, as actively engaged as the idea of all fiction. There is no genre that is more exciting, that is more frequently read, that is more frequently shelved among active users than romance.

I am fascinated by this massive gulf between the professional reviewing class and the professional reviews on the one hand, and then the average readers on Goodreads on the other. Yeah. What's especially interesting about what they find, they do some really fascinating network analysis on Goodreads users' shelves, the way that you can kind of tag books and put things on certain shelves. They not only found that romance is really this juggernaut genre that is really structuring how most users are engaging with Goodreads,

But it's also the most internally diverse in terms of the different types and categories of subgenres that exist within romance relative to any other genre category that you see on Goodreads. So it really is, in effect, its own genre system that is more diffuse and more diverse than the way that we're thinking about even fiction generally. And that, I think, is amazing and so worth more critical and scholarly attention. Yeah.

Yeah, I totally believe that. And I wonder if...

some of how robust the online community and online activity around romance is. Is it directly in response to the fact that romance only gets 2% of the professional book reviewing space and like has basically been the redheaded stepchild of the publishing industry forever. But when I first started writing online in 2008 and like book blogs for literary things were still sort of new, like there were a couple established ones from earlier in the 2000s

But there were really well-established and prolific romance, not just blogs, but whole communities. As soon as Web 2.0 popped up and people started being able to connect with each other, the romance people found each other. And I think they were so...

hungry for it because they had just never had that experience. They never got to see their reading preferences reflected in book-related media before. And so they've dominated the space, but how validating, especially to see that they're leading the way on internal diversity within their genre. Because that's certainly something that romance readers I've heard anecdotally say, that they feel about the community and that the community is progressive and sort of leading the way on the changes that folks want to see.

in the industry. So that's awesome to hear that there's numbers about it, but that, yeah, that space between 2% and then being like the most dominant that it accounts for all the rest of fiction, all

all added up together. Yeah, it is mind-boggling. To your point, Rebecca, about the online readership and engagement, I just snuck off camera because I wanted to grab this book. This is a really fantastic book by Christine Larson called Love in the Time of Self-Publishing. Oh, I've seen this. I haven't read it, but I've seen this book before. It is excellent. How Romance Writers Change the Rules of Writing and Success. And it looks...

at essentially the online communities that have always existed, or since we've had online communities, for romance readers and writers and how that really was the engine driving what we're now seeing downstream as this boom in writing. So it's really wonderful. She does some really great, again, some really great ethnographic work, spending time with romance writers and readers. Highly recommend to kind of begin to wrap our minds around not only this boom, but this gulf.

I have a little, I find this completely fascinating as well. I think there's a couple of things at play. I think Rebecca, you're right. There was a gap in mainstream coverage. So there was a lot more, you know, homebrew thinking about reviewing and networking and how to get the right readers in the right people's hands. I think another feature of romance is the trope. And, you know, that has become a, you know, a really dominant discourse, but the, the desire interest and utility of mapping those tropes for readers is

has given the taxonomic engine a lot of fodder to go with. Because you take a literary fiction reader, for example, tend not to be as interested in tropes in those things. And so the mapping them, reviewing them, metadata-ing them within an inch of their life doesn't have as much utility as it does for a serious romance reader who is really looking for

the kind of information about what that book does in a very granular way that so many other genres heretofore have not has been as interested in. I'm not sure that they wouldn't be a science fiction fantasy or a mystery like some other genre readers, but for romance, that is really a feature for a lot of people's experience to navigate tropes. And if you're going to navigate those waters, you need really detailed maps. So it really makes a lot of sense to me. I think what's interesting to me is why that hasn't

We haven't seen that much of that kind of taxonomic intensity be translated into other genres, even as online platforms for them have exploded. I find that endlessly fascinating. I don't know. I just don't know that it does. Like the example that I'm just an example, I'm thinking of what you're talking about tropes. Like I want to read a grumpy, grumpy and sunshine enemies to lovers book.

romance. It could do with fantasy, dragons, non-spicy, you know, like science fiction fantasy has as many possible tropes as romance does, but they're just not as interested heretofore, I should say, and it's not a value judgment, has not been interested in like cataloging them with like super granular specificity lore. I mean, I just don't think it shows up. I mean,

Now we're just like truly in the space where we're hypothesizing. But I'm just wondering, like, you can write, you can be like, I like dragons. Give me a sci-fi book with dragons. But it doesn't tell you anything about the emotional valence of the book, where most of the tropes of romance give you some information about what it is going to feel like to read that book, what the emotional arc of the characters or their interaction is going to be.

And then how the story is going to turn. I think that only feels that way because we don't have language for it yet. I think if you really, someone wanted to do it, they could be like, because even the cozy fantasy, this is a new thing under the sun. We didn't have a word for this 10 years ago, but now we do and people are interested in it. And we're seeing new things in metadata around cozy fantasy because of Legends and Lost. I mean, we've kind of troped our own stuff here. Like we talk about old men waiting to die and the gang gets back together. And you're right. Like that just has not made its way into our book discourse. Anyway. Yeah.

One of my favorite things this year, I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall, and one of my favorite parts of the fair was they had a new adult hall where this is one of the parts of the fair that is really set aside for the members of the public to come and engage that has kind of a Comic-Con element of things.

And in the new adult hall, they had all of these panels, these whiteboard walls set up in the, it was all primarily in German, but it was essentially asking like favorite trope and had all of these markers where just people who were visiting the fair could come and write their favorite trope on these boards.

favorite book boyfriend and you could come and write. And I was there, I was only there for the business part of the fair and it was already fully covered. And so people were not only writing, you know, their favorite book boyfriend, but for everyone else who wanted to say Mr. Darcy, you know, had gotten all of these tally marks. So you could just see, I was just thinking about that, Jeff, as you were talking about the mapping and the taxonomic aspect of things, like that was built into the infrastructure and the architecture of the way the Frankfurt Book Fair was thinking about romance novels.

And I think it structures a lot of romance discourse, frankly, like the trope, trope, navigation, identification and evaluation is a principle, perhaps the principal way of discussion. I mean, you look at TikTok, you look at Instagram reels. I mean, our own coverage.

Like they evolved their own way of understanding their genre because of neglect by the wider literary community. It's a fascinating case study in what can happen if something's left to its own, rightly or wrongly, to develop a discourse of its own. Ooh, that would be a great academic study title, Laura, for someone who's looking at taxonomic habits in romance novels.

Fascinating stuff. We could do this all day. All day. Laura, where can, so we talked about, that's an episode that's going up on Monday. We talked about your slush pile analysis on TextCrunch. People can find you there. You have a book coming out. It's going to be a while in terms of not, you know, it's nothing on you. It's just how publishing works. Like a year from now is not that long, but it doesn't help us to do a plug for it right now. I'll have you come back. Where else can people keep up with you? Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So you can find me on Substack, larbiemcgrath.substack.com. My newsletter is called Text Crunch, and I am doing this sort of work, which is talking about the really amazing data-driven work that's happening in book studies and literary sociology and publishing and trying to make this useful to other people who care and think about book slot.

I'm on Blue Sky, and I will have a book coming out next spring that is currently right now. And I don't know if it will be staying this way, but it's currently called Middlemen, Literary Agents, and the Making of Contemporary American Literature. The agents. We're so ready. So interested. Laura's going to stick around with us for a Patreon episode. We're going to turn the bat signal of data and attention onto...

this fantasy league idea we've been kicking around for a decade and we're going to see if having a pro who knows what the hell's going on makes any difference in making this into a wieldy kind of subject laura it's been terrific to have you thanks so much thank you so much for having me all the titles and things we referred to in the show notes as well thanks folks

Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook excerpt from Lethal Prey by John Sanford, provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio. The auburn-haired woman talking to Henderson took a final sip of cranberry juice and tapped the empty glass with a spoon to make it ring. Everybody, we're all here. Time to work. She introduced herself and the blonde.

I'm Tricia Boone of Mason, Tano, Whitehead, and Boone, and Michelle Cornell is an associate with our firm. We represent Lara Grandfelt. She reached out and touched the diamond-studded woman. We're here to help Lara launch a long, delayed quest. I will let Lara tell you about it and say only that our firm is firmly behind her whenever our legal services may be needed. Grandfelt smiled, turned to look at everyone in the group, and said-

What we're going to do is we're going to find the monster who killed my twin sister. That was more than 20 years ago now, and that's long enough to know he's roaming free. Lucas scratched his forehead, an unconscious gesture of skepticism, and Grandfelt caught it. Marshal Davenport doesn't think we'll get anywhere, but he doesn't know what we're going to do, she said. Boone jumped back in. Why don't we all sit down? I believe there are enough chairs.

They all did, and Grandfelt said to Boone, You were going to fill in some background? Boone nodded. Yes. She opened a file folder on her lap, cleared her throat, and said, Lara Grandfelt and her sister, Doris, both graduated from Minnesota colleges. Actually, Lara was at the university just before the turn of the century. Lara studied finance and economics, and Doris studied accounting at Manifold College in Northfield.

After graduation, she said, the sisters found jobs in the Twin Cities, Lara with U.S. Bank in their wealth management department and Doris with a local accounting firm. Three years after graduation, Doris was brutally murdered, a murder that was never solved. In the years between the murder and the present, Boone said, Lara left the bank to begin her own wealth management firm. She has done very well with it. Lara's not ridiculously rich, but she's done very, very well.

Is that correct, Lara? Grandfelt nodded and said, Yes. Boone said, I'm reviewing all of this so that we're all on the same page, and so we know that the money involved in this project, I'm coming to that, was legitimately sourced. So, Lara has asked Mason, Tano, Whitehead, and Boone to set up a project designed to investigate and find the perpetrator of the rape and murder of her sister, Doris.

Neither Virgil nor I worked that case, Lucas began. We know. We've done the research. You were starting your own company, Davenport Simulations, and Virgil was in the Army. The State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension handled the investigation, Boone said. When you, Lucas, later went to the BCA, Lara told me she spoke to you once about the lack of progress in the investigation. She got you to review the files with no result.

Yes, I remember it now. Lucas shrugged. The BCA ran a good investigation, but there was nothing to go on. They never got to first base. Boone said, I understand. Lara, however, has been unable to escape the gravity of the murder. She can't escape the injustice of it. That's true, Grandfelt said, looking around at the crowd again.

So she wants Virgil and me to reinvestigate, and Elmer and Edie and John are here to strong-arm us into it if we need strong-arming, Lucas said. I wouldn't have chosen that precise phrase, but that captures the substance of it, Boone agreed. What are you going to do? Virgil asked Grandfelt. Before she could answer, Boone stepped in again.

Lara has directed our firm to post a $5 million reward for information leading to the identification of the killer. The reward is to be made as a gift of gratitude to the person or persons who provide the information. If that passes muster with our tax people, and I'm told that it should, the gift will be tax-free. If somebody wins it, they'll get to keep the whole amount.

Later today, and we've already prepared this, the reward will be posted on all the major true crime sites on the internet. Virgil said Boone laid out the details. She expected a lot of people would be digging into the case, and Michelle Cornell would be in charge of reviewing submissions by what Boone called the true crime researchers. Anything that seemed even slightly relevant would be forwarded to Lucas and Virgil.

Lucas, as a deputy federal marshal, and Virgil, as a BCA agent, would have the legal authority together to get almost anything that needed to be gotten, to kick down any doors that needed to be kicked. We have the complete investigative files from the BCA and Woodbury, every piece of paper they have already in-house. We didn't steal them. That's absolutely legal under Minnesota law.

If we find that they've held anything back, we will sue them, Boone told Lucas. Lucas, and you'll post them? The files? Yes, including the crime scene photos. Lara has seen them and wants them on the sites. Grandfelt said, I can't tell you how painful that was, seeing those photographs. Her lip trembled, but she kept her chin up. I'm set on this.

"'If you need anything from me, anything, day or night, you call. "'If for some reason I can't answer, my personal assistant will.' "'She reached out and touched the woman in the gray suit. "'Marsha Wise. "'She'll find me wherever I am. "'You will have personal numbers for both of us. "'Virgil. "'You will be stirring up a storm, "'and you will have no control over it. "'We will be complying with Lara's wishes, "'which are perfectly legal.'

Boone said, her voice gone sharp. Frankly, we tried to talk her out of this, but she insisted. She is the client. The client does not have to accept our recommendations. So it's a done deal, Lucas said. Grandfelt nodded, and Boone said, yes, it is.