December 16, 2023 – February 10, 2024

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

And the Nominees Are…

Award season rolls on with the recently revealed longlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The ten nominees range from commercial hits (Emma Cline’s The Guest) to critical darlings (Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X) to the unicorn that manages to be both exceedingly popular and exceedingly good (James McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store). I’d love to see McBride take home the trophy—and the $15,000 prize money—and continue his run of overdue recognition. I’d also like to know what the National Book Foundation thinks of PEN’s claim that this is “the most prestigious annual peer-juried literary prize in America.”

It’s an Adaptation Nation, and We’re All Living in It

A new trailer touting Apple TV+’s 2024 lineup includes more than a few page-to-screen projects.

Among the adaptations featured are: 

Masters of the Air, airing now, based on the book by Donald L. MillerManhunt, a 7-episode limited series about the search for Lincoln’s killer, based on the Edgar Award-winning book by James L. Swanson, out March 15.Franklin, starring Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin, based on Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation. Coming April 12.The Big Door Prize, season 2, coming April 24. Based on the novel by M.O. Walsh.Dark Matter, based on the novel by Blake Crouch. Coming May 8 with what sounds like some pretty significant changes.Land of Women, helmed by Eva Longoria, based on the Spanish-language novel by Sandra Barneda. Coming this summer, date TBA.Lady of the Lake, a Natalie Portman vehicle based on Laura Lippman’s novel Lady in the Lake, date TBA.

The Kids Are All Right

TikTok may be melting their brains, but it’s also driving Gen-Z to read A LOT, and when they do, they’re reaching for physical books. They’re reaching for “hot girl books.” They’re reaching for “sad girl books.” They’re continuing the time-honored tradition of trying to brand reading as sexy. And you know what? When a 22-year-old supermodel launches her book club by selecting a complex work of literary fiction written by a poet, I can’t be mad about any of it.

From TV to real-life, non-monogamous relationships are increasingly ubiquitous

When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.”

My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind.

—Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy”

I came back from London on a miserable winter day, feeling fluey and gray, filled with an end-of-year, end-of-era angst that I saw reflected in the heavy skies and the mountains looming, gloaming, above Geneva.

This is the sixth and final piece in a series of posts that offer insights and calls to action based on the results of three recent surveys conducted by Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute. The surveys explored parental perceptions of public libraries, parental perceptions of librarians, and parental perceptions of school libraries. The first post in the series emphasized how data overwhelmingly supports libraries and library workers. The second looked at how what’s happening in school libraries is foreshadowing the future of public libraries. The third, on why library workers need to be their own advocates of the library, and the fourth, on the erosion of trust in professional library workers despite parental trust in those same professionals. The fifth piece explores how deeply ingrained intolerance is in America and how that manifests in book banning.

Somewhere between 2016 and 2018, a major shift happened in our internet experiences. Algorithms began to take over what were once chronological timelines across social media.* With that shift, users no longer only saw posts from friends, family, or groups to which they belonged. Instead, algorithms predicted user behavior based on prior engagement with content. If you clicked on and liked or shared a particular news story, the algorithm would learn that and serve up more stories like it to your feed. Access to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram was free to you as a user, but only in so much that you did not pay for it with money. You paid for it with your data, used by those social media companies to attract advertisers.

Several outcomes from this shift have happened, and two of them are especially relevant to our moment in history around book banning. The first is that algorithms have impacted local news. The downfall of local news since 2000 has been well-documented — somewhere around one in four local newspapers have shuttered between that year and 2020. This closure has meant local stories, including the reports on happenings at the local school and library board meetings, have gone untold or, if they are told, they are locked behind a paywall. The papers that remain either through good luck and those which have been absorbed into larger media conglomerates have had to play the game online to get their news in front of readers. Stories and headlines alone no longer do their job to catch attention. They need to compel readers to engage with the content via likes, shares, and comments in order for those stories to show up in more feeds. You might “Like” your local paper on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, but unless you’re doing something with their stories, you are probably not seeing them show up in your feed. Thus, a shift to cover the most outlandish has been crucial, not because the stories are important or impact the lives of a community. They’re crucial because they solicit the engagement those outlets need in order to even get their work out there.

The second big outcome of the shift to algorithms is that echo chambers online have gotten even bigger. Because engagement is what fuels the algorithm, anything you might be commenting on, sharing, or clicking, is going to package that data and help serve up more content like what you’ve seen. This is why it can be shocking for folks who are otherwise smart and well-informed to learn about something that has really been all over the news. A lot of times, when people online say, “Why has no one been talking about this?” the reality is that they have. That work just has not crossed into every feed.

Echo chambers borne from the algorithm create tunnel vision for people. If you’ve clicked and are compelled to share how angry you are about a new anti-trans law being proposed in your state legislature, the algorithm is going to serve up more news that is similar, both within your state and beyond. You will likely not see the stories of the activists on the ground fighting those bills or who have successfully codified trans rights in other states unless you are also engaging with that work.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. We are well into some of the buzziest books of the season, but don’t let this one fall off of your radar. Lovers of Such a Fun Age rejoice — Kiley Reid’s next book is finally here!

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid Kiley Reid’s debut novel Such a Fun Age was longlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as  Reese’s Book Club pick. With both critics’ and readers’ love of this book, the bookish world has been buzzing about her next book, Come and Get It. After sitting out for a year, Millie is back at the University of Arkansas to finish out her senior year. As a resident assistant, she’s responsible for helping the dorm residents settle in for the upcoming school year. If she can just get through her last year and graduate, she’ll be able to start her life and buy a house. At least, that’s the plan. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting writer and professor, offers Millie money to let her interview students, Millie thinks, what’s the harm? What follows is a wild series of events full of college drama. Reid excels at dialogue, giving readers pages and pages of conversations with different residents of the dorm. These young women discuss their rich daddies giving them allowances, clueless about their own privilege. Other girls have to fight for funding for their education; while others are given scholarships they are barely qualified to receive. Nicole Lewis performs the audiobook, giving a stellar performance of the different characters’ dialogue. In another narrator’s hands, the pages of dialogue might have become dull or overdone, but Lewis’ narration makes these sections of the novel shine.

Because I write about sex for a living—and because I maintain an online database of sex ed resources for parents and other caregivers—publicists often send me stuff that is sex- and sex ed-adjacent. You know. PMDD devices. Lazy eye lifts (?). Every CBD product known to man. (Seriously. Stop sending me CBD pitches.)

On top of all these, there are also the middle grade novels with themes around sex ed or puberty or menstruation. In the past, I’ve rarely read them, as I don’t often include fiction in the Guerrilla Sex Ed database. But as my child has hit the tween years and has started to read chapter books (I mean, primarily Warrior Cats and Wings of Fire, but still…), I’ve taken to flipping through them, screening them to see if they might be appropriate for my child.

In doing so, I’ve realized what, deep down, I already knew: fiction has a lot to teach us, and some of those middle grade novels totes count as sex ed.

A publisher recently sent me Ali Terese’s Free Period, a middle grade novel about menstrual equity. It was absolute fire.

When I first cracked it open, I did so with the intention of possibly saving it for my 9-year-old. After all, some kids start menstruating at that age. But then I got super into it, and I realized this book deserves to be in my database of sex ed books…which means I should probably consider other fiction titles, too.

Released 45 years ago, The Warriors revealed a dark and dangerous New York

Creating D&D campaign ideas from scratch can be exhilarating, fun, and also nerve-wracking. On the surface, there appears to be so much to think about, plan, prepare, and envision. However, in reality, as a D&D Dungeon Master (DM), you do not have to have a 500-page novel laid out before you sit down with your players. Yes, some DMs prefer to have most of their ideas, plot hooks, villains, and encounters all set and ready to go.

However, there are other schools of thought out there that posit it’s better to go session-to-session. This is based on the improvisational nature of the game and the unpredictability of players, if you plan TOO much, as a DM, you run the risk of railroading your players into scenarios that fit your story, not theirs. And it’s important to remember that a good D&D session should disrupt your carefully laid out plans as a DM. You shouldn’t have any idea what they are going to do and will need to act accordingly.

That said, there are some ways for you as a DM to create a framework of ideas that will help you be prepared. You can have a loose set of campaign ideas to get things started. We cover some D&D campaign ideas to get you started before your next adventures!

You, of course, can create your own library. I made one for our players, which I called “The Revelation.” It was a place where players could have maps made, conduct research on their downtime (for a fee, of course), and meet interesting and strange NPCs.