This Year in Books (2024)

This year! Books!

If last year’s edition of This Year in Books was characterized by a cloudy crystal ball as we seemed on the precipice of change, 2024 was a year when some of those swirling elements came into focus. And… Not great, Bob!

Now, let me be clear: if you zoom out, the publishing industry is doing just fine. Publishers are mainly in the black, Barnes & Noble is expanding, Spotify’s entry into the audiobook space appears to be going gangbusters, and heavy-hitters are experimenting with interesting new publishing models. As I often like to say, the sky has been falling in publishing every year for the last twenty years. Consolidation continues its inexorable march, but somehow we’re all still here.

But there are two 2024 topics I want to focus on here that have me screaming at the rafters “What are we doing?!?!” like I’m Taylor Twellman: Book bans and A.I.

Since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States. Nearly seven children die from guns every single day. There have been 83 school shootings in 2024 alone, killing 36 and traumatizing tens of thousands.

In a functional society, one might look at the leading cause of, you know, children dying and try and do something about that like common sense gun control.

But no. That would make too much sense for the ole United States of America. Instead, wealthy, influential people are choosing to spend their energy trying to ban books. BOOKS!!!

More kids are dying from guns than ever before and you want to ban BOOKS?!?! What, you think kids are going to injure themselves by thinking too hard?! They might get some paper cuts?!?! What are we doing?!?!

Already the bans and librarian harassment are having a chilling effect on children’s book sales, and it’s poised to get worse. A key plank in Project 2025, which is very much alive, is to recategorize all transgender content as pornography, jail anyone associated with it, and force educators and librarians who “purvey” transgender content to register as sex offenders. I’m not making this up!

Even if you don’t believe something like that will get enacted by Congress, tremendously worrisome lawsuits are percolating through our skewed justice system. Courts in Texas and Iowa seem poised to undermine a key protection for librarians and open up libraries to censorship. While publishers are fighting back on other fronts, they have not yet prevailed.

And in some respects, the laws themselves don’t really matter. All the noise and right wing parent groups and harassment are already casting a chill over the book world, and contributing to publishers getting weak-kneed in their efforts to diversify. (And they’re not the only ones getting weak-kneed, yes I’m looking at you Disney).

Ultimately, book bans are about control. Parents want to not only manage their own kids’ brains, they want to extend their power over what other kids can read too. Right wing organizations see the opportunity to wrest control of our culture to reinforce their preferred hierarchies and to sow cultural division to distract people from iniquities in our society.

Thus a handful of draconian but powerful freaks with way too much time on their hands are having an outsized cultural impact on society at large. So far, publishers, the government, and the courts haven’t been up to the task of beating them back despite the unpopularity of book bans.

And speaking of a handful of draconian but powerful freaks trying to control us, that brings us to artificial intelligence.

After a few multi-billion dollar efforts to vacuum up all the content that’s ever been written without compensating authors, as epic a theft as they come, A.I. companies are now racing to spit their error-ridden, soulless products back at us.

Please note: I am not a luddite!! A.I. has already done some truly incredible things. Google DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for A.I.-driven research into protein folds, and there are optimistic signs A.I. might help us with the crucial task of identifying new kinds of antibiotics. There are positive use cases for this technology, and it’s still in its relative infancy.

But when it comes to the book world, A.I. is just spewing crap coming and going. Already unscrupulous people are using A.I. to flood every available zone with horrendous gunk, tech bros are raising unholy sums of money to “disrupt” publishing via A.I. services authors don’t need, and publishers are racing to dip their toes into the sewage.

One of the incredible things about books is that we can fuse our consciousness to another person’s, even after the author is dead. A good book isn’t just a product of one mind, it’s a collaboration between true artists who are at the top of their games. Editors, cover designers, interior designers, support staff. Some of the most talented people in the country combine their energies to produce works of art that have never been done before. It’s magic!

I’m not the most woo woo person in the world, but that collaboration produces a product, a book, with a soul. A.I. does not. It’s backwards looking. Its voice is uncannily robotic. It’s B+ writing at best. We don’t need vastly more books, we need better books. It’s creating way more problems than it’s solving.

And for what? So a handful of freaks can insert themselves into a system that didn’t need fixing and profit from the mess. They’re taking a big dump in the public square and trying to sell the “solutions” back to us.

If there’s a common thread in all this, it’s oligarchy. A.I. companies and the venture capitalists who profit from them stole our writing and are now funneling us through A.I. products whether we want them or not so they can hoover up even more of the resulting profits. Book banners are trying to control the marketplace of ideas to keep us divided and make us less free to resist. A tiny handful of people are exerting outsized control on us, and it’s not good!

It’s time for all of us to band together and take back our culture from the freaks.

Whew! Thanks for listening.

Here are some of the best writing links from the past week, in list form:

What Book Publishing Needs to Consider in 2025 – Kathleen Schmidt, Publishing Confidential

‘Empty shelves with absolutely no books’: Students, parents question school board’s library weeding process – Nicole Brockbank and Angelina King, CBC News – Problems with censorship are creeping north of the border.

PW’s 2024 Person of the Year: Liz Pelletier – Sophia Stewart, Publishers Weekly

The Best Book Covers of 2024 – Matt Dorfman, New York Times

Amazon Disregarded Internal Warnings on Injuries, Senate Investigation Claims – Noam Scheiber, New York Times

Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with novels from Faulkner and Hemingway – Andrew Dalton, Associated Press

Disney Pulls Transgender Story Line From New Series – Nicole Sperling, New York Times

How time capsule houses teach us to celebrate our unique creative voices – Dan Blank, The Creative Shift

Publishing-Office Holiday Parties Used To Be Decadent and Wild – Emily Gould, The Cut – I often say that the golden age of publishing is always twenty years ago no matter what year it is, but I can confirm that publishing holiday parties really did go hard back in the day (for better or worse).

This week in bestsellers

Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):

Adult print and e-book fiction:

1. James by Percival Everett
2. Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
3. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
4. The Women by Kristin Hannah
5. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Adult print and e-book nonfiction:

1. Melania by Melania Trump
2. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan
3. Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher
4. Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten
5. Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Young adult hardcover:

1. If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin
2. Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter
3. A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
4. Murtagh by Christopher Paolini
5. The Glass Girl by Kathleen Glasgow

Middle grade hardcover:

1. The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
2. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
3. The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
4. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon
5. The Bletchey Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

• The best of 2024!
• Does Bluesky have the juice?

And keep up with the discussion in all the places!

• Follow me on Bluesky and Threads
• Follow my page on Facebook
• Join the Facebook Group
• Check out the Bransforums

And finally, for all you Succession fans out there, the extent to which the show has interwoven with the actual lives of the Murdochs is pretty fascinating to behold.

Happy New Year and thank you for reading in 2024!

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Art: View from Olana in the Snow by Frederic Edwin Church