This week! Books!
First up, apologies to newsletter subscribers as I had an errant link in my November Office Hours email that went to the September Office Hours, if you’re looking to watch November, click on over here!
I confess that I’m not spending much time on social media these days, but even I could feel the shockwaves from this truth bomb by 87-year-old Pulitzer finalist Joyce Carol Oates:
To which the world’s richest man, who was not mad, do not tell the newspapers he was mad, took time out of his day to reply:
Got ’em.
Musk then spent his week posting such scintillating refutations of Oates’ definitely-not-stinging-critique-seriously-he’s-not-mad-you-guys as, “Man on Fire is great!” and “Fifth Element has great style.” Maybe he’ll even read a book next.
Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist – Adam Serwer, The Atlantic – In other Musky book news, Adam Serwer delves into the history of The Lord of the Rings and RPG game Dungeons & Dragons, and ponders why Elon Musk needs them to be racially deterministic.
Anthropic Judge Slams Efforts to Have Authors Opt Out of Settlement – Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly – A misleading message from ClaimsHero urging authors to opt out of the Anthropic settlement has been making the rounds. The judge in the case has now slammed said message as “a fraud of immense proportions” and told them to alter their communications.
David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ Wins 2025 Booker Prize – Alex Marshall, New York Times – Congrats to David Szalay, whose novel Flesh won the prestigious Booker Prize. Personally, I’d be satisfied enough making it onto Dua Lipa’s book club, but I’m sure the Booker was a nice bonus for him!
How fashion embraced the book nerds – Josiah Gogarty, GQ UK – And speaking of pop culture and books, the fashion world has swiftly moved to embrace (co-opt?) literary scenes.
To Help SNAP Recipients, Bookstores Set Up as Food Banks – Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, New York Times – As SNAP benefits have been thrown into turmoil by the Trump Administration, independent bookstores have (again) stepped into the breach.
Why You Should Be Extra-Illustrating Your Books – Marla Mackoul, Mental Floss – Doodling in book margins has a long history, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Finding the Truth In the Imaginary: On “Accurately” Writing About Time Travel – Aja Gabel, LitHub – As someone who has written a novel featuring time travel, let me tell you: not easy! Let alone when you take the underlying science seriously, which I did not. Aja Gabel delves into how she attacked the challenge of building a scientifically cohesive novel.
There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore Cause It’s More Fruitful to Drive Them Out of Business – Megan Greenwell, Talking Points Memo – Thanks to private equity, it is often more profitable to destroy thriving publications than it is to cultivate them.
That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I. – Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker – It gives me no joy to relay to you that A.I. songs are getting extremely popular, including a song that hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart.
Lectorum Publications to Shutter – Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly – Another extremely distressing domino from wholesaler and distributor Baker & Taylor going bankrupt is that Lectorum Publications, the primary distributor of Spanish language books to schools and libraries, is now going under.
Little rooms – Austin Kleon – I loved this roundup by Austin Kleon, which included various riffs on Jack White’s “little room.”
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:
- The Widow by John Grisham
- The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
- Murder at Holly House by Denzil Meyrick
- Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben
- The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- Heart Life Music by Kenny Chesney with Holly Gleason
- How to Test Negative for Stupid by John Kennedy
- The Look by Michelle Obama with Meredith Koop
- Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
- Outlive by Peter Attia with Bill Gifford
Young adult hardcover:
- Eternal Ruin by Tigest Girma
- Fake Skating by Lynn Painter
- If Only I Had Told Her by Laura Nowlin
- The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer
- Starchaser by R.M. Gray
Middle grade hardcover:
- Warriors: Changing Skies #2: Hidden Moon by Erin Hunter
- The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
- The Court of the Dead by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell
This week on the blog
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
And keep up with the discussion in all the places!
- Follow me on Bluesky
- Check out the Bransforums
And finally:
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking – James Somers, The New Yorker – Artificial Intelligence is certainly weird to engage with. But is it really thinking? Particularly when there’s so much uncertainty about how our own brains work, and when generative A.I. arose out of attempts to map the way human neurons work, the case against A.I. performing a form of thinking is weaker than you might think.
Have a great weekend!
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Well, this is just a fantastic post. Lots of juicy stuff. Lots of wild stuff.
You probably know that Vroman’s is taking food donations.
As for Spotify, when I saw that they are posting recruitment ads for ICE, I removed my books. It’s bad enough I haven’t taken them off Amazon.
Aja Gabel nailed it: writing time travel is tough…. in the extreme.
I self-published my first novel and its theme was time travel. I worked especially hard on it. From attempting to show how it’s done, to making the change you wanted to make in the past without affecting everybody and everything else, it was a labor like no other I’ve ever attempted. Worst of all, I ended up creating a huge mish-mash that made little sense.
Never again.
Re: the article about weird little blogs being no more.
It was the same in the late 1990’s with newspapers (mostly weekly with some daily) in my home state of CT and elsewhere, A large media came in and proceeded to acquire about 90% of our state’s newspapers. They turned the robust weekly papers in cookie cutter pieces of wasted space (e.g. cutting the page count by 90% and raising the price), lost a ton of money in less than a decade, then gutted the company before selling itself off to a private equity firm after paying themselves a few golden parachutes.