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Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Mostest Anticipated Books of Summer 2024
You can close the 17 tabs you have open with various most-anticipated-books-of-summer lists because Lit Hub’s Emily Temple has rallied and tallied them. Pulling data from 23 lists, Temple identified 456 titles, 59 of which were mentioned at least 3 times. Let’s call them the most popular most anticipated books of summer. The mostest anticipated! The title that made the most appearances showed up on 10 lists, and it’s not a romantasy or a new novel by a TikTok fave. Can you guess? If you got it right, go ahead and brag in the comments.
Oprah Still Knows How to Surprise Us
If you’d given me twenty guesses about Oprah’s summer book club pick, I wouldn’t have landed on Familiaris by David Wroblewski (remember him?), but maybe I should have since Oprah has made something of a habit of featuring new books by past Oprah’s Book Club authors. You’ve got to give it to her: the woman is loyal. Familiaris is the “long-awaited” (by whom?) follow-up/prequel to Wroblewski’s 2008 novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which is basically Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin with dogs and a mute protagonist. The new book takes us back in time to tell the origin story of the family’s farm and their proprietary dog breed.
Since Familiaris clocks in at 975 pages (woof)—Publishers Weekly called it “gratifying if overstuffed“—Oprah is giving us three months to read it, and that means she’s giving herself three months to make content about it. Will she eclipse last summer’s fever-pitched coverage of The Covenant of Water? Will this help her successfully revive her effort to produce an adaptation of Edgar Sawtelle? (If you were waiting for the thing that would make it make sense, there you go.)
Adaptations Lead Television Critics Association Award Nominations
The nominees for the 2024 Television Critics Association Awards were announced yesterday, and adaptations showed out. Netflix’s Ripley (based on Patricia Highsmight’s Talented Mr. Ripley) and FX’s Shōgun (based on James Clavell’s novel) tied for most-nominated, appearing in five categories each. HBO’s Robert Downey Jr.-led adaptation of The Sympathizer also got a nod, as did adaptations of Heartstopper (Netflix) and Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney+). We’re on the other side of Peak Adaptation, but the bench is deep. This is a nice reminder that literary works were serving as inspiration for great films and TV shows well before Netflix was even a glimmer in Reed Hastings’s eye, and their reign continues.
If you’re wondering whether they’ll win, the smart money would be on no. Ripley and Shōgun are in excellent company in the Program of the Year category, but it’s hard to imagine either of them knocking out The Bear, Reservation Dogs, or Hacks. Honestly, those all so good, I don’t even know which to pull for.
Goodreads’ Most Popular Books of the Year So Far
Goodreads has revealed the most popular books of 2024 so far, where popular = added to users’ Read or Want to Read shelves. I have quibbles with that methodology—if a million people add a title but they all give it 1 star, should it really count as popular?—but it’s always interesting to see what a huge population of readers are expressing interest in. How do the results line up with your sense of the most popular books of the year?
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