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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Amazon Revisits 25 Years of Best Books Picks
Amazon was early on the internet-based Best Books of the Year trend. As we close out the first quarter of the 21st century, they’ve rounded up all of their #1 picks and other highlights from 25 years of best-of lists. Amazon editors’ approach to Best Of is unique among online publications and retailers. The #1 book is often a marquee work of fiction, yes, but sometimes it’s a nod to major political events, as when they crowned The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004 or an under-recognized memoir about race and criminal justice reform in 2020. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a Handmaid’s Tale sequel, was hardly the best or most-loved novel of 2019, but it was especially resonant during the first Trump administration’s assault on reproductive freedom. Some of the #1 picks haven’t aged well for a variety of reasons. That’s a feature, not a bug. A Best Of list is a snapshot of a moment in time, and it’s interesting to see the last 25 years captured this way.
Make It Make Sense
Think about the books that have ruled TikTok for the last few years. Based on those trends, what topics and genres would you say Gen-Z is most interested in? Now grok this: in a new study of Gen-Z’s media preferences, romance ranks third-to-last among the topics Gen-Z youth want to see depicted in TV and movies, and nearly half want to see less sex on screen.
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Pause a minute to consider Colleen Hoover’s oeuvre (the Hoovre?), then try to wrap your head around this finding: “Toxic relationships and love triangles also ranked among the most tiresome or uninteresting tropes for young viewers.” Now, reading about sex can be a pretty different experience from watching it on screen, and it may be as simple as that. But on its face, this is pretty surprising from the generation responsible for mainstreaming spicy romance. The kids contain multitudes.
Speaking of Colleen Hoover
The flurry of adaptations that were announced at the peak of CoHo fever continue to trickle out. Regretting You hits theaters this week, and the official trailer for Reminders of Him has just landed. Not even Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford could get me to see this movie—I barely survived the utterly ba-na-nas It Ends With Us adaptation—but I suspect it’ll do just fine without me.
How Much of What You Know About Poe is Real?
The mythology around Edgar Allan Poe’s life (and death!) contributes as much to his legacy as his body of work does, and…a lot of it is exaggerated or outright wrong. Join us as we reexamine Poe’s strange and influential life.
