Podcasts, best-selling books of the week, and more today on Book Riot:
This list contains book podcasts to meet all your needs. Some will help you find new books, read more diversely, and navigate reading challenges. Some will help you recognise and challenge your biases. Some will give you insights into the lives of your favourite authors, and others will get you excited about new ones. Some will make you feel endlessly heard and seen. All of them will make you think and wonder. Scroll on to find your portable reading companions.
There are thrillers by bestselling authors — one explores the 30-year-old disappearance of a childhood friend (Middle of the Night by Riley Sager), and the other is a “deliciously twisty new locked room murder mystery”(The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley). There’s also a trans memoir by an Olympic runner (Make It Count by CeCé Telfer), and Parade by Rachel Cusk is literary fiction that sees an artist who paints his wife ugly (the nerve).
For once, this bestseller list is fairly different from last week’s. Some of the reigning champs, like Funny Story by Emily Henry, have fallen to only being on three of the five biggest lists. Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez went from being on all five lists last week to not making this round up at all. We also have a few new releases, including Eruption, which is based on notes by Michael Crichton and written by James Patterson — put those two powerhouse author names together and you have an easy win. The movie rights are already in a bidding war.
Baggett claims several local parents approached her about inappropriate books in the kid’s section of the public library. Among the titles are perennially popular targets from Moms For Liberty, including It’s Perfectly Normal, a developmentally-appropriate puberty and sexual education book for tweens and teens. The other book cited as inappropriate was You Know, Sex, a book written for those ages 10-12.
Slowly, the world has generally begun to realize that fat people are a demographic with money to spend. Representation has spread in the modeling world, and clothing brands are inching towards inclusion. Publishing has taken strides to include fat people (mostly women), especially in the YA and romance categories. Open discussions about body neutrality and dissolving diet culture are less fringe. But it has taken much longer for the representation of all body types to reach the world of picture books.
