Category: Today In Books

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker.

South Carolina Police Object To Reading List

A police union has objected to the inclusion of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Jason Reynolds’ All American Boys on a high school summer reading list. Both books tackle police brutality. The president of the Fraternal Order of Police Tri-County Lodge #3 said the books’ inclusion is akin to an indoctrination of distrust of police, and claims they received an influx of “tremendous outrage” over the book selection. Perhaps Neil Gaiman said it best: “Because when people don’t like the books their kids are asked to read, they call the police.”

Judge Dismisses Plagiarism Lawsuit Against Emma Cline

A judge dismissed the copyright infringement lawsuit brought against The Girls author by her ex-boyfriend. Chaz Reetz-Laiolo claimed Cline plagiarized his work to write The Girls. But the judge ruled that the works had “few objective similarities and no substantive ones.”

Reese and Emma Summer Book Club Picks

Reese Witherspoon and Emma Watson chose their summer book selections for Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine and Our Shared Shelf, respectively. Witherspoon chose Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton, and Watson chose the club’s first poetry read, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur.

And don’t forget–we’re giving away $500 of this year’s best YA books (so far)! Click here to enter.

We’re giving away $500 of the year’s best YA! Click here, or on the image below to enter:

Children Of Blood And Bone Chosen As Tonight Show Summer Read

Tomi Adeyemi’s debut novel, YA fantasy Children of Blood and Bone, has been chosen by fan vote as the inaugural pick for The Tonight Show Summer Reads book club. The story following young Zélie and company on a journey to right the wrongs committed against Orïsha’s magical people won with 47% of the votes.

New Academy To Award Prize In Protest Of Nobel Prize For Literature

More than 100 Swedish writers, actors, and other cultural figures have formed the New Academy, which will hand out an award this autumn, following the same timeline as the Nobel Prize for literature. The New Academy will bestow their award as an act of protest against the Swedish Academy and the Nobel following sexual assault allegations connected to the Swedish Academy, which led to the cancellation of this year’s Nobel prize. “We have founded the New Academy to remind people that literature and culture at large should promote democracy, transparency, empathy and respect, without privilege, bias arrogance or sexism,” they said.

Samira Ahmed Reveals Next Book

Samira Ahmed, author of Love, Hate and Other Filters, shared about her next book, Internment. Here’s a bit of the description: “Set in a horrifying ’15 minutes in the future’ United States, the book follows 17-year-old Layla Amin as she is forced into an internment camp for Muslim Americans along with her parents.” Click here for an excerpt and the cover of what sounds like a timely story of hope and resistance.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by Flatiron Books and If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo.

Bookstores Being Censored By Facebook’s New Ad Policy

Facebook’s recent policy, which is meant to target foreign political ads trying to influence U.S. politics, is censoring bookstore’s ads promoting author events. Facebook’s definition of what qualifies as political already affected “Ijeoma Oluo, promoting her book So You Want to Talk About Race (Seal Press), and Cecile Richards, discussing her memoir Make Trouble” at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore. 

Bookshop Owner’s Tweet About £12.34 Sale Day Goes Viral

And brings in a bunch of sales! ImaginedThings has been struggling lately according to its owner Georgia Duffy who took to Twitter to say, “If anyone was thinking about buying a book now would be a great time!” The Internet responded by buying about 70 books, and she even got an offer from an author to do a reading at her store. Good job, Internet!

First Plus-Size Superhero Film One Step Closer

Faith Herbert, and her telekinetic superpowers, are one step closer to gracing the big screen as Sony Pictures is moving forward with the adaptation of the Valiant comic Faith. And Maria Melnik has been hired to write the picture. Now we excitedly wait for casting, director, and release date.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by REMIND ME AGAIN WHAT HAPPENED by Joanna Luloff.

Survey Says, Decline In Leisure Reading

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest American Time Use Survey, the share of Americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30% since 2004. The survey results also showed a higher drop in pleasure reading among men versus women. The article notes that the data doesn’t bear out the theory that the recent proliferation of computers, cellphones, video games, etc are to blame for the decline.

Harlan Ellison Has Died

The controversial speculative fiction writer passed away yesterday, at 84 years old. Ellison won numerous Hugos, Nebulas, and Edgars for his work, which included A Boy and His Dog. He contributed to TV series including The Outer Limits, Star Trek and Babylon 5. He participated in the Selma marches, but he was also infamous for being difficult to work with and litigious.

Become A Wizarding Prefect

And, like a prefect, do it for free. The North Yorkshire Moors Historical Railways Trust posted a vacancy for a Goathland Station, AKA Hogsmeade Station, volunteer wizarding prefect. Lead muggles on tours around the station and brandish your knowledge of the wizarding world.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year, Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory, new in paperback from Vintage Books.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Sets West Coast Premiere

The Tony Award-winning play will premiere on the West Coast at the historic Curran in San Francisco. The play premiered in New York this year; it’s in its third year of performances in London, and a Melbourne, Australia production is planned for early 2019. Details on dates, purchasing tickets, and casting will be announced in the coming months.

Royal Society of Literature Works To Address Historical Biases

The Royal Society of Literature just appointed 40 new writing fellows under the age of 40. The RSL decided to bring in a new generation of fellows through their 40 Under 40 initiative in order to step away from its “overwhelmingly white, male, metropolitan and middle class” history. The names chosen were almost three-quarters female, with 30% from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Prior to the initiative, only three of the 523 fellows were under 40 (the article doesn’t mention how many were from marginalized communities, but I can guess the number).

Midnight’s Children Set As Netflix TV Series

Netflix is adapting Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial novel of magical realism, Midnight’s Children, for a series. The book about India’s transition to independence was previously adapted as a Canadian-British film directed by Deepa Mehta in 2013. No word yet on a release date or casting.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by Litworld Publishing House. Get Patch 17 for FREE today by clicking the cover below:

Author, Can You Spare a Dime? (No, They Cannot)

I don’t think any clear-eyed person decides to become an author in order to accumulate obscene wealth. But as it turns out, it’s almost impossible to eke out a living by writing alone. A new report by the UK nonprofit Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society says that professional writers have a median income of under £10,500 a year, or $13,774. And like their counterparts across all industries, women authors are earning just 75% of what men get.

J. K. Rowling Gets Her Letter

Authors in the UK have another reason to envy outlier J. K. Rowling: she just got invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures in the Writer category. She joins 927 other new members, 49% of whom are female. But my favorite stat about the new class? The new additions mean the people of color in the Academy have doubled since 2015…to 16% of overall membership. It’s a low bar, but we need something to celebrate.

First Look at Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984”

More film adaptation news! It’s the teensiest of sneak peeks, but director Patty Jenkins shared a photo of Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva, aka Wonder Woman villain the Cheetah. She’s shown in a museum, wearing an outfit I am sure my mild-mannered mom had back then, so we’ll have to wait for a more Cheetah-licious lewk later.

Just for Book Riot readers: sign up for an Audible account, and get two audiobooks free!

Goodreads’ New Android App

Attention, Android users: Goodreads has released a new Android app. The app includes a new Explore page where you can browse trending books, new releases, and more; an improved My Books section that allows organization by genre or other names; and the ability to track rereads. Read the post to get all the deets on the new features.

A Discovery Of Witches Series Adaptation Gets A Trailer

But still no U.S. platform announcement or premiere date. Sky One has set a 2018 premiere for UK fans of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy, which begins with A Discovery of Witches. The story follows powerful, untrained witch Diana (Teresa Palmer) who stumbles upon a magical book that’s long been sought by witches, vampires, and daemons. Watch the trailer here.

Amazon Kindle Supports Arabic Language Books

Amazon Kindle is launching support for Arabic language books on Kindle devices and apps. The site also has a dedicated section for Arabic books in the Kindle Store. The initial eBook selection lists over 12,000 books, and includes books by popular authors, classics like Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqadimah, and translations of popular English titles. Arabic language authors can also self-publish through Kindle Direct Publishing.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by Amazon Publishing.

Full Trailer For The Hate U Give

As promised, we got the full trailer for the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give! The movie premiers October 19, but you can heighten the anticipation by watching the trailer now.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Name Removed From Book Award

The Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, voted unanimously to change the name of what was known as the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The decision came in response to concerns about how the author of The Little House on the Prairie series depicted Native American and black people on the page. The association said Wilder “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

2018 Locus Awards Winners

The 2018 winners of the Locus Awards have been announced. Among them are John Scalzi who won the Science Fiction category for his novel, The Collapsing Empire; N.K. Jemisin who won the Fantasy award for The Stone Sky; Victor LaValle, winner in the Horror category for The Changeling; and Nnedi Okorafor, winner in the Young Adult category for Akata Warrior. Congrats to all the winners!

As part of Season 2 of our podcast series Annotated, we are giving away 10 of the best books about books of 2017. Go here to enter for a chance to win, or just click the image below:

America Ferrera Is Editing An Anthology Full of Fascinating People

The anthology of essays, releasing in September, focuses on the theme of navigating between cultures. Some of the amazing contributors include Roxane Gay, Issa Rae, Michelle Kwan, Kal Penn, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Jenny Zhang. And a portion of the profits will be donated to Immigrants We Get the Job Done Coalition. To be honest she had me at the title: American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures.

Novelist Fanny Burney’s Letter From 1812 Describes Her Mastectomy

The British Library has placed online for the first time a letter Fanny Burney wrote to her sister where she described her mastectomy without anesthesia: “To conclude, the evil was so profound, the case so delicate, & the precautions necessary for preventing a return so numerous, that the operation, including the treatment and the dressing, lasted 20 minutes! a time, for sufferings so acute, that was hardly supportable – However, I
bore it with all the courage I could exert, & never moved, nor stopt them, nor resisted, nor remonstrated, nor spoke – except once or twice, during the dressings, to say “Ah Messieurs! que je vous plains!”

In Adaptation News

Three Jane Green novels are being adapted by Lifetime: Tempting Fate, To Have and To Hold, and Family Pictures. Alyssa Milano will star in and produce in the first adaptation Tempting Fate. In case you haven’t seen the trailer sneak peek for Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give you can see it here. And Shari Lapena’s thriller The Couple Next Door is being developed into a television series.

This edition of Today in Books is sponsored by Frolic Media, a new media destination dedicated to all things Romance and Pop Culture.

Google Celebrates Octavia Butler

For her birthday, Octavia Butler got her own Google Doodle. Butler, the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, would have turned 71 today. Butler was a black woman who entered the predominantly white, male-dominated science fiction genre in 1971. She wrote seminal works including short stories, many of which are collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, and the novel Parable of the Sower.

The Hate U Give Teaser Trailer

Angie Thomas shared the teaser trailer for the upcoming adaptation of her YA novel, The Hate U Give. Some of this year’s VidCon attendees got to see it early. Thomas also shared that a sneak peek of the full trailer will be aired during the BET Awards this Sunday, and will appear in full at TheHateUGive.com after.

The Spine Poet Of Stratford-upon-Avon…

Is an RFID machine. A staffer at Stratford library in Stratford-upon-Avon noticed a certain lyricism to the lines printed on some of their book scanning machine receipts. Basically, spine poetry. The Stratford library started posting some of the more poetic receipts, and now other Warwickshire libraries have joined in on the fun!