As book award season continues, we’ve been getting stellar lists of nonfiction titles to add to our TBRs. Plus, we are about to head into “the best Books of the Year” season, so hold onto your hats! In addition to these highlights, today, I also want to delve into the world of celebrity book clubs and whether or not they are still tastemakers. Spoiler: writer Kathleen Schmidt argues they aren’t—let’s jump right in! 

“The Best Books of the Year (So Far)” (The New York Times)

The New York Times added some new nonfiction picks to its Best Book of the Year (So Far) list. Some of the new titles include A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, and Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs. I keep seeing these books EVERYWHERE and have heard nothing but good things, so it’s no surprise that they made the list. But now the question is, which of these titles will make the big end-of-the-year list? 

The National Book Award Longlist in Nonfiction Announced

The National Book Award is one of my favorite prizes. I always love seeing the longlists they create across their handful of different categories. This year in nonfiction, they’ve highlighted a number of different titles. From memoirs to nature writing, this list includes a range of nonfiction genres. I’ve always imagined that having so many different kinds of nonfiction makes the prize hard to judge. But either way, we have an excellent list of nonfiction to add to our TBRs:

• Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
• Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
• Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
• Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising
• Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
• Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam
• Ben Ratliff, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
• Claudia Rowe, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
• Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
• Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

Celebrity Book Clubs Are No Longer Tastemakers (Publishing Confidential)

In Kathleen Schmidt’s recent Substack post, she discusses her opinion that celebrity book clubs, like Read with Jenna and Oprah’s Book Club, are no longer tastemakers. Gone is the time when book clubs tended to select under-the-radar titles and bring them to a larger audience. Now, these book clubs tend to choose books written by (mostly) wealthy white women who already have a certain amount of privilege. They aren’t tastemakers. They’re just supporting the success of stories that are already popular. Schmidt goes into much more detail, pulling examples of recent memoir picks from the different celebrity book clubs. 

You can find me over on my Substack Winchester Ave, or over on Instagram @kdwinchester. As always, feel free to drop me a line at kendra.d.winchester@gmail.com. For even MORE bookish content, you can find my articles over on Book Riot.