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Welcome to Today in Books. Here’s our the bookish news stories readers were most interested in this week.
You’re not imagining it; Best Books of the Year season is getting earlier and earlier. PW has been first out of the gate the last few years, dropping their list in the final days of October. Barnes & Noble beat them to the punch on Friday with not one, not two, not seven, but 19 lists. Both the number of lists and the way they’re arranged are reminders that Best Books season isn’t just about highlighting great work. It’s also—maybe even primarily—about holiday shopping. While I still have a knee-jerk “are you kidding me?” to seeing a best-of list before Halloween (and tbh, I probably always will), I want bookstores and publishers to succeed. If releasing best-of lists early helps them prepare for the season and compete with the Big A, I can’t be mad at it.
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.
Hot on the heels of their Best Books of 2025, announced last week, Barnes & Noble has revealed the finalists for the 2025 Book of the Year, which is indeed a different thing. The Book of the Year award, introduced in 2019, is selected by booksellers and tends to go to widely recommendable titles that are as close as the book world comes to four-quadrant hits. This year’s list of 14 finalists ranges from Sunrise on the Reaping to a book of New York Times puzzles to the year’s biggest self-help book (which, I must point out, was actually published in December 2024), kids’ books, cookbooks, and Katabasis.
I’m going to go ahead and place my bet on Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser, which was basically until it appeared at the top of B & N’s best fiction of 2025 list week. “A heartfelt tale that stirs the soul and ignites the imagination” about a young girl’s adventures at the art museum with her grandfather sounds like it was factory made to ring all the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year bells.
It’s Shakespeare week on Zero to Well-Read. If it’s been a while since you hung out with the Bard—or if you’ve never read him—I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy in our conversation about Hamlet.
Making this podcast is the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time (and my job is usually pretty great). Spending time with truly great works has turned out to be exactly the antidote I needed to dopamine-fueled algorithms. I’m on track to read significantly more books this year than I have in the last several years, and it’s because the more time I spend with really good books, the more time I want to spend reading (and the less I’m willing to spend scrolling).
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