The publishing industry definitely didn’t get the message that the dog days of summer have arrived. It’s been a busy week! Here are the most clicked articles from this week’s Today in Books coverage.
NYT names the 100 best books of the century (so far)
The New York Times polled more than 500 “literary luminaries” – including Roxane Gay, Jenna Bush Hager, Min Jin Lee, and three of us here at Book Riot – to determine the best books of the 21st century. Each voter was asked to submit a list of 10 books, and that’s an impossible task, I can tell you. My secret longlist had more than 30 candidates. On Monday, the Just revealed #100-80, with another block of twenty titles being announced each day this week. Four of my favorites made the list, and two more of my authors were featured, albeit with different titles than the ones I nominated. Not bad! Check out the full lists from the likes of Stephen King, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Marlon James, and let us know: Did your favorites make the list?
Alice Munro’s daughter reveals family secret of sexual abuse
Andrea Robin Skinner, whose mother was Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, wrote a letter in Toronto Star She revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Frmelin, had sexually abused her and that Munro knew about the abuse and decided to stay with him. Skinner states that the abuse began in 1976, when she was nine years old. After struggling for many years with post-traumatic symptoms such as bulimia, migraines and insomnia, she told her mother about the abuse when she was 25. In letters to the Munro family, Fremlin admitted to the abuse and blamed Skinner, calling her a “marriage destroyer.” In 2004, Skinner reported the abuse and gave Fremlin’s letters to Ontario police. He pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005. Munro stayed with him until his death in 2013.
Skinner writes, “Many influential people learned some of my story but continued to support and add to a narrative they knew to be false,” noting that “the silence persisted because of my mother’s fame.” Now that Munro has died (she died in May at age 92), Skinner hopes her revelations will force the public to confront her mother’s legacy, a particularly complicated and important challenge because Munro was considered a master at exploring the pain and minutiae of women’s lives. VoxConstance Grady provides a detailed analysis of the revelations in the context of Munro’s work, and Munro’s associates say they knew about the abuse.
Readers rave about romance novel bookstores
Romance novels are on the rise, and the ceiling is high, folks. Just two years ago, there were only two independent bookstores in the entire United States that specialized in romance novels: The Ripped Bodice in LA (which now also has a branch in Brooklyn) and Love’s Sweet Arrow in Chicago. Now there are more than 20. That’s a remarkable 10x growth in two years, but still less than 1% of the 2500-plus stores represented by the American Booksellers Association. In 2020, romance novels accounted for 18 million print books sold; by the end of 2023, that number had more than doubled to 39 million copies. That means more than 5% of all print books sold last year were romance novels. Not too bad for a genre that “independent booksellers largely ignored until very (very) recently.”
đź”— The best of the rest
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