Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Chinese author Can Xue is favourite to win 2024 Nobel prize in literature
Betting odds for The Nobel is such a bizarre, impossible, and ill-advised endeavor, and I hope they do it forever. This year’s front-runner is Chinese novelist Can Xue, whose experimental writings resists neat categorization and interpretation. But at only 10/1, this isn’t anything like a sure thing. Some more household names, at least in the West I should say, all have sort of similar odds in the 15/1 range (Murakami, Atwood, Pynchon, etc). For pure chaos reasons, I would like to see César Aira win because he has, and I am not kidding, more than 100 books out there.
AI Scientists Win 2024 Nobel in Physics
Speaking of the Nobel—this one has some people frustrated and still more scratching their heads. First of all, in the world of arts and letters, I think it is fair to say that the predominant feeling about AI is *extended fart noise,* so seeing contributions toward it valorized is not going down well. Still others, including myself, are confused to see work in computer architecture win a prize in physics. I guess it’s applied physics? There is no clean place for the Nobel to recognize work in software, code, or computer science writ large, so I can see why they shoehorned it in here. In the greater world of technological advancement, AI is clearly the story of the year (decade? century?), and I am sure they wanted to be in on it.
Hardcover Joins The “We Aren’t Goodreads” Ranks
Well, hello there. We have a new Goodreads alternative kicking the tires on social reading apps. It’s been a while. What makes Hardcover different? For starters, they are launching with a freemium model (you still can’t pay Goodreads money for a better/different experience), aren’t doing traditional advertising (sounds like it is getting money from authors to promote their books is the tact here), and there is an AI recommendation thing built in as well. It’s an independent project with no obvious venture/investment backing, which we have seen do better in this space (LibraryThing/StoryGraph) than others, which had grander hopes.