Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Here are the Finalists for the International Booker Prize
A couple of interesting features of the 2025 finalists. First: they are short, with the longest topping out at 278 pages and most of them even under 200 pages. Perhaps relatedly, all the selection were published by independent presses (aka not big 5). This is both a surprise and not: we are accustomed to major awards nominees coming from the big houses except in one field: translation. So, here we are.
Printed Books Seem to Be Exempt From Tariffs. But Probably Not Paper.
Publisher’s Lunch (sub req.) does the dirty work of finding the documentation that shows that books printed in other countries are exempt from the current tariff plans, but notably paper itself is not. Quite a bit of paper comes from overseas, which weirdly might have the strange effect of these tariffs making printing overseas more cost-efficient than importing paper and printing the books in the U.S. Not sure which move this is in 3D chess.
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Most Americans want to read more books. We just don’t.
I’m trying to parse exactly which results in this NPR/Ipsos poll support the headline claim. Maybe the 63% of respondents who say they want to be a better reader? Better is not necessarily more, though. Weirdly, there is not a question that asks directly “would you like to read more books than you currently do?” or something of the like. Still, quite a few fascinating results, along with some frustrating ones. 41% of respondents said that that audiobooks don’t count as reading, so I guess we still have to keep shouting that yes, yes they do.
Our own Liberty Hardy writes an appreciation and retrospective of Ishiguro’s masterwork. One of the few books I have no hesitation calling a modern classic.