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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
I say every year that the two NYT lists, the 100 Notable Books of the Year and the 10 Best Books of the Year, combined to form the single best snapshot of the year in books (or at least the year in books outside the realm of BookTok). This year’s top 10 is both a surprise and not a surprise. It was a surprise in that I would have probably guessed maybe one of these if given 10 title guesses. So the specific books are a surprise. But that I would have not gotten many right feels right for 2025, because there just have not been that many breakout books. Plenty of good books, but in terms of having even a handful of books that were consistently talked about in a way that distinguished them from the hundreds of good books published every year, it was not one of those years. (Shouts to my son, who named Angel Down as his favorite book of the year right when he read it, shortly after it came out.)
Rebecca and I discussed this in the most recent episode of our new podcast, Zero to Well-Read. We went through a bunch of the noteworthy books of the year with a slightly different aim: rather than name the best books of the year, we tried to identify the book we thought most likely to endure. I will spoil it mildly by saying: the list gets short quickly.
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A Personal Lament for Tom Stoppard
I try not to double-dip between this newsletter and the Book Riot flagship newsletter. But I wrote about my own affection for the work of Tom Stoppard over there yesterday and have continued to re-read him in the days since the news of his passing broke (Arcadia, folks. Arcadia). And so I include my short appreciate here for the folks who may not have caught it and because if I am ever going to repeat myself, it is for the loss of one of the greats.
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I didn’t know what I was in for. I was in London for a week in 1997, and one of my English professors suggested I go check out this play by someone he really liked. I knew nothing (and don’t still, really) about contemporary theater. But I was a 20-year-old English major, and going to a play about A.E. Housman and Oscar Wilde seemed like a very “I am an English major in London” thing to do.
I came out of The Invention of Love with at least two things. The first was a favorite living playwright. The second was this question: “Was that what it would have felt like to see a Shakespeare play in 1599?”
Tom Stoppard passed away this weekend at the age of 88. I can only give my personal elegy here, one that is uneducated about modern theater, and I am by no means a Stoppard scholar. But I was, and remain, a fan. For me, it is quite simple: Tom Stoppard did with spoken words exactly what I want to listen to. With seemingly extra-terrestrial erudition, a penetrating intellect, an undying curiosity, and a thorough-going veneration of ideas and those who have them, he brought play to what could be ponderous and intimacy to what could be intimidating (it is the great regret of my culture-consuming life that I did not cough up the cash to see The Coast of Utopia in its entirety: its day-long, multi-hundreds-of-dollars-per-ticket entirety).
Betters can write a terrific obituary. Others have conducted fascinating interviews. What I can offer for someone who doesn’t know Stoppard from a stop sign is a clip from the film adaptation of his breakout play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. If you find yourself as charmed and as alarmed by it as I still find myself today, then likely he too was your favorite living playwright, even if you didn’t know it.