The Tournament of Books Shortlist

Audible Partners With TikTok

Audible has announced a partnership with TikTok “to help listeners discover top trending books and stories right inside the Audible app and web experience.” New features will include a dedicated “Best of #BookTok” destination, collections organized by popular BookTok genres (think romantasy and dark academia), and badges highlighted the books currently trending within the BookTok community. This is one of many indicators that the bookselling and publishing industry is investing much into bookish TikTok spaces. I mean, I can’t tell you how many publicity emails I get promoting books from BookTok influencers or that found new or renewed success through the channel.

Is the Age of Reading Full Books in Class Over?

According to an informal survey by The New York Times, and research, most kids only read one or two books a year. The Times talked to parents, educators, and students about the high school reading experience to get anecdotal information about the declining expectation. It sounds like curriculums are perhaps more heavily driven by standardized testing and the pressure to raise scores that impact school rankings. The Common Core, setting national standards for English and Math, has also prompted the use of anthologies. It’s interesting because I was in high school in the ’90s (class of 2000 represent!), and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that kids read only one or two full books in standard English classes back then. Teachers did wear out the photocopier, and I had to lug a Norton Anthology around before the Common Core was formally adopted in California. But I can also say with certainty that we read Animal Farm, Siddhartha, Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and The Diary of a Young Girl. Opinions on whether reading fewer full books impacts students varies, and I am fully biased, but it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t great benefits to reading a larger work from start to finish and being able to think critically about more complex works.

The Seductive Appeal of Burning Comic Books in Postwar America

It regularly surprises people to learn that America’s history includes a period of time when books were burned. The surprise comes in part because there’s a lack of knowledge about how book censorship has been fundamental in American history and in part because the American government spent a lot of time, money, and energy delivering propaganda during World War II about Nazi book burnings that was intended to drum up patriotism. Americans wouldn’t burn books like Nazis would, would they?

They would. In fact, they’d do it in the years following the end of World War II.