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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. Here are the stories Today in Books readers were most interested in this week.
The Books Behind This Year’s Big Pictures
As the Academy Awards approach this Sunday, Publishers Weekly has rounded up their original takes on many of the books connected to the year’s biggest flicks. There’s Hamnet, of course, and Train Dreams (my favorite under-the-radar film of 2025), plus Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which inspired One Battle After Another. Nonfiction fans, don’t despair. Biographies of Mary Shelley, Turgenev, and lyricist Lorenz Hart (played beautifully by Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon) also await.
Study up for Oscars night with our Zero to Well-Read deep dives into Hamnet and Vineland.
The Secret is There is No Secret
The data and anecdata line up on this one: people are reading less and having a harder time focusing on books. The solution is simple but not easy: just do it. That’s the crux of this five-step plan for reclaiming your attention, and I appreciate that it begins with reminding yourself why you’re setting out to read deeply. There really is no secret, no hack, no shortcut. If you want to be a person who spends sustained periods of time reading books, you have to spend sustained periods of time reading books. One page counts. Want more tips? We’ve got you covered.
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The Book Thief at 20
Book Riot senior editor Kelly Jensen chats with Markus Zusak as his blockbuster YA novel turns 20.
It’s Complicated
Mark Oppenheimer’s biography of Judy Blume was going to generate a lot of media heat anyway, but the news that Blume—who participated in interviews, provided Oppenheimer with personal documents, and connected him to dozens of sources—is declining to comment on the book will surely activate the Streisand effect. Rather than speculate about what might have happened, I’ll encourage you to read Elisabeth Egan’s full piece here.