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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.
The Best-Selling Backlist Books of 2025
We will eventually get a list of the best-selling books of 2025, but those tend to focus on new titles. But the vast majority of book-buying is for books that came out before 2025. And an editor with a BookScan account gave us the top 10 best-selling backlist books from the last year:
Fahrenheit 451
Animal Farm
1984
Handmaid’s Tale
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Alchemist
Red Rising
The Song of Achilles
Brave New World
Of Mice and Men
Red Rising and The Song of Achilles are the newcomers and might surprise some people.
The Millions’ The Year in Reading
Terrific browse-reading that is really just internet but feels like proper reading, where you can discover some new books that you say you want to read but will just end up in memory purgatory. What else is this week for?
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Here is an excerpt from it of Erin Somers (The Ten Year Affair) on Howard’s End. Her description of reading a classic very much lines up with my re-engagement this year on Zero to Well-Read:
I have been doing this long enough that I should know that whatever my notions are about a classic are likely wrong. But no, I never learn. Every time I’m like, what is this turgid artifact? From what dusty tomb was it unearthed?
Howards End looks so, so dusty. It’s like they tried to make it look as dusty as possible. They should refresh the design. They must. But then when you crack it, it is funny and alive, a class novel inspired by the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell concerning the fate of a country house.
What Every Non-Fiction Books is Called Now
There isn’t enough funny literary writing, but Daniel Lavery keeps the torch burning over at The Chatner. As someone who reads a bunch of books like this, the shock of recognition here was especially zingy:
Go Ahead, See If I Care Theory: A Heterosexual Woman’s Guide To Stifling Herself
First Things: Why The Morning Ends (And Why It Doesn’t Have To)
The Mastery of Circles
A Complete History of Breakfast
Pasta Fabulous
Be A Miracle Right Now
Why We Age
They Don’t Call It Menostop: Keep Going After Fifty
Keep Going After Fifty. Go Harder After Sixty. Kill Them All At Seventy
How To Age Without Getting Old
What Being Chinese Can Teach Us About Aging
1927: The Year Before 1928