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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 Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh, a novel about “a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.” In his acceptance speech, Szalay, who is the first Hungarian-British author to win the award, described the book as “risky.” Roddy Doyle, chair of the judging panel, noted its “utter singularity.” What makes it so unique? The Guardian‘s Justine Jordan explains:
[Flesh] “takes a classic story arc – one man’s journey through life, from childhood to old age – and presents it in a radically new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form…we are cut off from his thoughts, emotions and motivations: we see only how others react to him, desire him, fear him.”
For a look behind the scenes of the Booker, here’s Sarah Jessica Parker discussing her experience serving on this year’s committee.
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The Goodreads Choice Awards Begin
Voting is open in the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards. Curated from readers’ favorite books of the year, each of the 15 categories includes 20 nominated titles. Members can vote for one book in each category through November 23. The final round, which opens November 25, will present the top 10 books in each category, with winners announced December 4. Popularity is not a reliable indicator of literary quality, so I’m always delighted to see titles that are both well-crafted and commercially successful make these lists. This year’s crossover darlings include The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, A Guardian and a Thief, and Wild Dark Shore.
Reading is Fashionable Again
I’m bookmarking this deep dive into the fashion industry’s recurrent interest in literature for knife-and-fork reading this weekend. In the meantime, I’ll offer that the answer to the headline’s questions, “Is reading fiction really cooler than ever? Or is it all just another performative fad?” is “Yes.” You wouldn’t know it from from falling sales numbers, but books do seem to be having a cultural moment, and we can probably thank algorithmic media for both igniting a new generation’s interest in reading and making anything-but-scrolling more appealing than ever.
