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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 Bloom is Off
Following a press tour that managed to be more fraught than the rollout of Don’t Worry Darling, Blake Lively is suing her It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment. Lively also alleges—with the help of damning private messages—that Baldoni launched a smear campaign intended to tank her career. This is a fantastic piece of reporting by the New York Times‘s Megan Twohey, Mike McEntire, and Julie Tate, and it’s well worth your time, both for the specifics of this case and the generally chilling details about what a Hollywood take-down effort looks like in the social media era. It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover, who tends to avoid the spotlight, spoke out this weekend in support of Lively, encouraging her to “Never change. Never wilt.” (That’s a reference to Lively’s character, Lily Bloom, who owns a floral shop.)
If you missed it in theaters, It Ends With Us is streaming on Netflix now. And if you want to catch the vibe without actually watching the movie, we saw it so you don’t have to.
Goodreads Members’ Most Anticipated Books of 2025
As we get ready to turn the page on 2024, it’s time to start stacking up next year’s TBR. As measured by how many times they’ve been added to members’ Want to Read shelves, here are Goodreads’ most anticipated books of 2025. I’ve been deep in the 2025 catalogs for a few months now, but there were a few surprises even for me. S.A. Cosby’s next thriller King of Ashes is a Godfather-inspired story; Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child, will take us back to Alaska in Black Woods Blue Sky, a reimagining of Beauty and the Beast; Ali Hazelwood is switching it up again, this time with a sports romance in Deep End; and “hipster grifter” Kari Ferrell spills the juicy details of her life of crime in You’ll Never Believe Me.
The Reader in Chief Weighs In
Barack Obama released his favorite books of 2024 last week to gasps heard ’round the bookternet. In a sharp departure from his usually-predictable reading lists, Obama skipped over the year’s biggest book—James by Percival Everett—and Hanif Abdurraquib’s There’s Always This Year, both of which seem factory-made for his reading taste. (Both titles were included on Obama’s summer reading list, but historically, that hasn’t prevented books from appearing on the end-of-year list.) If I have one broad complaint about best-of lists, it’s that they rarely include context or explanation for which books made it, and that has never been more true than it is with this particular list.
Is BookTok Past Its Peak?
Book Riot’s Arvyn Cerezo speaks with publishing industry experts about one of the business’s biggest questions: is BookTok past its prime?
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