What I've Been Reading

Where are the missing aggregators?

Less, probably, about book publishing than I did when twitter was a viable place for finding what published pieces about publishing. This is a real problem that I hope gets solved soon! Not the social media aspect, but the curatorial/discovery one. For years and years, my muscle memory has led me to open twitter when I want to find things to read that are interesting or important or relevant. It no longer suits that purpose.

Before twitter became my go-to place, I used to read GalleyCat. I also used to chronically click on Arts & Letter Daily. Other places included The Millions and LARB. These days, LARB remains in rotation as an aggregator or sorts. So too does The New Republic, and of course Jane Friedman’s Hot Sheet. Quickly rising to the top of the list is the WRB, who are killing it, curatorially. For tweet-threads-ish-in-another-format type reading, I enjoy

BDM

, and

John Warner

and

Counter Craft

often write about the issues I’m thinking about in their Substacks. But there is a gap that one great aggregator needs to fill. Ideally by someone with exactly my sensibility, interested in the same topics, and with a similar take would be great! (There was a time when my twitter feed was just this, when I would find what my community there was reading and thinking about very easily, and it offered me an extraordinary intellectual community as well as a pipeline to new ideas and writers. RIP!)

Publishing Related:

• This article about the death of sports books is very strong, and I think the argument could be extended to most researched non-fiction.
  

• A truly fabulous use for AI; I put it under publishing-related because it is all sorts of fun to imagine ways to create books—knowledge— from this new fount of information.
  

• This new publishing memoir (not read yet, but high on my TBR)
  

• Sherrod Brown continues his campaign against the term Rust Belt, which is publishing-related for me.
  

• Does book publishing needs more merch?
  

• We can finally answer the question: who is the best nepo baby? (See prominently displayed book below)

  

For Fun:

• My new thing is walking. Okay that’s not a new thing: what’s new is that I am clocking many miles every day. Hence many podcasts, including the excellent recent season of Slow Burn on Clarence Thomas, the new Serial, “The Retrievals”, and I’ve become a fan of The Commotion.
  

• I inhaled The Sullivanians and have many, many thoughts, both positive and negative, about the book, which I plan to write up in a future newsletter.
  

• Parul Seghal may be my favorite working literary critics, but I did not think she hit the nail on the head with her latest piece on storytelling and narrative. I 100% agree with the premise—I think about this all the time!—but not so much how she wrote about it. Here’s to continuing this conversation.
  

• Phillip Maciak is definitely my favorite tv critic, and his piece on the second season of The Bear is one reason why.
  

• I’ve read Today in Tabs for years, and now, which the tabs being harder to find, I’m enjoying it even more.

I hope this aggregator-ish newsletter, which I have been doing about once per month in 2023 thus far, is helpful to any of you who also may be looking for the kinds of things I find. Please do suggest links for the August edition!

And now let me end with….

Another shout out for my book proposal course, starting August 7.

The compulsory-but-still-important reminder that becoming a paid subscriber helps me keep consuming things I can later aggregate for you.