The Biggest Bookish News of the Week

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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 most popular stories from the past week.

Walmart Gets Saucy

If you’ve been wanting to turn your book club into an episode of Hot Ones, now’s your moment. Walmart, the big-box retailer historically devoted to ~family values, has created a line of hot sauces inspired by spicy romance novels. Made in partnership with Melinda’s Hot Sauces, the Spicy Books limited-edition set includes five 5oz bottles of various heat levels and retails for $14.98. Walmart cooked up the caliente condiments as a surprise for screenwriter Yulin Kuang, who is set to adapt two Emily Henry novels (Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation) and whose own debut, How to End a Love Story, was published in April. Stay tuned for the next culinary tie-in, James Patterson’s “mystery” meat Spam promo.

Spoiler: It’s the Patriarchy

A few things in life are guaranteed: death, taxes, and that every so often, the Discourse decides to fuel itself by musing about why men don’t read novels. (And no, it’s not because book cover design alienates men, though I do have a 1,000-word essay in me about that for another day.) This issue of men and fiction is not a new question, or even, frankly, an interesting one. Since the 18th century, fiction has been aimed at and increasingly ruled by leisured women, and thanks to the magic of capitalist patriarchy in which men are seen as most successfully male when they are most visibly productive, men are incentivized to affirm their masculinity by distancing themselves from any cultural product that is primarily associated with women.

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Men receive a centuries-old message that if you want to be sigma (greetings, fellow kids!), you better stay on the grindset, and that means only reading nonfiction, if you read at all. And it’s a huge bummer! Fiction is fun and edifying. Men should get to enjoy all of its benefits, and the rest of us should get to enjoy a world in which men aren’t so constrained by narrow definitions of masculinity. It’s almost like patriarchy is bad for everyone! The next time someone feels the urge to write a “Why don’t men read fiction?” piece, I hope they’ll pick up Liz Plank’s For the Love of Men instead and redirect their time and energy to the real problem.

Utah Bans 13 Books From Public Schools Statewide

After passing one of the most restrictive book banning measures in the country, the state of Utah has released its list of books to be banned from schools across the state. The ban encompasses books that are deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic,” (six of the 13 are romantasy titles by Sarah J. Maas), and the titles are, on average, 13 years old. As my colleague Kelly Jensen points out, this highlights the fact that “the so-called problem of pornography in schools appeared only when it was a convenient talking point.” Funny how that works.

The vast majority of Americans disagree with book bans and believe they infringe on parents’ rights, and that’s part of the point. This isn’t about the books; it’s about a small minority of extreme right-wing conservatives who know they are losing power in American culture and believe they should be able to restrict everyone else’s freedom. Go to your school board meetings, volunteer, and show up the polls in November, folks. Let’s remind them this is a losing issue, just like it was in 2022.

We Saw It Ends With Us So You Don’t Have To

Book Riot’s intrepid managing editor Vanessa Diaz joined me for a discussion of the new adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. The headline says it all.

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