Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Something Monstrous This Way Comes
Guillermo del Toro has been working on an adaptation of Frankenstein in one way or another for decades. The long-awaited film, starring Oscar Isaacs as Victor Frankenstein and noted book lover Jacob Elordi as the monster, hits Netflix in November and promises to be one of the year’s biggest adaptations. Vanity Fair‘s exclusive preview includes interviews with del Toro, Isaacs, and Elordi, who reveal that while, yes, Frankenstein is a story about a scientist driven mad by ambition, this version is also about one of literature’s most persistent themes: “toxic family dynamics.” Shut up and take my money. Hard to imagine someone better suited to adapt the story that virtually invented science fiction than a modern master of the genre. The teaser trailer released last month has me feeling pretty confident about this one.
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The Trump Bump is Real at Indie Bookstores
When Bookshop.org released their list of the 100 bestselling books of 2025 so far a couple weeks ago, shortly after Publishers Weekly revealed the top 10 bestselling books of the year, I told my colleagues that one of these things is not like the others. The PW list is dominated by TikTok hits—Mel Robbins, Rebecca Yarros, Freida McFadden—and Suzanne Collins, whereas the first title on Bookshop’s (unranked) list is On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. Now we get some numbers to back up the trend, as PW‘s Claire Kirch documents the “Trump bump” boosting books about authoritarianism onto indie bestseller lists. On Tyranny, released in 2017 during Trump’s first term, has sold 1.4 million copies worldwide since, and nearly 1% of them (13,000 or so) have gone to customers at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon.
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That’s a fun statistic, and it supports Sharifah’s take that the Bookshop bestsellers “reflect a population of readers who are progressive, online, and engaged in the cultural and political landscape.” How does this compare to mainstream book-buying trends? Per today’s PW bestsellers list, Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory has sold 1.8 million copies this year alone, and Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins is hot on its heels.
The Fake Book That Inspired Real Chefs
Food writing is one of my favorite niche genres, so I was surprised to discover that I had never heard of a cookbook that inspired chefs like Alice Waters and Samin Nosrat. I was even more surprised to read that the book, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth by Roy Andries de Groot, is largely fictional and that this doesn’t seem to matter to the folks whose food and philosophies it helped inform. A fascinating story and an interesting invitation to consider how much a story’s truth matters when it has shaped our personal truths.
A Case for Supporting Independent Media
On today’s Book Riot Podcast, Jeff and Vanessa make a case for supporting independent media, discuss the book prize that has already dropped its 2025 longlist (yes, it’s still July), discuss how AI is changing publishing, and more.
English (US) · 