Booksology What the most popular book clubs are reading now
The book club is in a really tough situation right now, but I can’t complain. There are general books, niche books, big name books, and small books. Jamie Canabeth breaks down what some of the biggest book clubs are reading this month. The selection is a good mix of new It Books for 2026 (such as John of John by Douglas Stewart, selected by Roxanne Gay’s Book Club) and backlist titles (such as The Emperor of Joy by Ocean Vuong, selected by book influencer Jack Edwards’ Book Club, The Inklings).
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Will BookTok bring back monoculture?
Reading this post about Romancing the Phone Substack (named A++) got me thinking about the demise of monoculture. This essentially means that the majority of us don’t share the same pop culture moments as we used to. This is widely attributed to the rise of the internet, niche communities, personalized algorithms, and streaming services. I’ve never thought of it that way, and I know this is a little off-topic to the point of this Substack post, but I think BookTok is reclaiming a kind of monoculture by just putting books front and center. That and popular adaptations, as briefly mentioned by the writer of this post, Alyssa Morris. I wish the popular books on BookTok were more diverse, but I’m honestly a little surprised that they aren’t. Because if you’re in there enough, the books mentioned start to feel redundant.
But I digress. If you’re wondering which books are at the center of the monoculture that BookTok is cultivating, those are basically the current bestsellers. Morris cites “Yesterday,” “The Strangers,” “Project Hail Mary,” “Dungeon Crawler Carl,” and “Off Campus.” Two of these were modern IT books, and two were helped by adaptations (although project hail mary To be fair, it was popular even before it was made into a movie starring Ryan Gosling, but the ending is an odd pick, and I’m glad it’s popular just because it’s so weird. But otherwise, like I said, they aren’t diverse and when you see these in every list they start to feel repetitive.
Shaq is doing everything here.
Yes, I mean Shaq. Like Shaquille O’Neal. A person playing sports ball. And I don’t hate him at all — in fact, I don’t know much about him or any of the athletes — but ever since I regained consciousness, I’ve seen him put his name on everything. Well, he is now involved in comics, specifically Archie Comics. Yes, it’s super random. But it also kind of sounds dope, I’m not going to lie. This partnership is for new original series with the following titles: Vengeance Unchained: The Legend of Black Caesarand it has an element that almost always guarantees my interest in the pirate thing. This is a story about the real-life Black Caesar, a West African who was part of Blackbeard’s crew. Written by Stephanie Williams (of Nubia and the Amazons, Moon Girl, and Devil Dinosaur fame!) and illustrated by Ray-Anthony Height (artist of Star Wars: Doctor Aphra and Strange Academy).
you know what? Yeah. oh yeah.
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