You Can't Care About Everything.

True in life, true in books.

We got lots of feedback over our confusion about how to cover/not cover the enormous (first-week at least) sales of Reckless Fearless by Lauren Roberts, the latest romantasy series to hit it big.

Several readers had heard of it because someone they know cares about it. A couple are reading it themselves. And one suggested that we should have known about it because booksellers and librarians knew it was coming and we really should maybe talk to more of these people because really we should have known.

Maybe.

The truth is, though, that I don’t care about this series, just as there are many, many books I don’t care about. This is not the same as saying I think they are bad, should not be published, the people who read them are somehow less than, or some other negative evaluation. I just don’t care. This is not to say that there might come a romantasy book that grabs my attention somehow, though probably the signal I would need would be something along the lines of “this is really doing something different.” Because for now, I feel like I get the genre, and it’s now how I want to spend my reading time.

But as someone who podcasts and writes and in general tries to cover books, my own taste cannot be the boundary of what I pay attention to? This is where the answer becomes more difficult. Am I trying to be exhaustive, a book nerd version of “all the news that’s fit to print?” Even formulating the question that way shows its absurdity: I cannot do. Rebecca cannot do it. Our entire staff cannot do it. The dozens of editors at the NYT book section cannot do it. Because there are too many books and books take a long time to read. It’s that simple.

So the last installment of an extremely-popular romantasy series needs to be about something other than romantasy is still really popular for us to get interested. This does not mean it is bad. It means that we are more interested in spending our time talking about other things. We note the big sellers and sometimes engage with them. We think about and are interested in talking about the genres and kinds of books that are on the rise and reshaping whole editorial strategies. When it comes to how we spend the next minute thinking or exploring, we are going to let our curiosity be our guides.

This is the only way it can be and not burn out. To cover a field so wide and unwieldy when you know you cannot take it all in for years on end, you have to balance what you should cover with what sustains you. If we somehow required ourselves to spend the vast majority of our reading and thinking and talking time on the popular stuff, we wouldn’t still be doing this. Heck, we probably wouldn’t have started. Ours is not a mandate to chronicle the whole, but to curate and consider stories and books from the reading world for people who care about books and reading, but not any specific book or story. The original tagline for the show was “what’s new, cool, and worth talking about in the world of books and reading.” Your criteria for “worth talking about” probably doesn’t line up exactly with ours. And it shouldn’t. But neither does it mean that if we don’t talk about something, that no one should. It just means our questions and interests lie elsewhere. And time, friends, is short.

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We are still taking recommendations requests for our Moms, Dads & Grads recommendation episode. Email your requests (for a mom, dad, grad, yourself, or anyone) to podcast (at) bookriot (dot) com.

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