Lit Hub Weekly: January 6 - 10, 2025

• Need help deciding what to read this year? These are the books we’re most anticipating in 2025. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Why did we start drinking milk, anyway? Anne Mendelson explores the prehistoric origins of modern agriculture and human-animal relations. | Lit Hub Food
• “For the first time since I started submitting stories to literary journals, I found myself asking: wait…what kind of book do I actually want to write?” Kevin Maloney on Henry David Thoreau, Kurt Vonnegut, and rewriting his life story across multiple books. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Black authors of speculative work sit at the apex of the two issues, frequently relegated to a strange place of hyperinvisibility as if Blackness and speculative fiction are both some extreme ‘other.’” Naomi Day examines the pigeonholing of Black writers. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Megan Craig examines the poetry of geology: “Oddly, perhaps, it is the late physician, neurologist, and author Oliver Sacks who offers the most poetic assessment of rocks.” | The American Scholar
• How romance readers rallied towards fighting book bans. | The Guardian
• Greta Rainbow chronicles a year with Maya Man’s net art piece, “Glance Back.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Jon Klassen reflects on the beauty of board books. | The New York Times
• Can an author own a trope? Katy Waldman on genre, accused plagiarism, and the rise of romantasy. | The New Yorker
• “These strange relics allow us to understand a lot about what the contemporary fear of ‘cancel culture’ among right-wingers and reactionary centrists is really about.” Adrian Daub revisits the European “PC dictionaries” of the 1990s. | Slate
• Ariel Dorfman on regret, the day Salvador Allende was overthrown, and building “a tomorrow where we are not condemned to mourn those whose only sin was to fight for a more decent and just world.” | The New York Times
• “I never realized how similar my relationship to language was to religious faith, taking it as a given that words mean something.” Daisy Alioto on Conclave, The Brutalist, and secret names. | Dirt
• Mosab Abu Toha talks to Amy Goodman about ongoing genocide in Gaza: “I mean, the painful thing is that we are talking about things today and next year, what happened, that we are talking about the same thing, the same losses, or even worse.” | Democracy Now!
• “Owens is to helicopter moms what the neuroscientist-cum-health guru Andrew Huberman is to aging bachelors: a tonic for the spiritual ennui of the technocratic striver class.” Matthew Gasda enters the Zibbyverse. | UnHerd
• H.M.A. Leow considers the hybrid heroines of “Bollywood chick lit.” | JSTOR Daily
• Where are all the ecoterrorists? In books and movies, of course. | The Baffler
• “Your grandmother, like the mother in the novel, could have been mistaken for somebody who had nothing, who came from nothing, who was nothing.” Nathan Dize on a translation project that hits close to home. | Words Without Borders
• “Why must we breathe? What does wanting have to do with the functioning of my body?” Jamieson Webster on climate, psychoanalysis, and breath. | Broadcast
• Rebecca Solnit considers climate crisis and the California wildfires. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub:

Lauren E. Oakes on ancient arboreal memories • On creating a natural refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains • The plight of Indigenous women in the Brazilian Amazon • Lauren Groff on the nuances of A Room of One’s Own • Elizabeth Harris on making politicians mad as a journalist •  Jane Ciabattari talks to Playworld author Adam Ross • Gloria L. Huang on understanding herself through classic teen books • The effortless racism of America’s criminal justice system • What will you preserve in the face of climate crisis? • Kevin Maloney on rewriting his life story across multiple books • How ancient Roman coins reveal human stories • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Kristen Arnett answers your questions about awkward writerly situations • Family illness, government cover-ups, and the unhealed wounds of nuclear testing • Meredith D. Clark on online solidarity • Piers Gelly revisits True Grit after Trump’s reelection • Adam Haslett on harnessing doubt • The misunderstood history of the Black Panther Party • Gabeba Baderoon explores historical trauma in South Africa • The best reviewed books of the week