When it’s cold, wet and miserable like it was yesterday in Las Vegas, would you rather curl up with your iPhone — or a good book?
Although print-book sales last year were down 6.5 percent from 2021, Publishers Weekly says people are still buying a lot more books than before the pandemic — 12 percent more since 2019.
The hashtag #BookTok has had more than 100 billion hits since TikTok’s book club went official last summer.
As for Las Vegas: Four years ago, the New York Times said the city was becoming a literary hub.
Backing this up is Drew Cohen, the co-owner and buyer of The Writer's Block, a downtown independent bookstore, and Kim Foster, a local author with a cookbook reading club called Please Send Noodles. Foster's 2017 Desert Companion story, The Meth Lunches, has inspired her forthcoming book of the same title.
The Writer's Block reflects Las Vegas' growing literary interests — one that isn't too unlike those in other cities. "We do tend to sell similar books to what other independent bookstores nationally are selling," said Cohen. "We definitely have a literary niche here in Vegas. So we are selling a lot of literary fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction — that would be essay collections and criticism."
"It's not anything too out of the ordinary, even though we're in a city that I think people expect will have very different literary habits."
Here's a list of some of the books mentioned and recommended in the episode:
- Laura McBride, In the Midnight Room
- Claire Vaye Watkins, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
- Sally Denton, The Colony
- Daria Peoples, Hello, Mister Blue
- Viola Davis, Finding Me
- Rob Delaney, A Heart That Works
- Eric Kim, Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home
- Melissa Clark, Dinner: Changing the Game: A Cookbook
- Deb Perelman, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
- Susan Marie Swanson, The House in the Night
- John MacArthur, Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ and The Gospel According to God
- Hyeonseo Lee and David John, The Girl With Seven Names: Escape from North Korea
