Get a Hoda This

Today’s Hoda Kotb has the #3 book in the country with I Really Needed This Today, a year’s worth of daily inspiration drawn from the quotes she’s posted to her 1.4 million–follower Instagram account. In addition to her two picture books, both illustrated by Suzie Mason, Kotb has written three previous books for adults. First-week print unit sales for the new title are more than triple those for her other adult books combined.

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Strout Numbered

Elizabeth Strout returns to the Pulitzer Prize–winning world of a cantankerous math teacher in Maine with the PW-starred Olive, Again, debuting at #4 in hardcover nonfiction and selling in one week the same number of print copies it took 2008’s Olive Kitteridge well over a year to sell. That title, boosted by the Pulitzer win and 2014 miniseries, has sold more than a million copies in trade paperback.

The Entertainers

A trio of celebrity books lend star power to our hardcover nonfiction list.

In Me (#1 in hardcover nonfiction, #2 overall), pop legend Elton John “looks back cheerfully on a melodramatic life” in what our starred review went on to call a “rollicking autobiography.”

Actor and stand-up comedian Ali Wong, with Dear Girls (#7 hardcover nonfiction), delivers what the subtitle calls “intimate tales, untold secrets, & advice for living your best life” in the guise of letters to her young daughters.

And in Home Work (#10 hardcover nonfiction), Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar–winning singer and actor Julie Andrews, writing with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, “offers a sincere and inspiring account,” our starred review said, “focus[ed] on her Hollywood years beginning in 1962.”

New & Notable

The Guardians
John Grisham
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #1 overall
“A lack of nuance mars this novel,” our review said, “which centers on idealistic attorneys fighting wrongful convictions.”

Catch and Kill
Ronan Farrow
#3 Hardcover Nonfiction, #4 overall
In what our review called a “crackerjack journalistic thriller,” New Yorker writer Farrow “revisits his 2017 reporting on sexual assault and harassment allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.”

Sulwe
Lupita Nyong’o, illus. by Vashti Harrison
#4 Children’s Picture Books
Actor Nyong’o makes her authorial debut with a story our starred review called “by turns beguiling” and “magical,” its “graceful prose” enhanced by Harrison’s “expertly executed animation-style art.”

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.