Measuring Up

Three cooks, each of whom built a platform in a different medium, serve up new books.

Ree Drummond, who started blogging as Pioneer Woman in 2006, has the #1 book in the country with The Pioneer Woman Cooks: The New Frontier, with more than 100 recipes for what she calls “everyday eating,” including Instant Pot pumpkin spice oatmeal and Mean Green Mac & Cheese.

Binging with Babish by Andrew Rea, #9 overall, is named for the author’s 5.5 million–subscriber YouTube channel. Our review found the book’s film- and TV-inspired recipes “creative, if perplexing”: Amid dishes “that enthusiastic readers will be enticed to try,” there are “several recipes that Rea acknowledges are inedible,” such as what he calls the “pretty gross” Dothraki blood pie recreated from Game of Thrones.

At #9 in hardcover nonfiction, Nothing Fancy is new from Alison Roman, whose recipes—salted chocolate chunk shortbread cookies and spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric, to name two—have a tendency to go viral on Instagram. The website the Kitchn wrote in 2018 that Roman’s #thecookies “broke the internet.”

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

White-Hot Weeks

Brent Weeks closes out his epic fantasy series Lightbringer with The Burning White, #10 in hardcover fiction. First-week print unit sales imply that his fan base has been increasing with each installment.

Mackesy’s Menagerie

Debuting at #5 in hardcover fiction, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is an illustrated fable by British artist Charlie Mackesy, who worked for the Spectator and as an illustrator for Oxford University Press before he began exhibiting his work in galleries. He’s found fame through his Instagram account (178K followers) and high-profile fans including Whoopi Goldberg, Sting, and Elizabeth Gilbert.

New & Notable

The Night Fire
Michael Connelly
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #2 overall
“Connelly’s superlative second novel featuring detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch together,” our starred review said, “once again proves that he’s the modern master” of police procedurals.

The Deserter
Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille
#3 Hardcover Fiction, #10 overall
DeMille père teams up with his screenwriter son for the launch of a thriller trilogy starring, according to our starred review, “Scott Brodie, a hardened ex-soldier with impulsive, rogue tendencies, and Maggie Taylor, a cunning by-the-book Army cop who does her best to rein in Brodie’s urges, both investigative and sexual.”

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.