Defining Wellness
As the calendar flipped from 2019 to 2020, readers scooped up new hardcover releases that offer a hint as to their New Year’s resolutions.
The #2 book in the country is The Defined Dish, a Whole30-endorsed cookbook by food blogger Alex Snodgrass. Our review’s assessment: “Readers looking for healthy dishes that do not sacrifice flavor will find plenty to enjoy in this outing.”
Celebrity health coach Kelly LeVeque, whose 2017 debut, Body Love, has sold 96K print copies, returns with Body Love Every Day, #5 in hardcover nonfiction. Actors Emmy Rossum and Jennifer Garner each contributed a foreword.
In Tiny Habits, #6 in nonfiction, social science researcher B.J. Fogg “shares his myth-breaking and persuasive research on habits and human behavior,” our review said—namely, a behavior model “built on motivation, simplification, and the correlation between emotion and habit.”
Media Watch
The release of season one of Netflix’s dark fantasy series The Witcher, which dropped December 20, stoked interest in the two Andrzej Sapkowski story collections from which it was adapted. A new hardcover edition of the first prequel story collection, 2008’s The Last Wish, debuts at #19 in hardcover fiction. It was also the #4 fantasy title for December; a trade paperback edition of that book and one of the second prequel collection, Sword of Destiny, are also among the top 10 for the category.
Greta Gerwig’s big-screen adaptation of Little Women opened December 25. A middle grade hardcover tie-in edition is #8 on our children’s fiction list, and another tie-in is #19 in adult mass market.
In Clubland
First-time author Kiley Reid debuts at #3 in hardcover fiction with Such a Fun Age, “a nuanced portrait of a young black woman,” our review said, “struggling to define herself apart from the white people in her life who are all too ready to speak and act on her behalf.” Well-Read Black Girl and Reese Witherspoon are among those who named the novel a book club pick; Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe acquired film and TV rights.
NEW & NOTABLE
RADICAL COMPASSION
Tara Brach
#19 Hardcover Nonfiction
Mindfulness teacher Brach “presents a straightforward approach to living with more presence and compassion,” our review said. “Anyone hoping to gain a deeper understanding of themselves and advice for easing the burden of negative emotions will find this to be a helpful resource.”
THE WIVES
Tarryn Fisher
#9 Trade Paperback
In what our review called an “engrossing psychological thriller” in which the unreliable narrator shares her husband with two women she’s never met, “Fisher smoothly inserts moments of self-doubt, longing, paranoia, and triumph into her unsettling narrative.”
