Announcing the 2025 Book List (AKA: The Great Winnowing)!
Close Reads Podcast
Goldberry Studios
4.4 • 823 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2024
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The reading list for 2025 is officially official! After a lively nominating season and much debate (which you can hear in this episode), we have chosen nine books to discuss next year. We’re heavy on classics this year, by design—and we’re going to take our time as we read them.
If you’d like to hear how these books came to be chosen (and the books that didn’t quite make the cut), click that “play'“ button to check our “Great Winnowing” conversation. Here’s to a great year of reading together!
A few notes:
* You can click here buy these books through Goldberry Books.
* The complete schedule, with dates and number of weeks per book, will be relased later this year. We do not yet know the order in which we will read them (including which will be read first).
* The first subscriber-exclusive book for 2025 will be The Betrothed, an Italian novel by Alessandro Manzoni. We will announce the second title soon.
* The titles in our monthly series on mystery fiction will be announced in early October
Happy listening!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit closereads.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm David Kern. |
| 0:04.1 | I'm Heidi White. |
| 0:05.6 | I'm Tim McIntosh. |
| 0:07.1 | And I'm Sean Johnson. |
| 0:08.8 | You were listening to Close Reads, a podcast for the Incurable Reader on which Sean Johnson likes to just try to make me laugh during the intros. |
| 0:16.3 | This is the 2024 great winnowing episode on which we are discussing not one book, but many books. |
| 0:25.9 | And the attempt to narrow down 180 weeks down to 46 weeks so that in 2025 we can talk about books along with you all, those of you who are listening. |
| 0:38.9 | Thank you for tuning in. |
| 0:43.8 | This is an episode that I know is one of our most popular episodes. So guys, no pressure. Don't screw it up. Okay. We have the spreadsheet and everybody's busy looking at the spreadsheet again. |
| 0:49.6 | It is a spreadsheet that has 38 books on it right now. |
| 0:55.8 | Oh man. |
| 1:00.4 | Each of them have been allocated a certain number of weeks on which, you know, that we would be discussing them on the show next year based on the page count. |
| 1:03.7 | And that adds up to 243 weeks right now, which we need to narrow down to 46. So Heidi, how are you feeling about that? |
| 1:14.6 | I feel great about it. We always get her done. We do. And the show goes on from year to year. |
| 1:20.6 | So if everybody's, if somebody's favorite book doesn't get cast, so to speak, this year, maybe next year. |
| 1:27.2 | That's true. And |
| 1:27.9 | 2025 is our 10th, June of 2025, the show will have been going for 10 years. Wow. Amazing. Amazing. |
| 1:35.1 | Yeah. So we would have to do some thriving and flourishing because you have run out of books. |
| 1:40.9 | That's true. And just when you think you might, you discover more. Yeah. Not that I ever think that I might. Because of the making of books. That's true. And just when you think you might, you discover more. |
| 1:45.8 | Not that I ever think that I might. |
| 1:47.3 | Of the making of books, there is no end, right? |
| 1:49.3 | That's right. |
... |
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