July 2022 update: Lattes, legends and panda preservation
It’s been a while since the last analysis update, but I’m back in business!
Honestly, I got a bit burned out by the rise of in divisive, political books; as well as the repetitiveness of the monthly top books, and the newsletter mostly ending up in peoples’ spam inboxes. I think in the future I’m going to do fewer monthly update type analyses, and more individual subject-based blog posts. Let me know if there’s anything you’re curious about!
But for now, I’ve got the hazmat suit on back trawling through reddit comments to bring you a not-so-monthly update.
And rest assured: I’ve still been updating the dataset regularly, and using redditreads to discover some awesome new books!
New books for July
First up here are the latest additions to the Reddit Reads dataset, first appearing in July.
Just one anti-woke Christian rant preventing a romance novel clean-sweep!
New books for 2022
Because this is the first update of the year, I'm also looking at new books in 2022 to bring us back up to speed.
I'm gonna take a controversial approach and split this up into two categories: romance novels, and all others.
We've seen some erotica with interesting themes in the redditreads updates, but medieval-monster-coffeeshop themed Legends & Lattes is the genre crossover to end all crossovers, as one might expect for the so-far top book of 2022. "A hot cup of fantasy slice-of-life with a dollop of romantic froth".
Ok, now lets give the non-romance books a chance by excluding all the better-scoring erotica novels. It's like highschool PE but for books.
My body is growing is an illustrated sex education book that some pear-clutching thinkofthechildren redditors shared on conservative subreddits to warn other repressed puritanical parents, lest their offspring develop a healthy relationship with their bodies and sex.
The Kaiju Preservation Society and Upgrade are both contemporary sci-fi thrillers: the first tells the story of a app-based delivery driver who turns to saving pandas during Covid; the second is a gene-hacking thriller with a very catching cover.