Don’t Judge a Book By Its Author
Jane Austen’s BookTok , a fifty year musical journey, George RR Martin’s latest and down with Valentine’s Day!
Is it possible to have a gathering of the biggest trend-generator in history, an author from 250 years ago, musicians across half a century, a chocolate bar designed to attack lovers and a physics paper from fantasy?
Indeed it is, and welcome to it.
Don’t Judge a Book By Its Author: how the 21st century meets Jane Austen.
Friday Finds: Destroy Valentine’s Day or watch a cricket captain. Or both.
Musical Time Travel: 50 years in one remarkable sequence.
With: George RR Martin’s latest (no sorry, not that), a cricketing dad’s wisdom, top 100 inventions, awards and AI for music.
1. Don’t Judge a Book By Its Author
BookTok is a reading community on Tiktok where people discuss, critique & recommend books. Since 2020, it has evolved into a vibrant, popular and influential community. Titles trending on BookTok find their sales spiking, they can rapidly hit bestseller lists and become part of the wider zeitgeist. Indeed, its trends affect writing styles and publishing trends; it has become a powerful force that publishers look to leverage.
BookTok has taken books from near-obscurity to chart-topping bestsellers years after they released; it has convinced publishers to rush-print hundreds of thousands of extra copies; it has even landed ‘viral authors’ huge deals before a single chapter hit the shelves. Yes, that might be BookTok’s most ‘whoa!’ flex.”Lightlark by Alex Aster didn’t even need to exist before BookTok sold it. She teased the title on TikTok with cinematic world-building videos and mysterious plot hints to make it look like the next big fantasy obsession. Aster dangled the title on TikTok, scored a six-figure deal, and got a movie deal before anyone actually read it.
Another one? A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a “relentlessly harrowing” 700-page novel about suffering & pain. This 2015 book became a viral sensation some years later, because BookTok turned it into a crying challenge. Wait, what? People sobbed, recommended it with trigger warnings, and somehow made it must-read material. There was (is?) a viral obsession with books that emotionally wreck readers- Tiktokers film themselves in tears during or just after reading.
It’s real- TikTok doesn’t just follow trends, it seems to create them out of thin air.
First Impressions
Then there’s Jane Austen. You might have heard of this author of books like Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility? The English novelist from the early 19th century whose writing is noted for “wit, realism, shrewd sympathy, and brilliant prose style”, was the daughter of a rector and resident of a circumscribed countryside world of gentry and clergy. Across her six novels spanning 1811-1817 (all published anonymously at the time and two after her death), her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life defined the ‘novel of manners’.
Now, Jane meets BookTok. You saw this coming, right?
In an attempt to make her classics more accessible to young readers, Penguin has opted to go all Tiktok on us- romantic, colourful, illustrated covers and Young Adult authors’ intros and blurbs. Christening this new series ‘First Impressions’ (the early name for Pride & Prejudice) and projecting vibes swimming in romance- “meet cutes, missed connections and drama”, they are meant to connect with BookTok’s core, dominated by the romance genre, particularly "spicy" romance.
Here’s the official description:
Fall head over heels for First Impressions, Puffin’s boldly designed new YA Jane Austen collection. Like all the best romcoms, Austen’s novels are full of meet-cutes, missed connections and drama; they are masterclasses in the lost arts of stolen glances and breath-taking gestures.
With a stunning modern design and forewords from leading YA romance authors, this eye-catching six-book series is an open invitation to escape the brutal nonchalance of modern dating and embrace your inner romantic.
Here you are:
“Legit Freaking Soulmates”
In reality, we very often judge books by their covers. They are the gateway into picking up a book or clicking on a thumbnail, flipping through it or checking ratings, putting it in the basket or adding to cart. And book covers, especially for classics, are interpreted and reimagined all the time. If done in the service of making young people in a Bridgerton world discover timeless literature, that can only be a good thing.
Right?
Not everyone is loving this approach. Some detect a trace of fluff to these covers, there is cynicism that it is a “cash-grab”, an unabashed attempt at reframing Jane Austen works as teen friendly rom-coms. These are after all, very much the original texts, just in new wrappers.
The books are also accompanied by forewords from YA romance authors like “‘Anne and Wentworth are legit freaking soulmates ; ”‘Lizzy and Darcy’s will be a relationship with a high roasting-to-flirting ratio” ; “If Elinor were real, I’d bet that her favourite Taylor Swift song would be This is Me Trying”.
In all of this lies a certain tonal allure that many feel will do a disservice to the text, even misrepresent what a young reader is going to find in those pages. Sample this from some reditters:
"It feels a little bit patronising,… I can’t help but feel that readers with absolutely no prior knowledge of Austen are going to feel a bit deceived.”
"It feels such like a dumbing-down to encapsulate Austen within the confines of a 'romcom’
“This is exactly why I borrowed my mum's books (Austen among them)when I was younger. I hated books aimed specifically at children that pretended we were dumb and talked like babies.”
But maybe these takes are from people either very close to her work, or older readers- neither of whom are expected to be drawn in by this release. There is merit in avoiding any ‘gatekeeping’ around such work, and parking our design and literary snobbery to the side. If these pink and lavender books fly off the shelves, and really make more people read Austen, that is a net good. If it doesn’t, it’s just another marketing effort falling by the wayside.
And hey- it’s not all fluffy steamy romance, young adult and fantasy, or Wattpads growing up, that populate Boktok either (though all those might well dominate.)
In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. And it trended on BookTok and Bookstagram (the IG equivalent). I mean, Dostoevsky! Jacqueline Harpman’s dystopian I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, then slid into obscurity. The book was print-on-demand, barely selling a handful a year. Now, it’s known in the hashtag world as IWHNKM, and a staple bestseller in the UK; US bookshops have struggled to keep stock meeting the demand.
I don’t care for these covers, and I don’t know her work well enough to be a big Jane Austen fan— apparently they are called Janeites now! Let Penguin have a go; once these are released next month, we’ll see if BookTok can do its thing for old Jane. She was born 250 years ago, and we still talk about her and read her work. That’s bigger than any trend or hashtag or book cover.
~ · ~
· on A Little Life · on Dostoevsky’s White Night · on IWHNKM · on Janeites ·
2. Friday Finds
A pair today. First off, some cricket?
Today we find ourselves one on one with a certain Pat Cummins. The skipper of the Aussie cricket team was roped in by Prime to promote the upcoming ICC Champions Trophy. In an oddly amusing series, we see Patty in various situations, mostly around the house and mostly by himself, getting pumped for the upcoming tournament. Here is a link for all of the spots, but this one is Cummins trying very hard to come up with good sledges for the event. Key here is trying.
Its amusing (not hilarious) for a cricket fan, and a bit cultural- I can see some Indian/South Asian fans possibly not finding it as funny (though they are not the target)… but I must say the fella can act alright.
World Cup winner, team man, great smile, loves the planet, stands up for things, wins everything he plays (almost), overall nice guy… is there anything this man can’t do?
The unfortunate bit? Looks like Patty will be watching the tournament from the sidelines, as he has just pulled out of the team with an injury.
~ · ~
Now we have a funny, curious, even bold spot from Cadbury’s in India. Their 5Star chocolate bar has had some fun, funny and generally lateral advertising over the years. This one takes on the small task of destroying Valentine’s Day! Now they’ve dissed the lovey-dovey day before, but this time, they want to recruit the ultimate killers of trends and coolness in things- UNCLES!
The Beast of Traal takes look at the arc of 5 Star ads over the years and wonders if this has gone too far?
3. Musical Time Travel: 50 Years In One Remarkable Sequence
Saturday Night Live, America’s iconic show, clocks 50 years in 2025. It has been shaping American culture for half a century now, bringing us everything from iconic catchphrases to career-defining musical moments. Two documentaries released in January marked this milestone. The first was ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’, a four-part docu-series featuring the show's history, with rare footage and interviews.
Then, ‘Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music’, a feature-length documentary that wades into the show's rich musical legacy. It opens with a sequence that is an absolute masterclass in curation and craft- a remix of SNL’s most iconic musical moments, cut together with razor-sharp precision. These seven minutes are a breathtaking rush through history, where Queen, David Bowie, Kanye West, Nirvana, Prince, REM, Billie Eilish, Cher and The Rolling Stones all share the same stage. It’s a stunning intersection of archival nous and musical storytelling; a feat of research, curation, patience, and most of all, editing.
And you can watch it, in just a minute.
Ahmir Khalib Thompson aka Questlove is a musician, DJ, producer, author, and filmmaker. You might know him as drummer and co-founder of The Roots, the house band for The Tonight Show. His documentary directorial debut in 2021—Summer of Soul— won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, along with a BAFTA, a Grammy, and a Sundance Grand Jury Prize. An encyclopaedic historian of music and pop culture, he was the perfect bet to curate Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music.
This was presented to me in early 2021 when I was doing press for Summer of Soul, and I knew that I had to turn this thing in by 2024. So if I go through somewhere between four to eight episodes a day, maybe I can have something. But I gotta really commit.
Co-directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, the film was a huge undertaking. Spanning five decades and nearly 1,000 episodes, the film explores how music has been a constant, defining force on the show. Originally, his plan was simple: pick the 50 best musical performances of SNL. But as he sifted through the archives, he quickly realised that was not enough.
It’s almost like music is the unspoken co-star of the show, maybe I have to start over. The amount of times I had to knock my Jenga down to start again. For me, the way that I curate things and put things together, especially of this manner, people remember the first 10 minutes of a presentation and then the last five minutes.
I await watching the full film. But I have sat mesmerised by its opening sequence. Questlove and the team have created something that feels like a masterful DJ set spanning five decades. It serves multiple functions simultaneously; an introduction to the documentary's scope, a demonstration of SNL's range, and a piece of music in its own right.
Leading with a cavalcade of stars invoking the trademark, three-word introduction for musical guests- everyone from Daniel Craig to LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney to Eddie Murphy says “ladies and gentlemen”, before the music kicks in and the unexpected takes over. Queen's ‘Under Pressure’ manages to create a dialogue with Dave Matthews Band's ‘Ants Marching’, and then of course with Vanilla Ice; REM, Cher, Hansen, Busta Rhymes, TLC, and Bobby McFerrin seem to perform together across time. This is creative vision and precision in craft working in concert. Both a technical achievement and artistic statement.
These are not just clever editing tricks- there is a stamp of authority about them that shows-off a great grip on structure, tempo and harmony, allowing seemingly unrelated performances to exist in the same sonic space. There is a synthesis of sorts that transforms five decades of performances into a punchy conversation across time.
Here’s a one-sentence review:
The new film about *Saturday Night Live’*s five-decade history of (mostly) live musical performances kicks off with the best opening to a music-centered documentary I have ever seen. ^
Whether you're a long-time SNL fan or just someone who appreciates seeing how music evolves and connects across time, this sequence offers something worth watching.
Ok, now take a minute or seven please, and check this out!
Afternote:
Questlove says he has been involved with Saturday Night Live in every possible role—except for the one he wants most. "I've been a punchline on 'Weekend Update.' I've been part of a Timothée Chalamet sketch. I've been mentioned in monologues… I'm a part of that ecosystem almost in every way but the one way I want to be, which is musical guest. The Roots are working on their 17th album right now, so I'm still hanging on to my dream."
4. Quickies
If you think truly creative people with vast and impressive bodies of work must not be procrastinators, let George RR Martin give you an alternate view. The grand old gent seems to be doing everything he can to avoid finishing the finale to his Game of Thrones books (the powerhouse A Song of Ice and Fire series). In the latest effort, he has just finished co-authoring a peer-reviewed physics paper.
Yes, you read that right. “The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.” Right, thanks very much then.
Amelia Kerr, cricketer from New Zealand, has had quite the year, winning the T20 World Cup with Player of the Final and Player of the Series, winning the domestic T20 league and now being awarded the ICC Women’s Cricketer of The Year. Quite brilliant for the young all-rounder. But I bring her up for something she mentioned in an interview, while talking about the importance of family in her career.
My dad said to me once:
If I turn up to a ground and you’re walking off the field from batting, I don't want to know from your reaction if you got a golden duck or a hundred.
While at odds with the allure of seeing players wear their passion on their sleeve, I found this fascinating. There is something of the real, the tough, the grounded, even the stoic in this thought. Doesn’t matter if you’ve just had the best or worst day in the office; at that moment, don’t show the world that. Stay real.
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
Know: Music streaming service Deezer launched a new AI detection tool, then revealed its new tech has already discovered that roughly 10,000 ‘fully AI-generated tracks’ are being delivered to its platform every day. That amounts to about 10% of the daily content delivered to Deezer. CEO Alexis Lanternier also said the company plans to “exclude” fully AI-generated tracks “from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.” Promising words.
Read: A fully transparent TV, Game-Changing Vaccine, a reimagined spice-grinder, an AI-powered toilet seat, a DIY Pap smear, a 25-year battery… all in TIME’s list of the best inventions of 2024.
Know: The Grammys happened. Is that still a thing for many of you? Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year, Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” was unstoppable (Record & Song of the Year), Chappell Roan took was the Best New Artist, and no- Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish won nothing.
Stay real.