Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Publishers This article first appeared in Book Gossip , a newsletter about what we’re reading and what we actually think about it. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month. Dear Book Gossipers, you don’t need me to tell you that it was, in many ways, a hellish year. Unfortunately, books weren’t entirely exempt from that. Book sales fell in the first half of 2025, and while AI continued to erode our ability to write and think for