Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

It’s a big week over here in the Non-Obvious team as we’re launching our picks for the best books of the year that made the Longlist in the 2024 Non-Obvious Book Awards! You can see the winners showcased below as well as get an advance look at the biggest trends in book topics for the past year.

Next week on Thursday at 11am EST, I will be doing a LIVE announcement of the winners on YouTube so mark your calendars for that and I’ll share a link to watch in next week’s newsletter. It will be available for later playback too in case you can’t make it.

Now that we are back at work this week in America, I also have a full list of non-obvious stories from the week to share with you including a deep dive into the myth of food deserts, how Amsterdam actually managed to get tourists to stop coming to their city and a new look at how music alters how we remember moments in our lives.

Enjoy the books and the stories this week, and always stay curious!

Rohit

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The Top 12 Trends From Non-Fiction Books Published In 2024

This week is the first announcement for our annual Non-Obvious Book Awards and we just published our list of the Top 100 books of the year that made our annual Longlist. As part of our judging process, I also spend some time looking for some macro themes across the many submissions we receive. In total, we consider more than 1000 books published across the past 12 months from publishers of all sizes (and a handful of submitted self published books too).

Yesterday I published a short article featuring an inside look at the top twelve themes and trends from books. The short list of themes is noted below and you can see the books in each category as well as a short writeup about each theme in the presentation featured on that post.

1. Calming Anxiety & Burnout

2. Math Mindedness

3. Good Aging

4. Rethinking Higher Ed

5. Generosity First

6. Saving Humanity

7. The Female Lens

8. Finding Purpose

9. Climate Solutionism

10. The Citizenship Imperative

11. Quiet Leadership

12. The Friendship Antidote

After reading these, I’d love to know what you think and if you’re an avid reader—what other themes in books stood out for you this past year?

The Truth About Food Deserts and How The Solution To Fix Them Already Exists

A food desert is defined as “a geographic area where residents' access to affordable, healthy food options (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) is restricted or nonexistent due to the absence of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance. I have known the term for a while but always assumed that the existence of these areas was a symptom of capitalism. It was probably just not economically viable for grocery stores to exist in economically depressed areas. An article from The Atlantic this week suggests that this explanation may not be entirely true.

Prior to the early 1990s, small towns and poor neighborhoods had ample grocery stores and this was never a problem. So what happened around that time that created this decades-long public health crisis? It turns out that back in the 1930s the US government had passed a piece of legislation known as the Robinson-Patman Act which “essentially banned price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them.” This rule allowed smaller grocery stores to compete with national chains. Then in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, they essentially stopped enforcing it … which meant smaller suppliers got squeezed out of markets.

The solution to this problem, therefore, is a government empowered to actually enforce the Act to make it possible for independent grocery stores in small towns to return. As the author of this article suggests, “hopefully the incoming Trump administration realizes that the rural and working-class voters who propelled him to power are among those most affected by food deserts” … and they start enforcing the Act once more.

Amsterdam Launched A Campaign To Convince British Tourists NOT To Visit. Did It Work?

Back in 2023 in response to a growing number of young male British tourists partying, getting drunk and generally behaving badly, the city of Amsterdam launched a “digital discouragement” campaign aimed at suggesting that these visitors would not be welcome and should skip their trips. At the time, the campaign was widely shared and many criticized it for unfairly targeting one stereotype of British traveler. Others suggested the real problem was over tourism which was being fueled by the city’s famous coffee shop culture and red light district.

Nearly a year later, the early results of the campaign came back and it seemed that indeed this campaign did result in a 22% reduction in British travelers to the city—though the city’s simultaneous flight restrictions and cap on inbound flights to Schiphol airport were probably a bigger factor. The example is one that is being closely watched by many other cities who are also dealing with angry locals who feel their city is getting overrun with tourists who treat it poorly and generally turn a beautiful place into an overly Instagrammed circus of contrived snapshots.

What do you think about these sorts of discouragement campaigns? Are they a natural response from frustrated locals or an overreaction to the problem of over tourism?

New Study Finds Music Can Alter the Way We Feel About Our Memories

Imagine if the way you remember a moment from your past was dependent on the music you were listening to at the time. It turns out this may be exactly how our brains work to process memories. As a Fast Company article this week notes:

“When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.”

The significance of this finding could be particularly useful when considering how to help people who are struggling with overwhelming negative or traumatic memories. Music-based interventions could offer relief and help with treatments for depression or other mental health conditions. Presumably there are also more intentional applications for any of us to think carefully about the soundtrack we choose during moments in our own lives where we are making memories we want to remember too.

12 Provocations For Year Ahead: 2025

“Predictions are boring. None of us knows the future and therefore no one cares what you think is going to happen. Provocations are different. There is no right or wrong, just boring or stimulating. As a result, they can take many more forms: a meaningful question, a firm statement, or ambiguous feeling.”

That’s the way this list of provocations from leadership network ON_Discourse is introduced as the platform compiled interesting thoughts from their members to share as an alternative to predictions. While I don’t agree that predictions always need to be boring, I do love the idea that these insights can be framed as provocations meant to start a dialogue. The list shared in their article does offer some unique perspectives that will get you thinking about the year ahead.

One insight from the list suggests that “AI won’t take jobs, it will take tasks.” Another suggests that Google will win the AI wars because they have the biggest data store of human interest thanks to all their search and click data collected over the past three decades. What’s also interesting about this list of provocations is that each is also examined from the lens of other members who push back against it or offer a different perspective.

Altogether its an interesting article to read if you’re looking for a bit of inspiration to get your strategic mind working as we head into the final weeks of the year and many of us start thinking about what will matter in 2025.

The Non-Obvious Books of the Week

The 2024 Non-Obvious Book Awards Longlist

After considering more than 1000 submissions and hours of reviewing titles, I’m thrilled to share that our latest round of winners for the Non-Obvious Book Awards was just announced today! These are the best 100 non-fiction books published in the past twelve months and you can see the full list on the book awards website »

Next Thursday at 11am EST, we will be doing a LIVE announcement of the Shortlist and the top winners of the event, along with an exploration of the best cover designs, best book titles and a deeper look at the annual book trends. I’ll share the link to watch in the newsletter next week but mark your calendar for that if you are able to join me live for that (or you can watch a recorded version too)!

For now, I hope you enjoy these book selections and let me know what you think about them or if there are any amazing books you read this year that you think we might have missed!

About the Non-Obvious Book Selections of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed. This week we are featuring the full list of selected books for the 2024 Non-Obvious Book Awards Longlist.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

• StolenTime St. Lucia Resort Launches 'Grief Retreat' Package

• Chefs Weigh In: Do AI and Smart Tech Deserve a Home In Our Kitchens?

• Tuvalu: The Disappearing Island Nation Recreating Itself In the Metaverse

• Scientists Create An Electric Lollipop That Simulates Green Tea, Durian And Other Flavors

• Saving Olive Trees Through Art

• Scientists Converting Cars to Run on Invasive Seaweed

How are these stories curated?