Welcome to 2020!

Welcome to 2020! We really should be having flying cars by now, right?

Bookship (version 6.4.3) got a bunch of new features to start off the year, driven by insightful feedback from you Bookshippers. It’s in your app stores and www.bookshipapp.com today. The feedback is super helpful; send ideas if you have them!

You can now do rich text formatting on comments, including bold, italic, actual paragraphs (gasp!), and many other things. Formatting is done using Markdown, which just using normal characters to indicate format - for example typing *italics* will put text in italics, and so on. Details in the help section of the app. You can also mention someone (@username, like twitter), so they (and only they) get notified you mentioned them. Again, details are in the help.

There is now a separate page for each Group, where you can see all your members (and their avatars), the list of books you’ve read, and the group’s shared TBR Booklist (you can also set an Avatar for the group now as well). Expect more things to come to Groups in 2020!

From a book or reading page, you can now get recommendations for “related” books, books you might read after the book in question.

Alerts about comments now open the app to the comment in question (nice in conjunction with @username mentions!).

Reminder: previous versions introduced public, sharable readings and Group TBRs for keeping a shared To Be Read list for your group.

OK, on to the books! The most popular books in the last 30 days are:

Little Women Sparked no doubt by the movie (in theaters now!), Little Women was our most popular book. Greta Gerwig's movie adaptation stars Emma Watson (who has a well known book club by the way!), Saoirse Ronan, Laura Dern, and others. The book is a classic, and you can read it for free in Bookship! The Starless Sea Erin Morgenstern took the bookish world by storm almost 8 years ago, with her atmospheric debut novel The Night Circus. Heck even I read it, and loved it, and I'm not normally inclined to romantic books. She's back with her second book, The Starless Sea, 'a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea'. Could be fun! Such a Fun Age #3 on our list: Such a Fun Age. As literary website Lithub says: Kiley Reid’s much buzzed-about debut, about a young black babysitter working for a white family (the mother of which is an influencer of sorts) in Philadelphia, is the kind of book you have no choice but to read from cover to cover, forsaking all other obligations. (If you can swing it, I recommend tearing through it on a plane, where there’s less chance of interruption.) It’s juicy and smart and timely (and Lena Waithe has already acquired the rights to adapt it into your next favorite film and/or tv show).

Thanks for reading and staying in touch. If you have any trouble with Bookship, please drop me a note! And Happy Reading!