If you’re looking for some additions to your TBR pile, Drake has a few suggestions.
Last Tuesday the megaselling Canadian rapper posted an Instagram story on his account, @champagnepapi, that was one part sneaker promo—he has a branding deal with Nike—and nine parts literary recommendations. The photo included the shoe atop a stack of nine titles that mixed a classic novel, a few recent buzz books, and some forthcoming titles.
The oldest and best-known title in the stack is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian classic, Brave New World. But mostly Drake is looking to the recent past or near future. At the top of the stack is Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, To Paradise, her hefty follow-up to 2015’s Kirkus Prize–winning A Little Life. At the bottom is Leone Ross’s madcap magical-realist novel This One Sky Day (published in the United States last year as Popisho).
In between are suggestions that Drake has wide-ranging interests as reader. Among his selections are Damon Galgut’s 2021 novel The Promise, the Booker Prize–winning family saga set in South Africa; Rachel Yoder’s darkly comic 2021 novel about motherhood, Nightbitch; and Sarah Winman’s 2018 novel, Tin Man, set in London during the late-’80s AIDS crisis. Drake’s selections also include Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart’s follow-up to his Booker Prize–winning 2020 novel Shuggie Bain, out next month; and Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the debut novel by British writer Maddie Mortimer, which comes out in the United States in June.
Does the stack mean that the MC is scouting movie or TV projects, starting another celebrity book club, sharing some of his recent favorite reads, or just building a colorful pedestal for his new pair of kicks? For now, he’s letting the books do all the talking.
Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for Kirkus, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
