For many readers, finishing a book is only the beginning. Before the cover is even closed, there's already an urge to tell someone about it, compare interpretations, or convince them to read it too. Book podcasts have become one of the easiest ways to keep that conversation going, whether through thoughtful reviews, author interviews, or deep dives into your next read.
1. What Should I Read Next?: Personalized recommendations
Anne Bogel asks every guest the same three questions: three books they loved, one they disliked, and whatever they're reading right now. From the answers she works out a pattern and hands back three excellent new recommendations.
She ran this format in writing for years, as a series on her blog Modern Mrs Darcy, before she recorded her first podcast episode in January 2016. The show passed its tenth anniversary in January 2026, with more than 500 episodes. Bogel also publishes an annual Summer Reading Guide, now in its 15th edition, and hosts a second, shorter podcast called One Great Book. Fun fact: Guests apply and submit their reading history in writing before they're booked.
2. All the Books!: New release rundowns
All the Books! comes out twice a week. It covers a dozen or more new releases every Tuesday, in about 35 minutes, and focuses on a backlist pick every Friday for older titles publishers have stopped actively promoting. After years working as a bookseller at RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire, judging for the Book of the Month Club, and volunteering as a librarian, host Liberty Hardy calls herself a velocireader.
Book Riot, the independent books site Jeff O'Neal and Clinton Kabler founded in 2011, runs the show. Fun fact: A searchable New Release Index backs up the podcast, letting listeners look up anything mentioned by title, genre, or release date instead of trying to remember which Tuesday it came up.
3. Between the Covers: Deep craft interviews
Guests on Between the Covers leave behind more than just an interview. Most also record something for the show's bonus audio archive, usually a reading of another author's work. Some writers also send in recorded questions for whoever is being interviewed that week.
David Naimon started the show on July 21, 2011, on a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. He ran it for a decade as a side project while working full time as a naturopathic physician, acupuncturist, and herbalist. The station required every guest to record in-studio; so Claudia Rankine flew in for her episode before her book Citizen made her a household name, and Lorrie Moore and George Saunders both added Portland to book tours that hadn't originally included the city. Fun fact: Naimon's conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin were collected into a book of their own, published by Tin House in 2018.
4. Otherppl with Brad Listi: Long writer interviews
Most episodes of Otherppl open with a long, unscripted monologue from Brad Listi before he turns to his guest, sometimes running several minutes on its own. Listi launched the show in 2011, the same year he was already running the literary magazine The Nervous Breakdown, and the show has since passed a thousand episodes. A recurring segment called Craftwork sets the interview format aside to cover the mechanics of the industry instead, with topics like book publicity, developmental editing, and the screenplay marketplace.
Listi has written a novel called ‘Attention. Deficit. Disorder.’, which made the LA Times bestseller list. Guests over the years include George Saunders, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, and Jonathan Franzen. Fun fact: Listi still answers listener mail himself, at letters@otherppl.com.
5. Poured Over: Bookseller-led interviews
Barnes & Noble launched Poured Over on June 1, 2021, with Maggie O'Farrell discussing her novel Hamnet, and reached its 100th episode less than a year later with Jennifer Egan on The Candy House. Host Miwa Messer, the chain's Editorial Director and a career bookseller, had already booked Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah alongside Celeste Ng, Patti Smith, and George Saunders before that first season was over.
New episodes come out Tuesdays and Thursdays, with an occasional Saturday bonus. A recurring segment called TBR Topoff hands the microphone to booksellers at B&N's Westchester, Ohio store, who pair whichever author just appeared with an older backlist title. Fun fact: Some episodes are recorded live in front of an audience at the B&N Upper West Side store in New York.
6. The Book Review: Weekly book news
The Book Review podcast started in April 2006, more than a year before the first iPhone existed. Each episode features two author interviews, a shorter segment on industry news and sales figures, and a close where the paper's editors talk about what they've been reading themselves. Hosting has passed from Pamela Paul, who ran the show for nine years, to John Williams, and now to Gilbert Cruz, the paper's Books editor.
In 2024, the Book Review pulled together more than 500 novelists, critics, and poets to rank the best books of the 21st century so far, and the podcast spent several episodes going through the results with the editors who ran the project. Fun fact: The same team also runs By the Book, a Sunday newspaper feature that asks nearly every writer the same set of questions about their reading habits. Editor Pamela Paul collected 65 of those interviews into a book in 2014, with subjects ranging from J.K. Rowling to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
7. Fated Mates: Romance read-alongs
Fated Mates does amazing post-read discussions. Most weeks, Sarah MacLean and Jen Prokop take one romance novel and go through it in detail, chapter by chapter, spoilers included. Between read-alongs they run trope episodes, entire hours built on enemies-to-lovers, marriage of convenience, or the fated mates premise the show is named for.
MacLean writes bestselling historical romance that's been translated into more than 25 languages and serves on the board of Authors Against Book Bans. Prokop, now a romance critic, found her way into the genre in seventh grade through a bag of forty-year-old paperbacks in her grandmother's basement. They launched the show on October 23, 2018, and listeners call themselves firebirds. Fun fact: One episode, about Derek Craven, the hero of Lisa Kleypas's 1994 novel Dreaming of You, became popular enough that fans now mark an unofficial holiday on February 4th, called Derek Craven Day.
8. Reading Glasses: Reading habit advice
Brea Grant and Mallory O'Meara spend Reading Glasses on the logistics of being a reader. Listeners write in with problems like a page falling out of a borrowed book, and a recurring segment tests reading apps and gadgets, from tracking spreadsheets to library hold systems. Every year the two also publish a Reading Glasses Challenge, a list of tasks to complete over twelve months, and check the boxes off on the show as they go: pick a book by its title alone, read with background music, try an unfamiliar reading app.
They've hosted the show every week since 2017 on the Maximum Fun network, and by May 2026 the archive had passed 470 episodes. Fun fact: The advice eventually became a physical book, The No Pressure Book Journal, which pairs essays on reading better with pages for logging what a reader has finished.
9. NPR's Book of the Day: Short daily interviews
Each episode of NPR's Book of the Day runs 10 to 15 minutes and covers one author. Roughly half the material comes from NPR's radio archive rather than new recordings, so an episode might carry an interview taped years earlier for Morning Edition. The show debuted September 29, 2021, joining NPR's roster of short daily shows alongside Up First and Consider This, and Arts Desk reporter Andrew Limbong hosts it.
In October 2025, Limbong and Code Switch co-host B.A. Parker branched into a limited series called Books We've Loved, which trades new releases for older titles like Pride and Prejudice and Giovanni's Room. Fun fact: The show grew out of the same NPR Books team behind the Book Concierge, the network's annual interactive guide to hundreds of recommended titles.
10. The Maris Review: Author culture chats
Maris Kreizman doesn't stop at the guest's new book on The Maris Review. Each episode also covers whatever else is on their mind that week. Naomi Alderman came on to discuss The Future, and Stephanie Land to discuss her memoir Class.
Before podcasting, Kreizman had started a Tumblr blog called Slaughterhouse 90210, where she paired lines from classic literature with screenshots from reality television, which later became a book. She had also worked as editorial director at Book of the Month and at BarnesandNoble.com before starting the podcast in 2018. Fun fact: Some episodes are taped live in front of an audience at the Strand Bookstore in New York City.
11. First Draft with Sarah Enni: Writing craft interviews
Sarah Enni made First Draft about the mechanics of writing. She concentrates especially on young adult and middle grade authors, and Apple has named the show one of its Top 25 Podcasts for Book Lovers.
She started it in 2014 by driving 6,600 miles from Washington, D.C. toward Seattle with a Zoom H2N microphone and a laptop running GarageBand, meeting any author willing to talk with her along the way. She interviewed 48 writers on that drive and came home with more than 60 hours of tape, then kept recording once she settled in Los Angeles. Fun fact: Right before she hit the road in 2014, Enni had just watched a book deal fall through at the last minute, and was going through a breakup on top of it. She called the road trip a “lemonade-from-lemons desperation project”.
12. The Stacks: Deep book discussions
Traci Thomas interviews authors on The Stacks most weeks, weighted toward nonfiction, and on the last Wednesday of every month the show shifts to a full discussion of one announced title that listeners are assumed to have read. Guests have ranged from Ibram X. Kendi to Angelina Jolie.
She started the show in 2018, out of her own garage, after finishing Heather Ann Thompson's history of the 1971 Attica prison uprising and finding only two podcast episodes about it anywhere, one written for academics and one for lawyers. Neither was what she wanted, so she began recording her own conversations about books. The show has since passed three million downloads, and Thomas contributes monthly to NPR's Here & Now. Fun fact: Her Patreon community, the Stacks Pack, got so worked up about mainstream year-end book awards that they created their own, the Stackies, nominated and voted on entirely by members.
13. So Many Damn Books: Chats & cocktails
Christopher Hermelin mixes a cocktail for every guest, matched to whatever book they're there to discuss, and publishes the recipe along with the episode. When Rachel Khong came on to discuss a book partly about eggs, the drink included an egg white.
Hermelin and Drew Broussard started the show in 2014 after meeting through an online bracket competition called the Tournament of Books. They recorded in what they called the Damn Library, which has never been a fixed address. It's whichever New York apartment Hermelin happens to be living in, and the 100th episode was spent listing every address that had briefly held the name. Broussard left as co-host in 2021 to run Lit Hub Radio, and Hermelin has kept the show going alone since. Fun fact: During pandemic lockdown, Hermelin invented a drink just to talk his wife into co-hosting. He called it Weathering With You, mixed it with tequila, one of her favorites, and named it after the prepper foraging plot in Jenny Offill's novel Weather. She said yes, and they recorded together in isolation.
14. The Bookshop Podcast: Indie bookshop interviews
Mandy Jackson-Beverly splits The Bookshop Podcast between two kinds of guests: independent bookshop owners and managers on Mondays, talking about stock decisions, rent, and competing with online retail; and authors or humanities specialists on Wednesdays. She started the show in October 2020, worried about whether independent bookshops would survive the pandemic, after an earlier career as a costume designer and stylist for David Fincher, and musicians including David Bowie and Tina Turner.
The show has since picked up subscribers in 104 countries across 3,204 cities and is closing in on 300 episodes. Fun fact: Once a month she talks with Stephanie Stillo, curator of the Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, in a segment called From the Vaults.
Books may end, but the conversations around them don't have to. A great book podcast can deepen your appreciation of a favorite novel, introduce you to authors you'd never have discovered otherwise, or simply make your commute feel like an ongoing book club. Pick a few from this list and see which ones earn a permanent spot in your listening rotation.