If you tuned in to CBS Sunday Morning on November 15 and heard Jane Pauley introduce The Reader, the site she was talking about is Washington Monthly’s The Reader. It’s a new online book review publication that covers mostly nonfiction alongside some fiction. The website launched the same day as the broadcast, and you can read new reviews for free for a month. The Reader’s About page has details on subscriptions and archive access.
CBS is making books a weekly feature, too. The show says it will share two recommendations from The Reader each weekend, one fiction and one nonfiction. The first pair was Louise Kennedy’s Stations and Gary Shteyngart’s The Sensualist. Watch Jane Pauley’s CBS segment.
Who runs The Reader, and why did it launch?
The Reader is an independent sister publication to Washington Monthly under the nonprofit Washington Monthly Institute. Its founding editors are Jonathan Alter, Paul Glastris and Karen Pritzker. Haley Sweetland Edwards is the executive editor, and Eric Liebetrau is the managing editor. The team points to The Washington Post’s decision to close its Book World section in February 2026 as a reason for starting a new outlet for criticism..
The editors plan to publish five pieces a week. Alongside reviews of new releases, there will be author interviews, pieces about how books make their way to the screen and recommendations of older titles worth picking up. The contributor list includes Margaret Atwood, Robert Caro and Ann Patchett.
The older-book recommendations are the feature I’m most interested in. A new-release list can tell you what’s arriving on Tuesday. A critic making the case for a book that’s been out for ten years can send you to a part of the library you’d otherwise walk straight past.
Which books did CBS Sunday Morning recommend?
Jane Pauley introduced two picks on November 15, a novel about a friendship that follows a woman into adulthood and a collection of essays about the lengths one writer will go to for a little pleasure. See the two picks on CBS News.
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Fiction — Stations by Louise Kennedy
Róisín and Red become friends as teenagers in 1980s Ireland. Years later, Róisín still measures parts of her life against that friendship and what she hoped it might become. Start here if you like novels about the distance between what you remember about someone and what you understood about them at the time. Riverhead Books published the U.S. hardcover on November 3.
Shop the Stations hardcover on Amazon.
Nonfiction — The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure by Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart goes looking for a great martini in New York City, pursues the perfect blue suit and boards an enormous cruise ship in this collection of personal essays. Pick it if you want something funny you can dip into a chapter at a time. Random House lists November 17 as the U.S. hardcover release date, two days after the CBS broadcast.
Is The Reader free, and where can you subscribe?
The Reader says each review is free for a month after publication, and it sends out a free newsletter twice a week. Paid subscribers get full archive access and an invitation to its live book club. If you came for the two titles from the broadcast, CBS has both in the segment write-up. For the site’s ongoing reviews, sign up for The Reader’s newsletter.
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