Bookscape Report
Which books are shaping the broader conversation this month, as mentioned across leading podcasts.
Biggest mover: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, Neil Gaiman #5, rising 626 places.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes was the top newcomer at #8. In total 66 books had their debut mentions.
The Next Big Idea Daily drove the most book chatter, with 13% of this months book mentions.
Across February 2026, conversation clusters around how individuals and systems change—psychologically, technologically, and economically. Michael Pollan’s A World Appears stands out at the top, suggesting strong interest in consciousness, perception, and inner transformation alongside enduring attention to practical self-improvement via Atomic Habits. Classic speculative fiction and stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ted Chiang, and Daniel Keyes signal that hosts are using science fiction as a lens on AI, ethics, and the long-term trajectory of technology and human capability. At the same time, Enshittification and Getting Real point to concern with platform decay, product discipline, and building resilient digital businesses. The sharp rise of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator indicates renewed focus on market psychology and cyclical behavior, tying financial risk-taking to broader questions about how people navigate increasingly complex systems.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Michael Pollan
4
mentions
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Edwin Lefèvre
2
mentions
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow
2
mentions
2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Gaiman
2
mentions
Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein, Neil Gaiman
2
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
2
mentions
Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
1
mentions
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
1
mentions
Exhalation
Ted Chiang
1
mentions
Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Linderman
1
mentions
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness to #1.
Significant outlier with 3.8x as many mentions as the average book.
Flowers for Algernon to #8.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
Exhalation to #9.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones to #6.
Down from #1 last month
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy to #177.
No mentions after ranking #2 last month.
How to Win Friends and Influence People to #185.
No mentions after ranking #4 last month.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this month.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The podcasts included in this report are all podcasts being monitored on the MavenSignal platform at the time of report creation.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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