Bookscape Report
Which books are shaping the broader conversation this month, as mentioned across leading podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks #8, rising 261 places.
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson was the top newcomer at #3. In total 106 books had their debut mentions.
The Next Big Idea drove the most book chatter, with 16% of this months book mentions.
November 2025’s list clusters around three concerns: systemic risk, moral leadership, and the social costs of technological change. The Big Short stands out with unusually heavy discussion, suggesting renewed interest in how opaque financial or technological systems can fail and who bears the consequences. Alongside it, multiple titles by Brené Brown and David Brooks point to a strong preoccupation with character, courage, and values-based decision-making in public and organizational life. Walter Isaacson’s presence, both with a high-ranking craft-focused title and a biography of Elon Musk, highlights curiosity about the personalities and choices shaping today’s tech landscape. Finally, the prominence of The Anxious Generation and a work on saving the Amazon indicates growing anxiety about long-term societal and environmental damage, and a search for frameworks that connect individual responsibility with systemic reform.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis
7
mentions
Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit
Brené Brown
4
mentions
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
Walter Isaacson
3
mentions
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
Brené Brown
3
mentions
How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers
Dom Phillips
3
mentions
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
2
mentions
Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B Cialdini
2
mentions
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
David Brooks
2
mentions
The Road to Character
David Brooks
2
mentions
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt
2
mentions
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to #1.
Significant outlier with 5.9x as many mentions as the average book.
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written to #3.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life to #8.
Up 261 places from #269 last month.
Down from #1 last month
No mentions after ranking #1 last month.
The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports to #204.
No mentions after ranking #2 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 entrepreneurship podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the voices founders and operators trust most for playbooks, launches, and long-term strategy.
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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