“Read Any Good Books Lately?” by Bird Lives

[Cinny]

Solved without nudges. Very nice meta. Thanks, Jay!

[Qmark]

No nudges needed...enjoyed it...thanks!
(don't know why puzzles with parenthetical numbers make nervous...they just do)

[MikeyG]

This is a meta I can get behind, at least based on the title! Definitely marking that book down, @whimsy to see if my mom would want to buddy-read it! (Always up for a buddy read here also!).

Of course, I haven't solved the puzzle or the meta yet, haha. (SE is a bit crunchy.) I have some pieces but not all of them yet!

Edit: Got it! SE was tough as nails, but I pulled it out and got the meta!

Mike's Best Books of 2022 (in order read):

Black Cake - Charmaine Wilkerson
Peach Blossom Spring - Melissa Fu
Unlikely Animals - Annie Hartnett
True Biz - Sara Nović
Woman of Light - Kaji Fajardo-Anstine
All My Rage - Sabaa Tahir
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby van Pelt
Gilded Mountain - Kate Manning
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow - Zoulfa Katouh

[Bird Lives]

The “appropriate” 7-letter answer was SABBATH. This is, after all, the Sunday Summer Substitute.

Each themer ended with a book of the Bible — the Good Book hinted at in the title — even if you haven’t read any of them lately. Now about those numbers. It was hard enough finding Bible books with titles that could have another meaning. Even so, with two of the titles that were names (RUTH, AMOS), I had to use names, just not those of people found in the Bible.

There was no way I could use their initial letters, regardless of their order in the grid, to spell anything. So I had to resort to parenthetical numbers as a guide showing solvers which letters to use and where to put them. The first number indicated which letter of the book to use; the second number told you which position that letter held in the answer. So in RUTH (4;7), use the fourth letter (H) and put it seventh.
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For a Friday sundown version, I could have changed the order of those second numbers to make the answer SHABBAT.

In the end, we had 32 solvers.
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Presumably, in coming weeks, the SSS will see more solvers (and fewer puzzles with parenthetical numbers).

Thanks to all for the kind comments.

[sharkicicles]

Didn't get it, but a really nice mechanism (I for one welcome our new parenthetical number overlords.)

If you could have worked the black squares in somehow it could have been BLACK SABBATH.