Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Book Review – "Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading"

Host: Gilbert Cruz
Guests: Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, Jen Zalai
Date: December 12, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this special year-end episode, New York Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz is joined by critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, and Jen Zalai to recap their reading highlights of 2025. The critics reflect on a diverse range of books and genres, discuss trends in memoirs and biographies, delve into notable fiction, and share personal favorites that shaped their year. Peppered with candid banter, sharp insights, and their trademark idiosyncrasy, this episode offers listeners a snapshot of the literary landscape as seen through the eyes of three of America's top book critics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sentences as a Unit of Literary Pleasure

Dwight Garner’s Year in Sentences

• Dwight approaches year-end reflection by compiling his favorite sentences from books he read, weaving them together for commentary.
• He keeps a "commonplace book" of lines that strike him, asserting:

  "The sentence is my favorite unit of prose...something intelligent and really well expressed. That's what I live for as a reader." (02:28 - 02:47)

2. Fiction Highlights

Ian McEwan’s "What We Can Know"

• Seen by Dwight as a return to the engaging, multi-layered style McEwan displayed in "Atonement" and "Saturday."
• Described as a "big crowd pleaser" that appeals to both literary and casual readers

  "You can recommend to your most, quote, unquote literary, and yet also recommend to your relative...this is one of those books." (04:03 - 04:27)

David Szalay’s "Flesh" (2025 Booker Prize Winner)

• A narrative of male alienation, featuring spare, terse prose compared to Hemingway’s style.
• While Dwight “admired it deeply” but wouldn't re-read it, Jen was “drawn in and mesmerized by it” (05:21 - 05:53).
• Alexandra expressed mild frustration at qualified praise, calling for bolder opinions about major literary prizes (06:48 - 07:20).

Kiran Desai’s "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny"

• Alexandra’s top pick; despite its heft (688 pages), she wished for “double the length.”
• Appreciates the 20-year labor of love and laments a literary culture that doesn’t always reward such efforts.

Adam Ross’s "Play World"

• Alexandra champions this under-the-radar novel set in late 1970s-early 1980s New York, noting its evocative depiction of the city, ambiguous morality, and nuanced treatment of coming-of-age amidst adult irresponsibility (08:42 - 09:47).

3. Memoirs & Femoirs

Graydon Carter’s "When the Going Was Good"

• A lively, wistful look back at the heyday of glossy magazine journalism. Enjoyable for the anecdotes rather than the plain prose (10:40 - 11:55).

Keith McNally’s "I Regret Almost Everything"

• Deemed "riotously mean and funny," with McNally’s unfiltered opinions serving as both a memoir of New York’s restaurant scene and a vehicle for self-reflection post-stroke (11:58 - 13:21).

Susan Cheever’s "When All the Men Wore Hats"

• Alexandra applauds Cheever’s candid, late-career excavation of family and literary history—part memoir, part criticism (13:38 - 14:44).

Joan Didion’s "Notes to John"

• An intimate collection of raw, unpolished notes. Despite controversy over publishing such material, Alexandra argues:

  "If she's that meticulous...I think this was intentional, and if not intentional, who cares?...it’s the raw, unfiltered Joan Didion unplugged." (15:14 - 16:14)

4. Nonfiction on South American History

Jen Zalai spotlights two standout books on dictatorships:

"A Flower Traveled in My Blood" by Hayley Cohen Gilliland

• About the "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo" and the long search for Argentina’s disappeared children; a complex, moving work (18:59 - 21:52).

"38 Laundress Street" by Philippe Sands

• Explores quests for justice after Chile’s dictatorship, Pinochet’s London arrest, and transnational legal accountability (21:52 - 22:35).

5. Engaging Biographies

"Wild Things" by Sue Prideaux

• Gauguin biography that balances serious critique with storytelling verve, contextualizing the artist’s darker controversies (22:48 - 24:35).

"R. Crumb: A Biography" by Dan Nadell

• Dwight celebrates Nadell’s skill at capturing Crumb’s singular creative burst and the vibrancy of the underground comics scene (24:42 - 26:16).

"Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark" by Francis Wilson

• Alexandra relishes this creative, primary-documents-based portrait of the eccentric novelist (26:16 - 27:48).

Mark Twain, Updike, and Authorial Letters

• The critics debate the optimal balance of life vs. work in literary biography, with Dwight noting that sometimes the life suffices for an engrossing review.
• The failure of Ron Chernow’s new Twain bio to strike that balance is critiqued (28:31 - 30:01).
• Discussion of John Updike’s "Selected Letters" as a particularly rich source for both literary history and personal revelation.

6. The Elusive Thomas Pynchon

• With Pynchon’s new novel "Shadow Ticket," the panel reflects on his continued literary vitality, secretive persona, and ongoing influence (30:08 - 31:12).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Gilbert Cruz:
  On critics being themselves:

  "It's one of the primary tasks of a critic to simply read, be themselves, to experience culture with their own unique and idiosyncratic minds and then tell their audience about that experience." (00:56 - 01:10)

• Dwight Garner:
  On the pleasure of a great sentence:

  "The sentence is my favorite unit of prose...something that's intelligent and really well expressed. That's what I live for as a reader." (02:28 - 02:47)

  On reading Dave Barry growing up:

  "I grew up in Southwest Florida, largely. And he got his start there. Dave Barry...he cracked me up. He was smart, he was funny." (24:42 - 26:16)

• Alexandra Jacobs:
  On the value of raw Didion:

  "It’s kind of like the raw, unfiltered Joan Didion unplugged...I just think it's incredibly valuable writing to have in the…box set of bereavement." (16:09 – 16:39)

  On Jessica Mitford:

  "Jessica Mitford is the most fascinating Mitford because she somehow winds up in Oakland, California, and Montgomery, Alabama, and she becomes a major leftist activist...she just was a fascinating, sizzling creature." (34:54 – 35:30)

• Jen Zalai:
  On the Pinochet book’s complexity:

  “This is another one of those books that’s…incredibly powerful. How do you tell such a complex, layered story, but also retain its potency and its import? And Sands really does do that.” (22:15 – 22:35)

• Group Banter:

  • On literary feast and competition for reviews, Alexandra jokes:

    "I will never forgive Dwight for taking the Updike letters, but I retaliated." (34:00 - 34:05)

• On the act of reading collections of letters:

  "As a critic, I'm too scared to skip anything because…if you missed this one page…then you look stupid, and so you can't skip anything." (33:39 – 33:58)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:35 – 01:51 Introduction by Gilbert Cruz and panel
• 02:12 – 02:47 Dwight on the art of the sentence
• 03:07 – 04:27 Ian McEwan’s "What We Can Know"
• 04:39 – 06:48 "Flesh" by David Szalay and Booker Prize discussion
• 07:21 – 09:47 Alexandra on "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" and "Play World"
• 10:40 – 13:22 Memoirs: Graydon Carter and Keith McNally
• 13:38 – 16:50 Alexandra on femoirs: Cheever and Didion
• 18:59 – 22:35 Jen on South American dictatorship nonfiction
• 22:48 – 24:35 Gauguin biography discussion
• 24:42 – 26:16 Dwight on R. Crumb and Dave Barry
• 26:16 – 27:48 Alexandra on Muriel Spark bio
• 28:05 – 30:05 On biography, Mark Twain and the art-life ratio
• 30:08 – 31:12 Pynchon’s new novel and persona
• 31:47 – 37:36 Personal book recommendations for the holidays
• 37:44 – end Closing gratitude and light banter

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Critics’ Holiday Reading Recommendations (Stumping for a Book)

• Dwight Garner:

  • "Selected Letters of John Updike" – “A book about literary vocation...his letters about his marriages are very moving.” (31:47 – 32:58)

• Alexandra Jacobs:

  • "Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford" – “Really recontextualizes her for our moment…a fascinating, sizzling creature.” (34:00 – 35:31)

• Jen Zalai:

  • "More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity" by Adam Becker – “A combination of big meaty ideas...and surprisingly fun to read.” (37:06 – 37:36)

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Tone & Atmosphere

The conversation is lively, self-deprecating, and studded with literary in-jokes and friendly rivalries. The critics don’t hesitate to disagree or tease each other about books assigned or loved. Deeply informed but approachable, the discussion offers both keen literary analysis and plenty of warmth, making it essential listening—or reading—for anyone interested in the contemporary book world.

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Prepared for readers who want the substance and spirit of the episode without having heard it: here’s a whirlwind tour through a year in books with some of America’s most distinctive critics.

Transcript

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[C]

Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. Last week you heard our episode on the 10 Best Books of the Year. That's the Collective hour, the collective we. And this week we have something just as interesting, which is our staff Book critics are going to talk about their years in reading. One of the great joys in my life since I was a teenager has been reading year end list after year end list in December on books and movies and music and really everything. I read them across publications and definitely across critics. Even those critics I intensely disagree with. It's one of the primary tasks of a critic to simply read, be themselves, to experience culture with their own unique and idiosyncratic minds and then tell their audience about that experience. And here with me today are three wonderful and unique and idiosyncratic minds, and they're going to tell all of us about how they experienced this year in books. Dwight Garner, welcome.

[D]

Hey, Gilbert, great to be here.

[C]

Jen, Zelai, hello there.

[A]

Hi, Gilbert.

[C]

Alexandra Jacobs, it's a pleasure to have you on again.

[B]

It's a pleasure to be here, Gilbert.

[C]

There's so much to talk about. The three of you, as you have done for the past three years, have done each in your own way, a unique look back at a couple of books or several books that you enjoyed this year. I want to start with Dwight, who just loves to mess with us. And this year did a list of great how would you describe it?

[D]

It's a list of sentences that I loved from the books that I read this year and I ran them together to make them comment upon one another and tried to make them funny and provocative.

[C]

And you can do this because as we've talked about on this podcast before, you have a book, Commonplace Book, as it is called, in which you keep all these lines.

[D]

Yeah. And it was a good year for sentences. I think that the sentence is my favorite unit of prose. A lot of people love the book. They love the entire poem. I love the ideal sentence I love it. Short, sharp, shocked. The voice. I like something intelligent, something that's intelligent and really well expressed. That's what I live for as a reader. And so I love sentences.

[C]

It's always interesting to look back at a critic's year and look at the books that they either raved about or were really, really positive about. One of the ones that stood out to me this fall was your review of the new Ian McKeown book, which is a novel called what We Can Know. You called it, essentially, a return to form. Tell us about this one.

[D]

Yeah, it's just a big crowd pleaser. It's this big wanton of a book that has this really intensely literary story tucked into this dystopian narrative. And it's a return to form in the sense that it takes you back to his great novel, Atonement in the Histor waves this novel ripples out upon. And yet it's in the way that my favorite novel of Ian McEwen's. I'm not sure it's his best. My favorite is Saturday and the book that starts with that remarkable dinner party. And he's cooking that bouillabaisse at the start.

[C]

The Dr. Dwight loves food.

[D]

I do love food. And this one is a dinner party. It starts out as a dinner party novel, and people are arriving at this party, and while they're arriving, you're aware of who slept with who, which couples are falling apart, which couples are having affairs. And he just dexterously deals out all of this intrigue about the people in this novel, and yet he's working on six or seven different layers at once, yet there's very charming surface layer going on.

[C]

It does feel as if it had been a while since he had one of those books that felt like the Ian McEwen that people fell in love with in the early to mid 2000s.

[D]

Yeah, he's become a tinkerer in recent novels, so they've been interesting in Small book about a Sentient computer, he wrote. And anyway, there's been a bunch of them. But this is a big enveloping. It's really nice, as a critic, to have a novel that you feel like you can recommend to your most, quote, unquote literary and yet also recommend to your relative or your friend who's not that big a reader, reads a few novels a year. This is one of those kind of books that I think just covers all those bases.

[C]

A big book from this year. And I say big because it won one of the year's big literary awards, the Booker Prize was a novel called Flesh by a Hungarian British author named David Soloi.

[D]

Well, it's a book about male alienation. It's this young tough who's from Eastern Europe who. Who grew up rough and sort of fumbles his way. He becomes muscle for various people and ends up working for a sort of 1 percenter, this elite family. You know, it's funny, there's certain kinds of simplicity that a writer can bring to the page. And Zaloy in this novel. Sometimes you read a novel and the sentences are kind of simple and you'll feel like all you're getting is meagerness. With a writer like Zaloy, you feel this almost Hemingway like richness to the simplicity of his sentences. Each one is this iceberg that has a lot going on underneath it. And I think that's what really helps this novel resonate. I wasn't completely taken with it as I write a. I admired it deeply, but I'm not sure it's a book I'll read again. What do you think, Jen?

[A]

I remember that line in your review, and I really liked it. I felt really drawn into it and mesmerized by it, which really did surprise me. It's the first novel of his that I've read, and it's so spare and spare in a way where I think at first I was initially skeptical and reluctant, but I found that there was something to the rhythm of these very terse lines. And also the story and the structure of it and the plot is actually really well done. And at a certain point I was just taken by it.

[D]

If I can say one more thing about it, what I like too is you see these guys, these sort of rough guys, often who are maybe protecting someone. They've got an earpiece in and they're in a suit, but they look rough around the edges. And you wonder, who are these people? Like, where do they come from? And this book describes one of these guys in a way, his inner life, or what is there of his inner life. And you felt like you meet a character that you've met a character in this novel. You don't meet that often in fiction.

[C]

The easy way to talk about this book is to say you're not presented with the main character's interiority that much. And the way that he reacts to that world often is just by saying, okay, over and over and over and over and over and over again.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And you can see how to some people, that would be distancing to the extreme.

[D]

Well, it was distancing to me. As I said, like, it's one of those things. Sometimes you see a movie and you really appreciate it, and yet you're like, I'm not gonna watch that again. I'm very glad to have read this novel. I don't think it's a book I'll return to. Although Soloi is a terrific writer and some of his earlier stuff. I will return.

[B]

This discussion is upsetting me because you're praising this book, but with qualification and whatever. And I feel like if you're gonna give out a Booker prize, it should be.

[A]

I think it deserved it.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Maybe I'm the only person in this.

[B]

No, no. I mean, you know, I don't know.

[C]

Sarah Jessica Parker's under the table and she actually. She agrees with you.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I feel like the Loneliness of Sonya and Sonny should have won the Booker Prize, should have won the National Book Award. Unlike these sort of underwhelming. Okay, okay. Books. This is a kind of putting it all on the table.

[C]

You loved this book.

[B]

I love this book. And I'm not the only one.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Several of our colleagues down in this room also love this book. This book weighed in at a big honking. 688 pages. And yet my colleague, our colleague Alexandra Alter and I agreed that we would have been happy with it at double the length. So that. That should tell you something. I also truly appreciate that the author worked on this book for. For 20 years. As I say in this, Bring back the Garrett. Like, whatever happened to just suffering for your art and not finishing until it's done? I was absolutely thunderstruck by this book. I thought it was so fantastic.

[C]

What is the longest you've ever worked on something? Oh, God, you wrote a book. How long did that take?

[B]

It took five years off and on. That seems reasonable, but I was holding down a job for most of that time, too. Gilbert.

[C]

This is one of several sort of big un's that you were interested this year. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kieran Desai. You also wrote about the Sisters by Yonas Hassan Kamiri, which is another book that ended up on the collective top 10 books of the year.

[B]

Yes. And yet the one I actually want to talk about is Play World by Adam Ross, which I think maybe suffered slightly by coming out in January. It's like on these year end lists. I think it is on some year end lists. But I think this book is absolutely superb. And it's at a brisk 500 pages or so. 508 or so.

[C]

What is this one about?

[B]

So it's true. That this one tickles my exact pleasure centers because it's about New York City, as the Carter administration turns to the Reagan administration. So it's a very specific period in New York City history that anyone who lived through it will never forget. Yeah, so it's about an actor, a child actor or teen actor named Griffin Hurd, which is like some hilarious mashup of the Dunns and William Heard. I don't know, it's just totally. Again, exactly that. And it's just. I mean, it's really. In modern terms, you would say this guy is being abused by the mother of a family friend. But it just presents the sexual ambiguity of that era, the kind of adult irresponsibility. And there's some wrestling in it. There's amazing scenes of the television commercials and the theater. And it's just an incredibly culturally rich book, besides being really a love story, which I would argue that all books, over 200 pages, are love stories. There's no other way through it. And I guess I'm compelled by that.

[C]

This seems like it's a tribute to when helicopter parenting was not a thing.

[B]

Exactly. Or I think we called it at one point at the time Snowplow parenting, which was like a new iteration of Helicopter, where you're. You're actually dragging the kid along behind you. You're not just hovering, you're dragging.

[C]

So the three of you over the years have all written about memoirs. Dwight and Alexandra, I feel like this year in particular, you both wrote about a bunch. Dwight, you just had a. As I feel like you do every year, you just had like a pod of fascinating people. But at least two of them wrote memoirs about a period that's not dissimilar to the period that Alexandria was just talking about from Playworld, which is a time of New York that many people are nostalgic for. I'm talking about the book by Graydon Carter and the book by Keith McNally. Tell us about those two. And then some of the other memoirs that you really dug this year.

[D]

Graydon Carter's book was called when the Going was Good. And it was about his high flying times at Vanity Fair magazine in the 90s and the aughts when the going was good and pay rates were high and every assistant was well born and attractive, and people were paid a lot of money to do these things. And I loved his magazine. I loved his Vanity Fair. I loved it for reasons not everyone else did. I loved his front of the book. He had a lot of great writers in that magazine. But it's Sort of look back on his career. And a lot of people read these kind of books this year closely because we miss. We all miss that. I caught the tail end of it myself of the sort of glossy magazine world. But we all love hearing these grand stories of getting paid $10 a word to fly across the world and report some glamorous story. And Graden, it's funny, he's not the best writer in the world. I really thought he might have been because Spy is so well written. Spy magazine, which he found was so well written. And he also used the same ghostwriter that Keith Richards used. And I thought, well, this is gonna be fun. And, you know, it's fine. It's a good book, but it's very simple and the prose is plain. Jane.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. It's more the situations that he is writing about rather than the writing itself.

[D]

Exactly. The ostentatious wealth rubbed me the wrong way a little bit in this book. Everything he does is he has always the perfect sweater, the perfect friend, the perfect eyeglasses, the perfect shoes, the perfect pajamas. And it just got my class animals just rubbed me a little bit the wrong way.

[B]

Wasn't the book sponsored by Ralph Lauren?

[D]

But I did love it. I really. I enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed Even more Keith McNally, the restaurateur owner Oper Balthazar. His memoir called I Regret Almost Everything, is just riotously mean and funny and hilarious right down the line. He's just an opinionated man who hates a lot of things. Actually, someone once said the way to write a short story is to think of 10 things you hate and talk about them. And he seems to have written this book by thinking about 400 things he hates and talking about those. But in the process of talking about the hates, all the loves come forward because the opposite rushes in behind it. And he can write Keith McNally, unlike Graden. Sorry, Graden. And the book has caught on. I think it's doing really well. It's still selling and it deserves it. The restaurant. The restaurant life is a fascinating life. He's handsome, he's charismatic. He can write, he can think. He knows what to look for, he knows what to say, he knows what details to tell you about. And it's just a great portrait of what it's like to run a restaurant in the best city in the world in one of the best restaurants.

[C]

It's also a portrait of what happens to him after he has a striking medical episode, the after effects of which last to this day, if you see him around.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had A major stroke.

[B]

So this book's a way for him to preserve his voice.

[D]

Good point. Good point. Yeah. He talks about that and I think the regrets. The word regret in the title comes from the post stroke realization that he's been kind of a jerk in many ways. So he's meditating on the things that he. The person he wishes he might have been and yet he's not so sorry he was the jerk.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

So it's fascinating, both sides of the table sort of thing.

[C]

Alexandra, you wrote about a couple of memoirs, Femoirs. Okay. I was getting there. You wrote about a couple of Femoirs, a group of memoirs by female authors that you were particularly taken with.

[B]

I was thinking as I headed in here this morning about how two of these books really mixed up the memoir format. Susan Cheever, who I really applaud, she's written memoirs before, most famously Home Before Dark. And she's written other. Many other across genres. She did a biography of the Alcoholics Anonymous founder and all that. But she's 82 and she decided, heck, I'm just gonna give in. I'm gonna. I'm gonna dig into my daddy issues. And she analyzes, I think it's a half a dozen or maybe a little few more of his stories. And she gives us new details from their life, the Cheevers lives, but also sort of shows how she figured into his fiction and his diaries. It's just fascinating because it's, you know, it's two genres in one, and it's literary criticism and it's memoir and it's a little bit of biography. And I just adored this book. I love that she was. And she just said, eff it. I'm just gonna, you know, like, I just love it when a writer turns to the subject that they really want to do rather than dancing around it.

[C]

And that is when all the Men Wore Hats.

[B]

Yes, when all the Men Wear Hats, which, you know, of course, immediately conjures up for all of us the platform of asening or.

[C]

And it has that great. The COVID has the great Cheever scene.

[B]

Yes, the Cheever. I was actually in a therapy session with a young therapist who had not heard of. And I sort of had a strike my forehead moment where I realized I'm not sure that John Cheever is being taught anymore. I can't really fault this guy because I don't know that John Cheever is absolutely on the syllabus necessarily. But for a while, that book was on every single bookshelf. Another memoir that captivated me, although I Don't even know if it could correctly fit into the memoir category is Joan Didion's Notes to John. Because when this book came. This is the kind of book that lights me a fire when there's a controversy preceding its publication or around its publication. And there are a lot of people who said, oh, these are her notes. They shouldn't have been published. She was so exacting. What are you doing publishing her unorganized notes? She was so meticulous. To which I say phooey like or whatever. I believe Joan Didion knew what she was doing. If she's that meticulous. You ever hear of a shredder? Joan Didion, I'm sure. So I think that she wanted this to be. I also think there was a tremendous donation of. The papers were very orderly. They were given in a very orderly way to the library. I think this was intentional, and if not intentional, who cares? And they are fascinating because they're notes from psychiatric sessions. And it's kind of like the raw, unfiltered Joan Didion unplugged. Yeah, that's what it is. So it's like she wrote these very polished memoirs about the terrible her daughter's struggles. And you're seeing what she really was thinking without the filigree of those other books. And I just think it's incredibly valuable writing to have in the like I said, box set of bereavement. You know, you could put all those. She's got. Yeah. You know. Magical thinking. Exactly. Merry Christmas.

[C]

We'll be right back.

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[E]

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[C]

Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm here with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jen Zalai, and we are talking about their years in reading. Jen, I'm going to turn to you because you wrote about a pair of books that fall into the very, very specific category of nonfiction books about South American dictatorships.

[A]

Yes. And they're both excellent. The first one I'd like to talk about is called A Flower Traveled in My Blood, and it's by Hayley Cohen Gilliland, it turns out, I believe, to be her first book. So I thought that this was really a remarkable achievement. It's about the abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. And this was a group of grandmothers whose children were disappeared during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. And so these grandmothers are in search of the children of their own children who were born into captivity. So these were babies who were born in captivity. And there were rumors that these babies had been given to military families, a number of them. And so what Gillaland does is she tells so many stories in this book. She really focuses on one family, on one grandmother and her attempt to find out what happened to her grandson. And this book's story also radiates outward because it tells the story of the dictatorship, the history of Argentina in the 20th century, which is quite complicated. And the way that Gillaland pieces all these different parts together I think is just extraordinary. And the story is it's incredible, it's moving. It's obviously very sobering. But there is also something quite inspiring about it. I was just really taken by it. The second book that I wanted to Talk about is 38 Laundress street, which is by Philippe Sands. And Sands is a human rights lawyer, and he's written several books about issues of international law and human rights. And this is the story of Augusto Pinochet and the attempt to bring him to justice when he was traveling in London. This was decades, almost a decade after the end of the military dictatorship in Chile. He was arrested because a Spanish prosecutor wanted to charge him with crimes against humanity and wanted to extradite him from England. And so this led to this battle essentially of whether or not Pinochet would be extradited. He claimed immunity as a former head of state, and in the end, England decided to send him back to Chile, saying that his health wasn't good enough to stand trial. He ended up living for another six years and eventually did stand trial, or at least began to stand trial in Chile. And so that is really a story, I think, about the question of accountability, immunity, impunity. And Sands is a terrific writer. He weaves in his own personal history with the subject. As a lawyer, he can get people to talk to him. At one point, he was enlisted to write a brief in the case. And he has done this kind of thing before where he tells a very complex story, because in addition to Pinochet's story, he also wants to tell the story of a Nazi who fled Europe after the Holocaust and ended up in Chile and actually was an acquaintance of Pinochet. So there's all these dimensions to the story that he's telling. And again, this is another one of those books that's I think, incredibly powerful. And I think what also impresses me is just how do you tell such a complex, layered story, but also retain its potency and its import? And Sans really does do that.

[C]

Jen, you write almost entirely about nonfiction here for the Times, and you just have to write about some serious stuff.

[A]

Yeah, there's a lot of serious stuff.

[C]

Were there any books that you just had a rip roaring time with this year?

[A]

Oh, yeah. I mean, there was a biography of Paul Gauguin that came out this summer called Wild Things, Sous Prie d'.

[D]

Eau.

[C]

It was on our top 10 list of that.

[A]

Exactly. And I thought that book was fantastic. Gauguin, I should say. Probably a lot of listeners hear the name and recall that there's been a lot of controversies surrounding him. He did have a relationship with a 14 year old in French Polynesia when he was living there. And what Prideaux does, she doesn't try to really rehabilitate him, but I think she tries to really contextualize him. She points out that the age of consent In France was 13 at the time. So it's not like this was illegal behavior. Even though I think, understandably, we should condemn it.

[C]

It's not great.

[A]

It's not great. No. But what she does do, I think, is show the trajectory of this life. And I have to say that I feel like I knew the darkest parts or just very simple things about his life, but I didn't know his whole career as a stockbroker before he Became an artist. His very interesting, long lasting marriage to a very independent minded Danish woman and their complex relationship and his very complicated relationship with his children from that marriage. And the book also is just delightful to read in the sense that I think Prideaux, she really is somebody who cares about style. And she's written several biographies of other very problematic men, Nietzsche being one of them, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch. And she knows how to tell a story in a way that's very engaging and very appealing, but never really losing sight, I think, of the more serious elements that she wants to discuss. And I think that's really quite an achievement.

[C]

Dwight, you wrote about so many biographies this year, and I know there are several that you. That you were really taken with.

[D]

It was a good year for biographies, I think. I really loved the R. Crumb biography by Dan Nadell. I don't know. R. Crumb is one of these figures. Again, a controversial person, but you know, what a life. And the images that beamed into this man's mind. It's magic in a way. The electrical impulses in R. Crumb's head were just unlike the impulses in anyone else's head that's been around in terms of the kind of drawing he did. And it's a great San Francisco hippie era. Underground culture, underground magazines, newspapers, rock, all the stuff that I kind of love. It's all rolled up in this book. And what's great is that Nate Dale is just an ideal biographer. He knows just how much. And you know, we all know you're reading a biography and suddenly you're like, oh, God, now here comes the potted history of the Nixon administration. Because. And. Or whatever. Potted history, you know, he doesn't do that. He gets everything in a few sentences and manages to give you just enough information. And he moves the book along and you just feel like, okay, this guy knows what he's doing in terms of dealing his cards, right? The two books this year that I had the most just fun reading a was Dave Barry's memoir, the ComEd. Love that book. And I loved Dave Barry growing up. Just a funny, tight, perfect writer. Matter of fact, I had dinner about a month ago with this well known journalist. I'm not gonna name him, but late at night we talked about who our earliest influences were as writers. And this guy's major journalist. He said, Dave Barry. He said, growing up as a kid, I just loved reading this guy. He cracked me up. He was smart, he was funny. And I said the same thing. I grew up in Southwest Florida, largely. And he got his start there. Dave Barry. So I read Dave Barry early on in Tropic magazine, which was part of the Matty Herald. Dave Barry's memoir is Great Earl Weaver, the manager for the Baltimore Orioles. Just this banty rooster character who loved to take dirt on umpires. It's a fun book and a smart baseball book that I just was, like, eating popcorn.

[B]

Well, Dwight, talk about electric. What about Electric Spark? The Enigma of Day Muriel by Francis Wilson. I think that's one of the ones I wrested from you in one of our regular tussles. Yeah. Anyway, this. I absolutely adored this book. Maybe for some of the same reason I like the Cheever. Muriel Spark, again, is a writer once very much taught part of our culture, whatever. That maybe has just been shoved a little bit to the back of the bookshelf. I'm not sure. But there was a big authorized biography of her by a guy named Martin Stannard in 2010. It's perfect to have a posthumous biography of Muriel Spark because she was such a kind of kinetic esp. And her, as I was reminded, I think of her as the author of the prime of Ms. Jean Brody. She was so prolific, and there's an element of the supernatural, almost science fiction, in a lot of her work. And Wilson does a wonderful job of just conveying the weirdness of Muriel's bark, like the oddness. It's relatively short, and it just gives you this feeling of almost like she's. I think it's like the best thing a biographer can do, which is act as a medium. She really gets into the papers and the mysteries, and it's not told in a. And then this happened, and then that it's told through the notes. And in that way, it connects to the didion thing that I was talking about earlier. Just that sense of primary materials that, as we discuss every time we have a podcast, we are losing all the time with texts and emails.

[C]

Yeah, that stuff freaks me out.

[B]

Totally freaks out.

[C]

Who's gonna collect all the emails?

[B]

That's right. Exactly.

[C]

How do you feel as someone who. All of you critics who read a lot of biographies, what do you feel is the right ratio between when you're writing about an artist, the writing about the life, and the writing about the art and the analysis of the art?

[B]

I would say it depends entirely upon how many primary materials are available and unexamined. Like, I. Personally, unless it's a really great critic like my two colleagues here, I would prefer not to read endless Stephen Sondheim biographies like some of Them are just analyzing his work to me. I wanna see. I want the letters, I want the diaries. I want all that stuff, the notes, the stuff that was unfinished and. Yeah, that's how I feel.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

There's a new biography of Denys Johnson, the writer of Jesus Son and other books. It's not a great biography, but it's good enough. It gets the job done. And I realized as a critic reviewing it, that people needed to hear this story. I decided I wasn't really going to have a lot of opinions about the book. I just wanted to tell people these great details about Dennis Johnson's life. Because I knew that would be enough to make the review interesting. And then this year, famously or infamously, I reviewed the new Mark Twain bio by Ron Chernow. And I'm mostly just took down Ron Chernow because. Sorry, Ron, he's a very good writer. It's just that people know Mark Twain's story. I didn't have to retell Mark Twain's story to our readers. And sometimes a piece as a book critic, you just know the material's good enough just to tell it. Just let the story tell itself. I mean, sometimes as a writer, I'll go all in on how the biography's written. Other times I'll just talk about the life. It's by feel, I think.

[C]

Well, with the. Not to get into this review, but with the Ron Chernow book. Some say that the. Back to this question about the balance between literary analysis, say when you're writing about a writer and the life was off. That it was all life and nothing about.

[D]

Or very little about the actual work in his book.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

Yeah. But also, he. Again, Ron, you're a very talented writer in this case. You know, what was great about Twain was the American in Twain. And the early experiences he had that he worked into his early fiction in his fiction, his major fiction. And this book sort of ends. That's all over by about page 200. And you have 600 long pages to go. That's far too much about Twain, the failed inventor and all of that. It's just that stuff just goes on. That's the problem with the book. If the book were 400 pages long, it would have been a great book.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So we're not gonna have Twain the musical.

[D]

Well, hasn't there been?

[C]

Hasn't there been?

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised by anything.

[D]

I think it's a line of Pyncheons. And the new Pynchon novel came out this year, Shadow Ticket. He Says that everything is destined to be a Broadway play.

[B]

Well, that would be great.

[C]

Do you want to talk about the Pynchon? I feel like we're in Pynchon mode because of the loose film adaptation of Vineland. But as you say, he put out Shadow Ticket, a long anticipated novel. It had been a while.

[D]

Yeah, he's just such a high stepper. All these big think pieces came out when this novel came out. Pynchon really understands the moment, and it's the easiest thing in the world to understand the moment. A TV show understands the moment. The Simpsons gets the moment. And what makes Pynchon Pynchon is just the electricity. I've used this word again, but I'll say it again. Electricity of his thought. There's so many brilliant sentences and ideas. And he's funny and he's on the ground and you just get this sense of a man hoovering up American culture and spitting it back to you in hilarious ways. And of course, there's the paranoia that's always been there, but. And he's old now. He's 88. And writers are allowed to take a step back, but he's never developed a late style. A lot of writers pare their style down. He's refused to do that, which makes him interesting, and he's still going for it. And even though it's not a great book, sentence by sentence, it's one of the best things I read all year.

[C]

Has anyone ever seen Thomas Pynchon? I know there are no pictures of him, but I think he just lives in New York, like on the Upper west side.

[B]

So he might be in this building.

[D]

You know, I shop at Fairway on the Upper west side, and he's mentioned Fairway and a few things he's written. And I'm aware that he could be here.

[B]

You know, he could be there, help eating the potatoes.

[C]

You can buy him so many times. And he knows you, but you do not know him. I'd love to go around the table here and have each of you really stump for a book that you think listeners should check out over the holiday downtime or early into next year.

[D]

John Updike. I'm an Updike head. His selected letters came out this year and the word was that we'd never see a book of Updike's letters because he mostly wrote postcards to people and didn't keep a lot of them.

[C]

What an incredible move, by the way.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And he typed them. I have one or two. Because when I used to assign books here at the Book Review. He would write back on a postcard. And he was famously a correspondent with John Cheever. We talked about him earlier today, and Cheever didn't keep Updike's letters. That's just insane. That's a literary crime. But Updikes, enough of them did survive, that his selected letters are wise. From the very beginning, you could clear he had a major talent. His letters, when he was 14, just are more rich in their prose than most writers ever get to in their lives. It's a book about literary vocation. It's a book about marrying his two wives, wooing them. And he has this great reputation for being a libertine. But in fact, it was only really one time in his life, one short period when he was divorcing his first wife and marrying his second, that all of these quote unquote affairs happened. And there weren't that many of them. And I'm not trying to defend Updike's life. I'm just saying that we have the sense that he went through his entire life just as some kind of wild sexual liberty, and he wasn't that at all. But it's very moving, his letters about his marriages here. He cared a lot about them and he cared about the other people in his life. And anyway, I found this book to be rich and full and a great companion to have around.

[C]

What is the best way to read a book of letters? Do you start at the beginning and just go to the end? Do you dip in and dip out? Especially with something like this, which I think is meaty. This particular book.

[D]

It is. I always hate the first 20% of a book of letters because normally they're the tamami from camp. And I make the case that Updike wrote to his mommy almost his whole life because they were very close, which is a problem because there are things you don't tell your mommy. As I say in my review, of.

[B]

Course he was writing to his mommy when he wrote to the wife. And the new wife, too.

[D]

Right? Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay, therapist over here.

[D]

Yeah. I do wish there were little buttons sometimes. I could press in biographies as well. We could skip immediately to page 44 while retaining your.

[B]

Have you ever heard of a Kindle, Dwight?

[D]

Yeah. As a critic, I'm too scared to skip anything because. And I know you guys feel the same way. I'm not saying I'm special in this, but as a critic, you want to be declarative. You want to say never once in a. Does Jen Zlai mention the fact that, you know. And if you missed this one page where Jen Zlai did do that. Then you look stupid, and so you can't skip anything. But, yeah. Do I wish I could skip sometimes?

[C]

Of course, Alexandra.

[B]

Well, I will never forgive Dwight for taking the Updike letters, but I retaliated.

[C]

You know you can still just read them, right?

[B]

Yes, and I have. And in fact, actually, I'll never forgive him. And yet I was. In the end, I was grateful because Updike is one of my favorite authors, and I actually found some of those letters a little bit cringe to use the modern language.

[D]

I didn't know this would be a festivus, like airing your grievances.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

No, no, you can't play this game.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, you can. Right.

[B]

Well, anyway, no, I'm glad to have the update letters not be work for me. I'm continuing with them, and it'll probably take me a year to finish them. Anyway, I retaliated by seizing the Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, which came out very recently and I highly recommend to our readers. I feel like most people think of the Mitfords, as I wrote in my reviews, as sort of posh blo of sort of aristocrats. It's all Downton Abbey and this and that, and, oh, there's a Nazi over here.

[C]

Oh, typical British.

[B]

Yeah, novelist. But Jessica Mitford is the most fascinating Mitford because she somehow winds up in Oakland, California, and Montgomery, Alabama, and she becomes a major leftist activist, and she wrote the American Way of Death, and she just was a fascinating, sizzling creature. How does an aristocrat from the Cotswolds in England wind up in Oakland, California? Like, that alone tells you all you need to know. I think about this book. Again, as with Muriel Spark, this is someone who's. There have been previous books about her, but this one, I think, really recontextualizes her for our moment.

[C]

And what was the name of that book again?

[B]

Troublemaker. Also a great title and a great cover with Hot Pink.

[C]

I didn't know we'd be talking so much about Updike and Cheever and Murray.

[B]

Mid century. Maybe we can you get a bunch.

[C]

Of book critics and tours like Up Back Up, Dyke.

[B]

Up Back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

[C]

Sorry, Jen.

[A]

All right. From the mid century to the future. There was a book that I reviewed earlier this year. It's called More Everything AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. And it's by a science writer named Adam Becker, and it's one of These books that takes on these big ideas about technology and Silicon Valley and capitalism and where everything is going and looking at the dystopian prospect of people having to live on Mars, which is totally not survivable for humans. But Becker, you know, he has a PhD in astrophysics, so he knows his stuff. But he's also just a delightful writer and he has the requisite sense of humor, I think, to write about some of these just crazy gargantuan projects and dreams. And he comes around to the argument that. That a lot of this is essentially a way to distract from these very rich tech bros mortality. The sense that, yes, we're all here for a finite time. And so instead of really reckoning with that and staring that in the face, people come up with all these fanciful projects that actually won't make life any better for anybody who's actually living here.

[C]

Are you saying men would rather invent Blue Origin than go to therapy?

[A]

I think that's. Yeah, that's sort of woven into his argument. And it was one of those books where I just felt it had the combination of these big meaty ideas, but also it was communicated in such a way that it was just surprisingly fun to read. And I really did appreciate that.

[C]

Amazing. And what was that one called again?

[A]

It's called More Everything Forever. And the author's name is Adam Becker.

[C]

I did not keep track of how many books we just talked about. I think we probably talked about 20 something books.

[B]

I'm just wondering if we're gonna be Ripp Place by AI this year.

[A]

Oh, that's part of this. That's part of the book too.

[C]

No, not this year. It's been, as it always is, a delight to have the three of you on. We could have talked about dozens more. Jenzilai, thank you so much.

[A]

Thank you, Gilbert.

[C]

Alexandra Jacobs, thank you so much. Gilbert, you are welcome. And Dwight Garner, thanks for coming on.

[D]

Thank you, sir.

[C]

That was my conversation with Dwight Garner, Jenzilai and Alexandra Jacobs about their years in reading. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.

[E]

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