The 10 Best Books of 2024

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Book Review – "The 10 Best Books of 2024"

Episode Released: December 3, 2024

Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz collaborates with a panel of esteemed editors from The New York Times Book Review to unveil the top 10 fiction and nonfiction books of 2024. The discussion is enriched by insightful analyses, memorable quotes, and personal anecdotes, offering listeners a deep dive into the literary landscape of the year.

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Fiction Highlights

1. James by Percival Everett

   Timestamp: [03:26]

   Discussion:

   MJ Franklin introduces James as a profound retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, narrated from Jim's perspective. The novel reimagines Jim as an intelligent, philosophical character battling the horrors of American slavery while seeking to document his own story.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “James is not illiterate and he's not the sidekick that he's portrayed as in Huck Finn.” – MJ Franklin [04:12]
   • “Percival Everett infuses that with so much new energy and new plot points.” – Dave Kim [04:31]

2. You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique

   Timestamp: [09:49]

   Discussion:

   The panel delves into this vivid portrayal of the 1519 encounter between Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. The narrative captures the chaotic and often absurd interactions between two vastly different cultures on the brink of dramatic change.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “The Aztec priests stink like they're wearing human skin.” – Jomana Khatib [10:13]
   • “It's like Wolf Hall meets Tristam Shandy.” – Gilbert Cruz [13:39]

3. Good Material by Dolly Alderton

   Timestamp: [17:06]

   Discussion:

   Described as a cathartic breakup story, Good Material follows Andy, a comedian grappling with the end of a long-term relationship. The book is praised for its sharp dialogue, engaging characters, and the satisfying narrative twist that offers perspectives beyond the central relationship.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “It's genial, it's smart, the dialogue is sharp.” – Jomana Khatib [18:54]
   • “There are these two competing impulses... to be alone and to be loved.” – Dave Kim [20:35]

4. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

   Timestamp: [31:10]

   Discussion:

   Martyr explores the life of a young Iranian American poet seeking meaning through self-sacrifice. The novel intricately weaves themes of grief, identity, and the quest for significance, all while maintaining a playful and engaging narrative tone.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “Martyr! It carries the story and its play.” – Gilbert Cruz [33:11]
   • “He wants to become a living martyr.” – MJ Franklin [31:10]

5. Additional Recommendations:

   • Godwin by Joseph O'Neill

     Timestamp: [36:05]

     A dual narrative exploring the business of soccer and the complexities of capitalism, praised for its intricate critique and engaging storytelling.

   • The Coin by Yasmin Sahir

     Timestamp: [38:06]

     A debut novel blending humor with anti-capitalist themes, focusing on a Palestinian immigrant navigating personal and societal challenges.

   • Rejection by Tony Cholitamuti

     Timestamp: [38:49]

     Noted for its raw portrayal of dark humanity, this book demands a prepared mind for its edgier content.

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Nonfiction Highlights

1. The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

   Timestamp: [41:04]

   Discussion:

   This meticulously researched account of Captain James Cook's third voyage highlights the clash between Enlightenment ideals and the harsh realities of exploration. Sides presents Cook as a complex figure whose scientific curiosity often led to unintended conflicts.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “James Cook was trying to be a perfect scientist and he wants to just observe without interacting.” – Nima Jeromey [42:02]
   • “Cook wasn't here to lionize or demonize, but just describe him.” – Greg Coles [47:05]

2. Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

   Timestamp: [50:34]

   Discussion:

   Blitzer’s exhaustive exploration of U.S. immigration policy and its roots in Central American crises serves as a critical examination of decades-long political decisions. The book intricately connects historical policy shifts with personal stories, making the complex issue relatable and urgent.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “How did we get here?” – Emily Aiken [51:43]
   • “It’s an immensely meticulous work of reportage.” – Greg Coles [54:02]

3. Reagan by Max Boot

   Timestamp: [60:18]

   Discussion:

   This biography offers a nuanced portrayal of Ronald Reagan, balancing admiration with critical analysis. Max Boot, a former conservative who distanced himself from the party, provides a reflective look at Reagan's legacy and its unintended consequences in modern politics.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “Reagan exacerbated the Cold War, made it last longer.” – Greg Coles [64:57]
   • “He was born to New Deal Democrats yet refused to support key civil rights legislation.” – Emily Aiken [63:37]

4. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant

   Timestamp: [67:40]

   Discussion:

   Sant’s memoir narrates her personal journey transitioning gender in her 60s. The book intertwines past and present, offering a heartfelt and candid exploration of identity, relationships, and self-discovery without delving into broader sociological commentary.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “I'm a writer before I am anything else.” – Greg Coles [72:09]
   • “Multiple truths can exist simultaneously.” – Emily Aiken [69:54]

5. Cold Crematorium by Youssef Deborzeni

   Timestamp: [73:34]

   Discussion:

   This recently translated Holocaust memoir presents an unfiltered account of Deborzeni’s harrowing experiences in Auschwitz. Blending journalistic precision with poetic introspection, the book captures the bleakness and fleeting acts of humanity within the camp.

   Notable Quotes:

   • “He more or less almost died, and I don't know how to represent it to you.” – Nima Jeromey [77:37]
   • “Cigarettes are big in this.” – Greg Coles [77:38]

6. Additional Recommendations:

   • When the Clock Broke by John Ganz

     Timestamp: [78:38]

     An insightful political history of the 1990s, challenging the decade's perceived tranquility by highlighting the rise of fringe political movements and their lasting impact on contemporary politics.

   • Others:

     The panel briefly mentions various other impactful nonfiction works, acknowledging the depth and diversity present in this year's literary offerings.

---

Conclusion

As the year winds down, The New York Times Book Review hosts provide a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the year's best literature. From profound fictional narratives that challenge societal norms to nonfiction works that dissect complex historical and political issues, this episode serves as an essential guide for readers seeking both enjoyment and enlightenment in their literary pursuits.

Final Recap of Top Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2024:

• Fiction:

  1. James by Percival Everett
  2. You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique
  3. Good Material by Dolly Alderton
  4. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar
  5. Godwin by Joseph O'Neill
  6. The Coin by Yasmin Sahir
  7. Rejection by Tony Cholitamuti

• Nonfiction:

  1. The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides
  2. Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer
  3. Reagan by Max Boot
  4. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant
  5. Cold Crematorium by Youssef Deborzeni
  6. When the Clock Broke by John Ganz

The Book Review podcast delivers an engaging and insightful discourse, ensuring that listeners are well-informed about the pivotal literary works that shaped 2024.

Transcript

[T. Rowe Price]

Build the retirement you want with actionable insights from T. Rowe Price on the award winning Confident Conversations on Retirement podcast. T. Rowe Price uses the power of curiosity to explore topics like how the psychology of money influences financial behaviors, how to maximize savings through retirement, and the unretirement trend. Get insights to help confidently navigate your retirement planning journey. Better questions, better insights. Listen to confident conversations on retirement on your favorite podcast platform or visit t rowprice.com podcast.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. It's December, which means it's end of year list time, which means it's top 10 books of the year time, which means it's our top 10 books of the year podcast time. Joining me on this week's episode are two groups of editors from the Book Review to talk about the best fiction and nonfiction books of the year. Let's start with our fiction panel. Here to talk about the novels that are on this year's top 10 books of 2024 list are Jomana Khatib. Hello.

[Jomana Khatib]

Hi, Gilbert.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Dave. Kim.

[Dave Kim]

Hello.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And our regular, MJ Franklin.

[MJ Franklin]

Hello.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Hello. So the three of us are fresh, maybe not fresh off the National Book Awards, which we all attended last night. How's everyone feeling today? Silence.

[Jomana Khatib]

I was telling MJ and Dave loudly downstairs that the drink, the branded drink at the National Book Awards, was called the Plot Twist, and it incited a lot of plot twists in my personal life last night.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Really?

[Jomana Khatib]

Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Okay.

[Jomana Khatib]

Yep.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Tell us.

[Jomana Khatib]

I sent some emails. At 2 in the morning?

[Gilbert Cruz]

No. Why did you do that?

[Dave Kim]

Never a good idea.

[Jomana Khatib]

Never a good idea. Well, you know, something was unlocked. The power of literature moved me to write some of my own in Gmail. So I'm in a fine state to talk about contemporary fiction.

[Gilbert Cruz]

How are you two feeling? Remember when we were gonna record this at 10am yeah.

[MJ Franklin]

Dave helpfully and rightfully said, gilbert, that is sadistic. Please, let's change this. And we did.

[Nima Jeromey]

So.

[MJ Franklin]

Thank you, Dave.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Thank you, Gilbert. Let it never be said that I do not listen to my staff.

[Dave Kim]

Thank you. The words damage control come to mind.

[Jomana Khatib]

And of course, MJ is the most brilliant of the four of us here because MJ had a hydration plan.

[MJ Franklin]

I did. I went home. It was like 2am I'm sitting in the dark, playing video games for an extra hour in the night, but just drinking water. And I woke up this morning and I felt so okay, it even annoyed me, I was like this.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm leaving right now. As in all things MJ leads The way I need to adopt that next time. The big winner last night at the National Book Awards, as expected by many, was one of the books on our list. This was James by Percival Everett. It should probably be the first one that we talk about. And listeners, if you haven't already done so, please go find our book club episode from May in which MJ Xumana and Greg Coles talked about that book in depth. Mj, you hosted that episode?

[MJ Franklin]

Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Tell us about the book.

[MJ Franklin]

James is a revisiting, a retelling, a recalibration, a homage to I can keep listing off words. It is a reworking of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, this time told from Jim's perspective, or as he clarifies. It starts off with the beats. Huck runs away. Jim is about to be sold, or James is about to be sold, and he also runs away. They team up and flee down the Mississippi. However, Percival Everett infuses that with so much new energy and new plot points. Number one, you realize that James is not illiterate and he's not the sidekick that he's portrayed as in Huck Finn. He's incredibly smart. You find that out from the first page. He's in on every single trick and joke that Huck is trying to pull on him. He is a philosopher. He is fighting for freedom, and he has his own harrowing adventures that takes him into kind of the heart of American slavery. And he sees the kind of the horrors of that system. And he's trying to fight to free his family. And he's trying to also. This is the big point. He's trying to tell his own story and figure out what that means. What does it mean for James as a black man in a society where telling your or even writing is outlawed? So it goes places, it's funny, it's dark, and it's such a Percival Everett creation.

[Jomana Khatib]

It really. One of the things that's so moving about that book is that it restores so much dignity to this character. Jim was really two dimensional. And I think one of the things that is so clear in this book is that Percival Everett's able to keep this project of dignifying James even in the most indignifying situations. There are times where he has to. He's in blackface and he's in these absurd situations that I think really could only come from Percival's mind and his sense of humor and his sense of power and justice, too. It's a remarkable book.

[Dave Kim]

Yeah. I think there were, like, for me, two key departures. I think from Huck Finn, which otherwise it's fairly faithful to it just in terms of its rhythm and the picaresque structure, et cetera. But for me, one of the big themes that I think Everett dives into is race and language and the codes we have to signify identity. And I just found that whole thing fascinating. He really reverses this idea of code switching, which is that when people have two different ways of speaking depending on who they're with, there's a public facing one and a private facing one. And this is, this is flipped on its head because James and his fellow enslaved people are talking in this very erudite language when they're alone. And when there are the presence of, when there are white people around, they quickly switch to what they call their slave filter. And it's supposed to make white people feel more comfortable about their supposed superiority and thus protects people from. Protects the enslaved from getting hurt. It's a sort of mode of survival.

[MJ Franklin]

And it's not just like the language switching too. It's James dreams of Voltaire. He has like several fever dreams where he's in these debates with philosophers. His mind is so rich in a way that we haven't been able to see before. And Percival Everett totally opens up.

[Dave Kim]

It starts to become a much sharper critique of Enlightenment philosophy and this idea that all human beings are equal. And I think it really sort of throws that idea on its head. And I found that part of it really fascinating as well.

[Jomana Khatib]

And yet he packs in all these ideas in a way that is. We throw around the word accessible a lot. And I don't love using that. But this is not heavy handed. He's very effective at communicating this. And also it's in a way that's gonna be legible to a lot of readers. No Huck Finn and people. And frankly, I think the American reading public is primed right now to reconsider these sort of national narratives. And the way that Percival Everett pulls that off actually raises even bigger questions and assertions about the centrality of black lives, black stories, black narratives to American culture.

[MJ Franklin]

I was gonna say something very similar, which is like you were talking about Enlightenment Dave and like code switching and all of these very heavy histor influences and weight. And yet the book is so lively, it is funny. There are plot twists even from the opening line, which I have written down because I laugh at it every time. It's James is watching Huck and Tom Sawyer set up a prank. And this is the opening line of the book. It is quote those little Bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. You know, immediately this is a different voice. It's knowing, it's. It's exhausted, it's exasperated, and it's just. It's fun. Even as what James is dealing with is pretty horrifying.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Let's move on to a book that I read at the beginning of this year after our critic Dwight Garner gave it a rave review. This is you Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. I'll give you a brief description of what this book is about. It's 1519 in Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City. And Hernan Cortez has. He's arrived there with his crew. They're there to meet Moctezuma, who's the Aztec emperor. And Moctezuma's a little out of it. He's tired, he's on too many mushrooms. His Aztec priests are just covered in blood. He's killing people left and right. Everyone smells like literal crap. And it is this sort of short, fleet, hallucinogenic. Look at these two cultures coming together, trying to engage in this weird diplomacy where maybe they all think that the other side is trying to murder them. It's very weird. It's gross. And I loved it so much. And I know that several of you did as well.

[Jomana Khatib]

I'm one of them, perhaps to no one's surprise on the horn, although I think our colleague Lauren probably put this best when she invoked Baz Luhrmann when we were first discussing this book. Because, like the opening scene alone, they're at this horrible meal. And I will never forget the description of how these priests stink like they're wearing human skin.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Can I read the first paragraph? This is the first paragraph. There's a Spanish captain who's sitting between two Aztec priests. And the first paragraph goes, draped like a cape. Around the shoulders of the former priest was a decaying, blackened skin of a warrior sacrifice, who knows when, while the ladder's mat locks, neither cut nor washed since he'd taken orders at the temple, were crusted with many moons of sacrificial blood.

[Jomana Khatib]

And also. Let's take a minute to applaud Natasha Wimmer. I don't read Spanish. I don't know what the original paragraph would have read, but even just draped like a cape, there's so much musicality and intentionality. It's beautiful and that's why these images stick with you. But it's hysterical, right? And these characters are memorable. I think we all love the idea of an emperor out of his Mind on mushrooms. We've all met somebody like that at one point or another. And they're eating grasshopper tacos.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Delicious.

[Jomana Khatib]

I'm relieved they're not eating the contramar fish of current Mexico City. But he has such a command of the material. It's beautiful. He's talking about how each island in this empire has a specific function. There's the Flower island and the Trash Island. And actually, in a lot of ways, I think that this book has the most shared DNA with James. They're doing a lot of the same thing.

[Dave Kim]

It's counterfactual, but it's also not a kind of dutiful alternate history in which the Tanochka are portrayed as these hardworking, innocent people who are wholly slaughtered by the conquistadors. Or they're not like these valiant heroes that are protecting their homeland either. You don't get kind of cliche pictures. I think what you really get are just the absurdities of early diplomacy. Ends that fine line between a shared mutual understanding of cultures and total chaos and bloodshed. And it's very tenuous. It's tense. I think we've mentioned the gore, but it's really not all that bloody. Actually, the gore actually happens around the margins. But I just loved how this feels just messy and sloppy. And it doesn't feel like a battle or a kind of moral conflict between good and evil. It just feels like a mess. And I just love that about it.

[MJ Franklin]

And it's so vivid in that mess. Again, you were talking about how gross that even just that opening scene is. What I love about this is that it's a book that casts a spell. It's almost in Technicolor. It's examining history, but it's making it vibrant and vivid to give us a new way of approaching it and understanding it. It's. Even as it's violent, it's very playful. This book and the images that stand out of someone getting lost in this huge labyrinth looking for horses, for instance. The book that it reminded me of, in addition to James was we just talked about 100 Years of Solitude for the book club. And I feel like you can see Garcia Marquez's DNA all in this one. And again, it never feels dutiful, never feels like he's writing in someone else's shadow. Instead, it feels like a. A growing of the tradition and the baton. For me, this was such an unexpected book. It was so unlike anything I had read this year or actually in many years.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's so unique in the conversations that we had about this book. One of our colleagues described it as Agiri, Wrath of God meets Monty Python. Someone else said Wolf hall meets Tristam Shandy. I think that the thing that those two things shared is a sense of grandeur and courtly intrigue with a sense of the absurdity. I think Laura and our colleague called it a comedy of idiots. It is, as we've learned in history, there's supposed to be this freighted moment. And the way that Enrique is putting it is just a bunch of idiots who don't know what they're doing, trying to figure out, like, are they gonna kill our horses? Are we gonna get out of here alive? What's gonna happen? How do I make myself presentable? How do I cut my toenails with my knife? The book is very, very bodily focused.

[MJ Franklin]

And it's concentrated in such a short period of time as well. And so that's the other joy is it feels like you're diving into a pivot point and it's just bringing you very immersively into one critical juncture.

[Dave Kim]

Yeah. We should tell readers that it takes place entirely in a single day and it starts at lunch. And that's it. And that's it.

[Jomana Khatib]

Like all good days starts at lunch.

[Gilbert Cruz]

But because there's a fair amount of drug usage in the book, it also feels as if, like, time is telescoping in and out, even though it only takes place over the course of a day or so.

[Jomana Khatib]

I should say if anybody shares my skepticism of drug sequences, it's like up there with people talking to me about their dreams. Who cares? This is actually expertly done. I usually hate reading about drug trips or being in altered states. This nails it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I believe this is a take you have given on this podcast before.

[Jomana Khatib]

Oh, God, I'm getting stale. I'm just reaffirming. You can only be commitment.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Thank you. We'll be right back.

[T. Rowe Price]

Build the retirement you want with actionable insights from T. Rowe Price on the award winning Confident Conversations on Retirement podcast. T. Rowe Price uses the power of curiosity to explore topics like how the psychology of money influences financial behaviors, how to maximize savings through retirement, and the unretirement trend. Get insights to help confidently navigate your retirement planning journey. Better questions, better insights. Listen to confident conversations on retirement on your favorite podcast platform or visit t rhoprice.com podcast the holidays can be a.

[Jomana Khatib]

Hectic time, but Moonpig makes it easier by mailing your holiday cards for you. No extra cost, just the price of a stamp. Pick a beautiful design, personalize it with photos and messages. And Moonpig will send it to everyone on your list. No long lines or post office trips. It's card sending made convenient and personal. Try it free with code [e-mail] because everyone deserves a Moonpig card.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Let us move to something completely different, as different from this book as can possibly be, which is good material by Dolly Alderton. I think people think of the New York Times Book Review and they think of our top 10 books list that we put out every year, and they think it's serious and they think it's dutiful, and they think that there's nothing on there that gives one pleasure or joy. I think good material is a book that falls into the pleasurable category. Joumana, am I wrong in interpreting this book that way?

[Jomana Khatib]

I think the word that comes to mind for me, rather than pleasurable, is cathartic. Although maybe there is some relief or pleasure in catharsis. It's a classic sort of breakup story. So we meet Andy, who's a comedian in his mid-30s, fresh out of a breakup. He spent three years, 10 months. I mean, he knows down to the day how long he was with his ex, Jen, and he's shattered. And he's back living with his mom, who plies him with alcohol and cigarettes and encourages him to get over a broken heart that way. There's. It's populated by a lot of really charming characters. Andy is the primary for most of the book, and we see him really reflect on the relationship, what didn't work about it, what he didn't like about her. And for anybody that's gone through any kind of breakup, these are gonna be very familiar feelings. I actually listened to this when I was settling into a new apartment. And the audiobook's fantastic. And it's genial, it's smart, the dialogue is sharp, it over delivers on what the gambit of the book is. Dolly Alderton pulls off a kind of a triple axel at the end because we get a perspective change. We hear from Jen and we get to round out the side of the story and in a way that doesn't feel trite. Kind of reminded me of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, but, like, less demonic, because I think these are both fundamentally like decent, good people. And I think you're left with just the hard truth that, like, it's a miracle for anybody to get together, and it's a miracle that it lasts however long it lasts. And it's a miracle that you, like, move on and pick Yourself up and keep going.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Oh, my God, that's so wise.

[Jomana Khatib]

Thank you. I feel gray hairs coming in as I'm talking.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Mj, you hosted a book club conversation about Gabantio earlier this year. What are your thoughts on this one?

[MJ Franklin]

So, for me, I don't know if she said this on the podcast. We had a colleague who has said, and I think about it a lot. She says, I'm tired of books announcing themselves. Right. I feel like we frequently gravitate toward the dazzling books, the books that take on these big historical. I mean, two of the books that you've mentioned before. I love those books. But there's something to be said about just a good story you sink yourself into. And I think that's what this is for me. This book is one of the books that has unexpectedly stuck with me throughout the year. And I have found that it is quietly, very astute in how it captures modern relationships and modern breakups and the weird rituals we have and trying to get over that or not get over a breakup. Jumana, you were talking about the wisdom, the hard truths in this book and the breakup and the despair. And Gilbert, you mentioned this is a book that's pleasurable and full of joy. And I think that contradiction is only able to come to life and be true because of Dolly Allerton's touch. She is. It feels like reading just a fun rom com. It hides its lessons in just a really fun, propulsive, entertaining story so that it does feel cathartic. And it takes a little while for that to settle into you because you've just had such fun, a fun time while reading along.

[Dave Kim]

Yeah, I would put this squarely in the rom com genre, but at the same time, I think the best romantic comedies transcend the genre by teaching us something about relationships and about love and the nature of romance. And I think this totally does. I think especially at the end, towards the latter half of the book, you really start to see a shift, a shift in tone and also a much more inward, introspective feeling to it. I think she really dives into this, the idea that there are these two competing impulses that are so strong. One is to look inside and focus on yourself and be alone. And then the other is to just attach yourself to someone and be loved. And those two things should cancel each other out. They should not exist at once. And yet that's the great paradox in comedy, I guess, even of human life. And. And she really, she really unpacked that really well for me. And by the end of it, I felt that she's gone past the kind of rom com label. And in a great way, I want.

[Gilbert Cruz]

To transition to a book that also made me think about relationships, but in a completely different way. This is a book called All Fours by Miranda July. And I feel uncomfortable setting this book up.

[Jomana Khatib]

Do you want me to do it? Do you want me to?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, I would love for you to do this.

[Jomana Khatib]

Okay, I'll intro this book. This was the book of the summer. This is a phenomenon, this book. This is the story of a woman in California. She's in her mid-40s, she's married, she has a child, and she's an interdisciplinary artist in a way that resembles Miranda July. It feels autofictional. She works across genre, visual writing. And so she's just come into some money, and she decides that what she wants to do is drive cross country from California to New York and spend her birthday in the Carlisle, which to me sounds fabulous, even though I don't drive. And she doesn't even make it, like, an hour outside of her house or her town. She stops in Monrovia, California. She's smitten with this individual named Davey who works at the rental. The car rental agency. And before she knows it, she's rented a room at a local motel and has hired a designer to completely redo the suite with Tonka Bean scented soap and, like, the most opulent, like, things that should not exist in the universe of a motel. And this becomes the crucible for the narrator to think a lot more about her own desires and her own space and privacy and how a lot of her identities, particularly as a wife, as a mother, as an artist, as an individual, as somebody who still has a lot of will. I'm using that in a very kind of intentional. Like, if Carl Jung were on the call, he would say, she's a willful woman, which is great. And the other thing is that she's part of this generation that's approaching menopause. And so she actually is wrangling a lot of internal hormonal changes and existential questions. Will I be invisible? What's gonna happen to my desirability and my desire? Like, the stuff that makes me who I am. It's totally surprising. She crams a lot into this book. There's stuff about ancestors and family and trauma, real trauma. And it's a very relational book. The narrator is an individual. You see her in conversation with her best friend, with her spouse. It's. You see her come alive in these relationships and these dynamics. And I was surprised. It's a real ride. It's a real ride. One of my friends said it's like John Updike, but for women. I don't know what I think about that, but maybe the three men on this call could help me sort that out.

[MJ Franklin]

Can we get a friend on the podcast I have many questions about?

[Jomana Khatib]

Yeah, she's in social work school, so I trust her.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Mj, why do you think there were so many group chats about this book this summer?

[MJ Franklin]

This felt like a book you could not talk about. I read this on a vacation and I'm with my partner and I could not put it down. And he's, what are you reading? I'm like, nothing unless you read it. Let me talk about it. Until then, you don't need to know.

[Jomana Khatib]

Mind your business.

[MJ Franklin]

Mind your business. Get a group chat. It. The book is so zany and weird and explicit. It feels naughty even as it's earnest and searching.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You say naughty or naughty?

[MJ Franklin]

Both. It was an intentional poor pronunciation. It's both naughty and naughty because it's a very atypical affair, but it's a very rich affair. And I wanna point out that the structure is very atypical. I feel like you think of the typical, like, rising action climax and then fall. And this almost feels like three short stories in my mind. You have the section where she is building out the room, the hotel room. You have the section of the affair. And then you have what happens when she comes back and as she's dealing with peri menopause. So I think the reason why there are group chats and group chat merch is that it felt like a book that just demanded to be discuss. And once you were discussing it, you were laughing out loud. You were saying, I haven't seen this talked about in a book before. It has that illicit thrill of reading good gossip or finding about good gossip. It's peeking into someone's strange, weird relationship.

[Jomana Khatib]

And you know your point about the peaks and valleys of this narrative. There's a running gag that, like, the narrator and her best friend are staring with horror at the sort of, like, hormonal, this precipitous drop that they can expect their hormones to go under. So this chart is sort of like. It's almost like the roast that they're the most afraid of. And it's. But that makes a lot of sense about what a ride this is. Also, somebody has. It might as well be me. This is an unbelievably sexually frank book. Like, unbelievably sexually frank.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I was waiting for the one woman on this podcast.

[Jomana Khatib]

I'm delighted to be here. Yep. Yep. Wouldn't put this on an audiobook. In the car with your mom.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely not.

[Jomana Khatib]

Nope. Yeah. Just had to get that disclaimer.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I think that's a big part of why people have enjoyed talking about it. It's a pretty horny book in a way that you maybe see in other genres, but I feel like just in what we call literary fiction, you don't really see that often.

[Dave Kim]

I will never think about tampons the same way again.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely. Thank you for the spoiler.

[Dave Kim]

No. Oh, I shouldn't say that.

[MJ Franklin]

Why is it a T? We don't know what's happening there.

[Jomana Khatib]

That's. That's catharsis. Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Hey, yo.

[Jomana Khatib]

I am reclaiming. I feel like John Updike right now.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Dave, you were about to make a serious point.

[Dave Kim]

I actually think the John Updike point is kind of is apartment Actually. And it's hard not to think of. It's good. But it's also annoying that it's hard not to think of privilege while you read this book. And obviously, this is a person of means who can reject her mothering duties, her professional life, her. She has the sort of means to create this fantasy world for herself. And so I think that's gonna be a bit of a hurdle for a lot of different readers. For a lot of readers, it was. For me, at least. It might start to be a little bit insufferable because of that. But I think you see Miranda July saying. The author saying, okay, I know, but indulge me here for just a second. And when you do. I found this book strangely, like, moving and vulnerable and honest, and she just goes for it. What if you could do this? And what if you could create this little room and make a second life? We all have those moments where we imagine what our lives would be like if I went with option B. And she does it and she tries it, and it's messy. It's not. It does not work out perfectly. But I did enjoy going down that rabbit hole with her. And to that effect, I think the Updike thing does hold. Right. This is also. It's also very difficult to read Updike without thinking about male privilege and white privilege, and all of that stuff is dutiful. That's the word of the day, as it may sound. But I think once you do go down that rabbit hole, it's really fascinating.

[Jomana Khatib]

Rabbit run down the rabbit hole.

[Dave Kim]

Yeah, exactly.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's a very funny book. It's a very Horny book. It's a deep book in ways that I did not expect. And even though there was all this discourse over the summer and into the fall about it, which might lead some to think maybe it's overrated, I do not feel like it is. I don't feel like it is.

[Jomana Khatib]

One thing where I feel that this book really over delivered is the portrayal of the narrator's child. So there's a scene where the narrator and her husband are really at loggerheads. He wants to host a brunch. You can feel the rage on the page that they feel towards one another. And still the narrator makes a point to talk about how their child Sam is going around offering guests Altoids that they had bought with their own money. What an amazing detail. It's so rare to find kids in fiction that feel that three dimensional. And I think she really nailed it. Altoid. Care for an Altoid? Come on, it's beautiful. God, I'm so sappy.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Altoids make me sneeze.

[Jomana Khatib]

Where do you put them?

[Gilbert Cruz]

All right, let's talk about our last book. Sometimes, because we have the wonderful opportunity to read months ahead of when a book comes out, people will talk at the end of a year about a book that's coming out next year. And they'll say, already, I think this one is gonna be in contention for our best of the year list. And I remember around this time last year, October, November, one of our editors in particular saying martyr by Kaveh Akbar, is it. It's gonna be one that I'm gonna nominate and that we're all gonna talk about. And that editor was right, mj, to talk about Martyr on this podcast. You did so on another podcast. I will forgive you for that. Tell us about this book.

[MJ Franklin]

So Martyr is the reckoning of a young Iranian American immigrant who I think he's what, in his mid-20s. He is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. And he's grieving. When he was a kid, his mother died in a tragic accident in Iran where the US shot down a commercial passenger plane, killing about 300 people, his mother included. And ever since then, that death has really haunted him. Cause he's trying to figure out, like, his mother was just a number in a news event. And what he wants to do is he wants to make sure that his life has meaning. So he wants to become a living martyr. At the same time, he's researching martyrs and he's a poet in the book. And he becomes. He learns about an artist who is dying. She finds out that she has terminal Cancer. And she decides to spend her last days in the Brooklyn Museum just answering questions. That's the setup. What you're really reading as you are going along is just following a young, messed up poet's journey in discovering himself, trying to connect with his family, trying to figure out what it means to create a life. I went to the New York launch of this book, and one of the things that I think is a little clue about the tone of this book is actually on the COVID And the book is Martyr, exclamation point. And he spoke about how that exclamation point was so important, because you see a book like Martyr and you think it's gonna be self serious. And there's just that hint of winkingness and playfulness with that exclamation point that it signals. And I think that carries what makes the voice so infectious. It carries the story and its play.

[Jomana Khatib]

It works in such a funny double way because with the exclamation point, it's almost a curse word where it's like, ugh, murder. And there are moments in this book where you want to shake him. He's got a lot on his plate, admittedly, and make some decisions that from a healthy clinical distance, you think maybe are not the most healthy choices. And you do want to, like, shake him the way you would your hapless best friend or whatever. But it's play. There's so much doubleness in this book. I don't know. I will say I don't think this is a book if you were, like, a plot reader. But if you like language, you like voice, if you can plot and its mechanics and it's lesser demons on the back burner, then this can be a very memorable reading experience. I'm not gonna make a habit of being the sort of, like, resident person from the Fertile Crescent, but it's kind of amazing to see such an Islamic book like this right from the title on down. And Fun little nuggets Shams, his last name. That's the name of Rumi Svengali, his tutor. It's beautiful. It's so thoughtful. It's cool. And I agree with you, mj, that, frankly, it's a reminder that American fiction, there's so much more than just, like, Huck Finn, of course, is, like, quintessentially American canon, American material. But, like, where we are right now in America, we're a country of immigrants, where people come with this amount of grief and trauma that you can't even imagine, or these experiences that we don't talk about. I'm so happy and gratified to see this reflected in the cultural material that we have now. I think that's a real coup.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'd love, in closing, to ask each of you to tell me about another book from this year that's on this list that maybe entertained you or moved you or made you think that you wish had gotten a little more attention.

[Dave Kim]

I loved Godwin by Joseph O'Neill. I thought that was. It's a novel about soccer, but it's not really about soccer. This is very much a Joseph O'Neill signature, where his best known novel, Netherland, is a novel that's about cricket, but not at all about cricket. This is about sort of the business of soccer and the quest to find this perfect player in Benin. And it's a dual narrative because there's that story of a man who's trying desperately to find this wunderkind, this soccer prodigy, and this other story where he's also an employee in a technical writing collective. These are both topics that I have zero interest in, but I found completely fascinating. And O'Neill, I think, delivers one of the most complex and interesting critiques of capitalism with both of these narratives that I've seen in a while in fiction. And the way he pulls it off is really quite something.

[Jomana Khatib]

I love Godwin. I mean, I wrote about Godwin and I wrote about Joe O'Neill. It's just amazing. It shouldn't work, and it does. It's beautiful and thoughtful. And you don't see how much I think of Joseph O'Neill as a really classic novelist, where you don't see the seams. Right. He's worked so hard to make it look effortless. And I know how hard he works. That's a real treat for me.

[MJ Franklin]

I really love. I Keep Telling People about the Coin by Yasmin Sahir. This is a story about a Palestinian woman who immigrates to America, and she becomes a teacher teaching underprivileged students in New York. She also is obsessed with cleaning. And she has these very elaborate, very vividly rendered scenes of her scrubbing her body, trying to get clean, rubbing the skin tendrils off of her body and her arms in the shower. She also gets involved in a Birkin reselling racket. This book goes in all of these strange places. The one thing that unifies them is that at every point you think to yourself, this character should not be doing any of these actions. She should not be in charge of children. She takes up this. She start with this man, a homeless man. That she sees in her neighborhood and she recognizes him because she throws out a coat and then she recognizes him in the coat and he looks pretty sharp. And he's always. He's like this mysterious figure that pops in and out and is a foil for her very rich but also pathetic boyfriend that she hates but also spends all this time with. But this is another debut and similar to Martyr, you just get hooked by the voice. I keep saying it's Martyr Kaveh Akbar meets Ottessa Moshfegh and it's very bodily, it's very cringe inducing, but it's very sharp. It's very searching. If you want cringe inducing story that also deals with anti capitalist theory, this is a book for you.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What are you talking about?

[Jomana Khatib]

That's what I'm saying.

[MJ Franklin]

That's why I was paused.

[Dave Kim]

Sign me up.

[Gilbert Cruz]

All right. How do we all feel about this year in books?

[Jomana Khatib]

Okay. My feeling about it can be best summed up about the fact that the book I want to talk about is rejection by Tony Cholitamuti. I did stump for this one, knowing that it was not. You feel dirty. You shouldn't read this after you read a book about somebody who obsessively cleans. You got to read that in reverse because you feel filthy reading this book. But it's good. Nobody writes like Tony. You just have to be prepared for some real edgelord dark humanity stuff.

[Gilbert Cruz]

All right. To recap our best fiction of the year as part of our top 10 books of 2024, we have James by Percival Everett, All Fours by Miranda July, you Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique, Good material by Dolly Alderton and Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. I think we did it, everyone. I feel great about this episode. I hope you do too. Joumana, thank you as always for joining.

[Jomana Khatib]

Nodding enthusiastically. I can't wait to listen to this unironically.

[Dave Kim]

I loved it. Thank you for inviting me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Thank you, Dave and mj, as always.

[MJ Franklin]

Thank you for having me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

A pleasure. We'll be right back.

[Jomana Khatib]

Foreign.

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[Gilbert Cruz]

Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined now by a group of editors who are here to talk about our best nonfiction books of the year. Nima Jeromey, first time on the podcast. Welcome, Nima.

[Nima Jeromey]

Thanks, Gilbert.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Greg Coles, thank you for being here.

[Greg Coles]

Hi, Gilbert.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And Emily Aiken. Hi, Emily.

[Emily Aiken]

Hello, Gilbert.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So I'm going to start with a book that I think all of us, all four of us, were big fans of the Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of James Cook by Hampton side. So I love books about seafaring adventure. I think last year, David Grann's the Wager filled that slot for me. Nathaniel Philbricks in the Heart of the Sea, stuff like that. This is a book about the third voyage of Captain James Cook, the British explorer who I think first mapped out large swaths of the Pacific Ocean for Europeans. He was sent on this journey to try to discover the Northwest Passage and then also to return a man who had been in London for a while to Tahiti, where he was born. Nima, we're gonna start with you first. Why did you love this book?

[Nima Jeromey]

I'm really interested in these books that kind of highlight the way that history is not a straight line where everybody gets cooler and more with it as we go along through the centuries. I think what you see in this book is that this is the kind of dying embers of the Enlightenment. People are really dedicated in Britain and in Europe to the idea of humanism. They want to understand how people in other cultures see themselves, see foreigners, and look at things from a new perspective. And this book is not a biography of of James Cook. It's really only about the third voyage, which is this time where this kind of Enlightenment project comes up against a lot of difficulties. I really like the way that he's describing James Cook as this person who's trying to be a perfect scientist and he wants to just observe without interacting. But unfortunately, these are human beings. They interacted a lot. The guy who we're talking about. His name is Mai, he's Tahitian. He actually hopped on a boat. Coming back on the second voyage, there were multiple ships and Cook didn't know he was coming. And then he shows up in England and he becomes the toast of England. He sleeps with a lot of people. He wants to get guns so he can go back and fight a war against his enemies in the Pacific. And it is almost. It's nice the way the book is structured because what we then see is the photo negative of that happening. When the Europeans are in the Pacific, they sleep with a lot of people, they get in a lot of trouble. And James Cook ultimately stirs up a lot of violence.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Annalee, what were your expectations going into this book? And then how did you feel like maybe those expectations were thwarted a little bit?

[Emily Aiken]

I appreciate that question because I admit to wariness. I'm not someone who ordinarily will pick up a narrative about exploration. And I knew Hampton Sides, a writer I admire, has written several books, including one about an Arctic expedition. And so the idea of reading about Captain Cook's third voyage, I have to admit I wouldn't have picked up this book, but, boy, am I glad I did. I was so taken with it. I was immersed in this world. And Gilbert, I think it was. What was truly unexpected was the kind of rich literary quality of this account. Yes, the boat becomes a microcosm, I think, of English Enlightenment culture. And so the characters on the boat embody the different values of this society, of the astronomer, the surge, the carpenters, the naturalists, and down to the lowliest sailor. They all seem to be keeping these extraordinary journals. And Sides is just a kind of symphony conductor, was how I thought about it, creating this orchestra of voices, all of them really very literate. And it's just. It's a thrilling ride to see them go to sea and as Nima said, bump up against the limitations and contradictions of that Enlightenment culture that sort of officially espouses egalitarianism and tolerance and restraint. But in fact, over the course of the voyage is really challenged. And to me, the book I hope we can talk a little bit more about this is a kind of parable about cultural exchange and misunderstanding.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Greg, are you a high seas adventure guy?

[Greg Coles]

I am such a sucker for the seafaring adventure tales like you. Unlike Emily, if it's has a ship in it, I will read it. And I have a particular interest in James Cook. I have for a long time. I think he is the first European who went around the world. He did it three times. He famously died on the third time. And Sides does such a good job at bringing him to life as a character. He says in the introduction to the book that he is not here to lionize or to demonize or to defend Cook, but just describe him. So in a sense, he is bringing that same anthropological instinct that Cook himself tried to bring to his voyages. There's a beautiful sentence in that same introduction. It's not only a novelistic, literary book, but it's a beautifully written book. And the sentence that I'm going to quote is something along the lines of saying that his motives were inquisitive, not acquisitive, empirical, not imperial. And it's just such a concise statement of the way that Cook approached his voyages as a scientist, as an explorer. Sides does a really great job at explaining what made Cook succeed where others failed. He was fastidious as a scientist. He maintained his equipment really well. He was on top of the current technology of the time and used it.

[Emily Aiken]

He basically tested out a new chronometer that allowed him. He was a brilliant navigator. Right.

[Greg Coles]

He had a great sense of what he was looking at. The charts that he made by eye and by hand match, to an uncanny degree, satellite imagery from today. He was the first most accurate navigator and kind of chart maker.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. There's a part later in the book, if I'm recalling correctly, where they are up near Alaska or the area between Alaska and Russia, and they are relying, or they have maps that were made by somewhere else, and they discover those maps completely fictionalized.

[Greg Coles]

Yeah. Maybe intentionally for the mapmaker's own glory or to throw other people off the scent, but they're completely useless. Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

One of the things that's interesting about this book, and it's mentioned in that introduction very strongly, is the way in which Sides tries to balance our current understanding of the age of exploration, which people like Cook and others are seen as pillagers, conquerors. Yeah. Colonizers. He wasn't a col. You know, but problematic colonizers, with the truth that he was a true explorer of mapmaker. He had these sort of grand interests that maybe went beyond just trying to go somewhere and put a flag in it, although that was part of it.

[Greg Coles]

One thing that was super interesting about him as the major representative of the age of exploration is that unlike other explorers, he left indigenous cultures alone as he found them. He took them at face value. He held very strong kind of European views, but he did not try to impose those views on the cultures where he was landing. And so this book is really fascinating, as Emily said, as a study of culture exchange and culture clash. And a lot of it went wrong on this trip.

[Nima Jeromey]

He tried to do that. Yeah, he was also. You have to follow the money a little bit. The King of England is sending him out on this trip for a reason, not just because he loves science so much. He sends out, I think he stocks the boat with English flora and fauna, hoping basically to terraform part of the Pacific islands to make it easier to colonize. And what you also find is one of the great mysteries of Cook, is normally he would come back and everyone publish journals. He would publish journals. We went and we stopped off in this island, they gave us coconuts, et cetera. This time he had a lot of navigational notes, but he couldn't, as you pointed out, he died in Hawaii. And part of that was because it just became impossible to try and act like you were this floating eye moving around the Pacific. And people would come and they'd take stuff from the boats. And Cook would sometimes overreact in the opinion of his own sailors and kill people and brutally beat them. Or at one point, this is the thing that really did him in. He took the King of Hawaii hostage.

[Emily Aiken]

In exchange for a theft. And you've put your finger on something that the English are trying to espouse these universal values of humanism and tolerance. But the idea of personal property was not an idea that had any stock in Hawaii or the other Polynesian islands. And people who would visit the boat, the indigenous population, would often just pilfer things, and they didn't see it that way.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So Captain Cook, complicated man. Let's move on to a situation that is quite complicated. And I think the next book we're gonna talk about is obviously quite well timed. This is Everyone who is gone is Here. The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer. Blitzer's a staff writer at the New Yorker. Somehow we always end up with at least one book by staff writer from the New Yorker here. It's really frustrating. I'm getting annoyed at them for being so good. This is a very good book and as I said, quite well timed given how big a role the debate over immigration at the southern border played in this year's presidential election. It's obviously been a defining issue since Donald Trump first ran for office. And I think as this book lays out superbly, it's been a defining political issue for half a century, if not longer. It focuses on the so called Northern Triangle of Central America. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. And Emily, tell us what this book does so well.

[Emily Aiken]

Yeah, what really struck me about this book is the sheer reportorial ambition for my money. In that respect, this book wins the prize on our list. It is an incredibly labyrinthine, Byzantine task to untangle decades of American foreign policy in the region and how it informed our treatment of immigrants on our southern border. But basically, Blitzer set himself this impossible task, which is to answer this question, how did we get here? He looks at the southern border today, and he goes back to the 1970s, 1980s in these three countries Gilbert mentions. And triangulating among them tells us how the paranoia about the infiltration of communism fueled American policy in the region and allowed America to tolerate corrupt authoritarian regimes that in turn tortured and oppressed local populations that then began to migrate toward our border. He makes the point that until the 80s, the typical border crosser was a single Mexican man. And that totally changed, as we know today, when we read article after article about the Darien Gap and families traversing hundreds of miles on foot through the desert and the mud. So it's just an incredible feat of reporting. At one point, I'll just say I started to make a list of all the different groups of people that he incorporates into the story. And it was like a crosshatch drawing. I could barely interpret it. He talks to migrants, coyotes, their death squads, peasants, students, soldiers, generals, politicians, border activists, church volunteers, policy advisors, diplomats, aid workers, detention staff. These are all really important parts of the story. So it's just an incredible undertaking.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I was a little hesitant to start, I think I've said in the past, because we all have to read so many books. And am I Gonna read a 600 page about the history of the immigration crisis when I just. The to be red pile is as high as it is. And as is often the case, I was wrong. I was hooked. It's an odd thing to say about such a serious book, but I really was. Greg, did you feel the same way?

[Greg Coles]

I did. One big takeaway that I had from this book is how complicated the problem is. We tend to approach it now with very. In a very simplistic binary. But by taking you through the history, you realize, first of all, how implicated the US is in the crisis that it's facing. First for its willingness to tolerate these regimes and its willingness to destabilize countries in the name of the Cold War without following up with a commitment to restabilizing them that might have prevented this kind of. Of mass migration. He does just what you want a good journalist to do in terms of explaining where policies came from and what their effects were, and then relating them to real life people, both in those countries and in this country. He talks to the politicians. It's just an immense and meticulous work of reportage.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Nima, did you feel the same way about this one as the rest of us?

[Nima Jeromey]

I don't think I did. I think that what I liked the most was not the kind of on the ground granularity, but the scope. And the scope seemed thematic. I think one of the things that Blitzer does, who I know from my time at the New Yorker, we overlapped in the fact checking department where he was an extremely dogged reporter, literally running out at any opportunity to report a piece is the way that he's able to show how shortsighted this was. Here is the US this superpower, after World War II and even before World War II, decided that every part of the Americas is our responsibility and we are going to shape the destiny of this entire set of continents. And so there were all these kind of hubristic interventions into these conflicts, not unlike like what we saw in the Wide Wide Sea. And they basically destabilized, as Greg said, these countries. And all of these people were driven out, understandably, by violence, by civil war to the stable, wealthy country to the north. And then they got there and were incredibly alienated and beset by more violence on all sides in the neighborhoods that they landed in. And many of them, in reaction, joined gangs, which they formed in the United States. And then US Policy decided that since they had been associated with criminals or committed crimes, they should be deported back to the countries where they came, where those gangs spread and became stronger and made the violence worse in those countries. And it sent more people back here. And it's just this kind of endless and almost hindsight's 20 20. But it seems like a very predictable cycle. And I think that John, across these hundreds of pages, really lays it out in. In the clearest way I've ever seen.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Emily, one of the things that you most appreciated about this book was the human underpinning of it. Absolutely.

[Emily Aiken]

And I don't want to scare readers. This isn't a white paperish read. This is a very elegantly wrought narrative nonfiction. And Blitzer is smart enough to know that we need human beings. We follow through the thicket of policy reversals and decisions. And just figuring out what the policy is at any given time in this country for immigrants is not well nigh impossible. In fact, one of his characters Eddie Anzora is a young man born in El Salvador, but who has grown up in Los Angeles or San Francisco and is deported back to El Salvador despite really knowing very little about the country because he only has a green card and he's taken in on minor drug possession charges. And this is what happens to him. And that allows us to see really into how the MS.13 gang, which he has associations with, is taking root in El Salvador and the kind of nonsensical repercussions, the irrational repercussions of US foreign policy. Of all the characters, though, my favorite was one Ramagosa, who is also a Salvadoran, who is really a saintly character. He begins the book and he is an aspiring doctor. He can't decide whether to be a priest or a doctor. He decides to become a doctor. And he's tortured by the military in El Salvador, brutally tortured and left almost to die. Rescued at the last minute, and makes his way eventually to the United States, where he also goes through a lot of brutal physical ordeals, but devotes his life to helping other people like him. And Blitzer says at one point that they spoke every day for a year. And I believe it. This is the kind of tenacity Blitzer brings to the story. And it really pays off because you get the kind of granular narrative that makes the story vivid and immediate and not a bureaucratic kind of abstraction.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We'll be right back. Who wants to talk about a giant biography? Our next book is His Life and Legend by Max Boot. I didn't know that we needed another Ronald Reagan biography. There have been many, including a notoriously bizarre one called Dutch by Edmund Morris. Edmund Morris is a great biographer. He has written three great Teddy Roosevelt biographies. I've loved them all. But he was also Ronald Reagan's biographer, official biographer. He wrote this book, and I think Reagan broke him. And he ended up inserting himself as a character into the biography and fictionalizing a bunch of stuff. Anyway, lot of biographies. Coming to this one again, when we're reading it, looking back at a different sort of Republican Party, a different sort of celebrity turned president who also used the phrase make America great again. I wasn't sure I was gonna be along for the ride. But even though Reagan was sort of empty inside in some way, boy, he was interesting to read about. Nima, tell me about this one.

[Nima Jeromey]

I wanna say first, this is a really well wrought, thought written biography. That is lives, whole lives are really hard. They break Aristotelian unity. You feel things can get really repetitious as you circle back again to our lives are very circular as they move forward. You don't feel that here Reagan lived so many different lives. He was a radio announcer for football games. He was a Hollywood actor. He ran the Actors Guild. He was a spokesperson for ge, a California governor, the President of the United States. And yet, and all of that alone would make the way that he lays this all out would make for a good biography, because Max Boot's a good writer. But it's also an object of fascination because Max Boot is this formerly still somewhat conservative columnist and he was a centrist Republican who became a never. He was a foreign policy expert and he eventually is so alienated by Trump that he abandons the Republican Party and then conservatism altogether. He's still by no means a liberal in the way that we usually mean that in the United States. But Ronald Reagan was his hero. He moved as a child from Russia to the United States, and he saw Reagan as this guy who embodied American values. And then he wrote this biography, which I think he spent about a decade researching and reporting. And it really feels like a situation of never meet your heroes because he's left with very few. He sort of dismantles Ronald Reagan's legacy. He says that he exacerbated the Cold War, made it last longer. It might have ended earlier if he had been a little bit more canny. And he says that he that trickle down economics, widen inequality, which is something a lot of people say, but not usually centrist Republicans. And at the same time, he turns Reagan into a full bodied human, very human character who when he gets shot in an assassination attempt in D.C. in 1981, is trying to make everyone feel better by telling jokes as he's lying there getting better. It's an amazing accomplishment.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Emily, how many Reagan biographies have you read?

[Emily Aiken]

I have read none. I might have read Dutch back in the day. But I will say that is the question for readers. Readers are gonna say, does this book need to exist? And I think you've answered that pretty well, Gilbert. Luke Cannon alone wrote five or six books about Reagan. He's been written about to death. You don't need to be interested in Reagan to really appreciate this book as I want to talk about it as a kind of exemplary biography, as a kind of work in that genre. To me, it masterly balance of storytelling and analysis of historical context and biographical detail. We get very granular details. We know how many dress shirts he had in his closet when he was governor, 27. We know what Nancy fed him to Eat. Which was basically nothing. She had a size two figure and she wanted him to stay trim.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So mean. She gave him grapefruit for desserts.

[Emily Aiken]

Exactly. That was a Christmas Eve dinner where he got a skinless chicken breast and some braised celery. And he thought, I'm not gonna complain and I'll wait for dessert. But dessert was a boiled grapefruit. Boot just has a real sense of the kind of rhythm that a reader needs, how much policy to throw at you and then how to balance that with these kind of very detailed, fascinating biographical factoids. And so that's what I wanted to say about the book. It's incredibly engrossing. He's a witty writer. He never loses an opportunity to point out ironies. For example, Reagan was born to a couple New Deal Democrats in small town Illinois. His father actually got a. Was saved by the New Deal and worked for the New Deal. He went to a pretty liberal Christian college, a school that had welcomed women and people of color long before other similar institutions did. And yet Reagan became someone who refused to support the Voting Rights act, the Civil Rights act, the Fair Housing Act. He was an opportunist who went along with the kind of Southern racist strategy for political. He seems in the end, yes, a deeply incurious person around whom history kind of flowed and ebbed. And that's a really, a kind of fascinating situation for a biographer to find himself in.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Greg, what do you remember about Ronald Reagan?

[Greg Coles]

It's funny. Max Boot is almost exactly my age. I think he's a few years older than I am. We were both 10 when Reagan was elected. And unlike Max Boot, I didn't lionize Reagan when I was 10. I lionized probably Paddington the be and Aslan the actual lion. I remember the Reagan years as unfolding above my head. He was president until I went off to college. And so it was the atmosphere that I breathed in my childhood. But this book really cast a lot of light on things that I had not paid attention to when I was growing up. This biography really succeeds on. On a couple of different levels for me. One is on the level of straightforward. It's first and foremost a very thorough and satisfying biography of somebody who, as you pointed out, even though he lived most of his life in the public eye, was really an elusive character. It was hard to pin down. And Boot does a great job of that and at drawing out his inherent contradictions. But then the other level that it works for me, what kind of elevates it for me is Bout's own relationship to the material, because he did lionize Reagan, and there's this sort of reexamination, and it's electric with an implicit compare and contrast, because he publicly broke with conservatism over the rise of Trumpism. There's this unspoken question. He speaks it at one point, did Reagan lead to Trump? But it's inherent more than otherwise in the book on where do they overlap? Where do they differ? In what ways might Reagan have led to Trump? And it brings a real personal stake to the book that I thought was fascinating.

[Emily Aiken]

I was just gonna add that the compare and contrast with Trump is really fascinating. And I think Boot was smart to restrict that to the prologue and the epilogue of the book, because there are parallels that are so suggestive. Right. They're both people who rose to the high levels of politics in our country after being figures in the entertainment industry. They're both people who bungled a pandemic. For Reagan, it was aids, and for Trump it was Covid. They both survived assassination attempts. They both are these telegenic, charismatic speakers, but who also incorporated falsehoods into what they say to the public.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Greg, our next book, I Heard Her Call My Name, A memoir of Transition by Lucy Sant, is one that I believe you really, I did.

[Greg Coles]

I went into this one familiar with Sant's long career as a chronicler of kind of a gritty New York underground, and also as a smart commentator and critic of art photography. And I was aware that she had transitioned gender in her 60s during the COVID pandemic, but I wasn't sure what to expect of her memoir about that change. I think that I anticipated a book that would cast light on the rather sudden recent vis of trans issues in culture more generally and trans identity, which we as a society are obviously struggling to accommodate. But this book is not that to its ultimate credit. I think it is, in fact, for great stretches, not even a trans memoir at all, per se. It's just a memoir of somebody who is trans. And so, as a result, it is determinedly specific and individual. It never makes an attempt to diagnose or to draw sociological lessons. It just, this is who I am. This is who I've always been. This is what it's been like for me to be that person. And it is often very frank and moving in laying that out.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So, Greg, I think that the structure of the book is what you're referring to. It flips between past and present. We get a memoir of young Lucy Sant coming over with her parents from Belgium, growing up in New Jersey, becoming a young Person and then experiencing gritty Lower east side in East Village, New York City in the early 80s. And then that is alternated with these chapters in which Lucy, during the pandemic, discovers or brings to the surface something that she's always known. She describes it as her egg cracking, which is that she is a woman. And she talks about telling people in her life this, including her partner, her friends, and then everything that follows afterwards. And to me, it really was the sort of the counter narrative back and forth that. That gave it a sense of energy that it wouldn't have had if it would have just been snout to tail. Snout to tail, yes. If it was just a young to old memoir. Yeah.

[Emily Aiken]

Soup to nuts.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Soup to nuts. Emily.

[Emily Aiken]

I think the structure is one of the things I admired most about this book. At one point she says, who am I? Who am I? And she starts to. It's almost like she's rifling through her past to sort of incorporate it into her present. And she goes back and she finds that multiple truths can exist simultaneously. I mean, she says, I'm a twice married person, I'm a father of a son, I'm the writer of books under the name Luke Sant, and I'm not changing that. And I'm Lucy, this woman. And I found that very moving and beautiful. As Greg says, her journey, she makes it clear this is utterly unique and individual to her. And so that moving back and forth, especially because her transition is also as she makes clear, two steps forward, one step back. As she goes out in public, she retreats, she takes a public step. Letters to all her community, her friends, and then she retracts a letter and then tries again, which you totally can relate to. This is a huge event in her life. It's the biggest event in her life. And I wanted to say a couple things about the downtown that she evokes, which is really atmospheric and wonderful. A period in New York when young people flitted in and out of apartments, changing the record, doing some drugs, going out in life, moved around and life didn't stop at night. A lot of those people she invokes by their first names, Jim and Nan and Daryl and Jean Michel. And for other readers, some of you will recognize these characters as people who, like Lucy herself, went on to become well known creative authors and artists. And it's fun. Some of them have written their own memoirs, like Darryl is Daryl Pinkney, who wrote a memoir just, I think in the last couple years.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, a couple years ago, Come back.

[Emily Aiken]

In September, really focused on his relationship with There is a sort of apprenticeship to Elizabeth Hardwick, the literary critic who also appears in Lucy's memoir, and Lucy becoming herself as a writer. One of my favorite, in fact, she.

[Greg Coles]

Says at one point, I'm a writer before I am anything else. Even before gender, even before. She's Belgian, she's American. There's a lot of transitions in this book, but it is first and foremost the coming of age of a. It's a Kunstler Roman.

[Emily Aiken]

Yes, exactly.

[Greg Coles]

An artist's formation.

[Emily Aiken]

Exactly. And one of the distinctive things is she's from this working class background and somehow her prose, I don't want to say it's artless, but there's a kind of candor, a frankness to it that's very appealing. And there's one. She tells a story. At one point, she had a summer job in college at a tool and dye factory and she decided to read all seven volumes of Proust because she had to go onto the assembly line for 20 minutes at a time. And so she'd had time to. And she just read Proust, the Scott Moncrieff translation. And I just thought that kind of summed her up. She's someone who's very intellectual in her interests, but also incredibly down to earth. And there's a lack of pretension in her prose that's so delightful.

[Gilbert Cruz]

At the same time, I feel like there is sort of a sense of emotion that sort of undergirds several of the moments, particularly as she's talking about her transition, this realization that imagine what my life could have been like if I had discovered this earlier, how much she presumes, happier she would have been.

[Emily Aiken]

How she says, I regret my missing.

[Greg Coles]

Girlhood, whether five or six decades, that she could have lived differently.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, that was quite moving, even thinking about it. Now let's move on to our last book, which is Cold Crematorium Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by Youssef Deborzeni. Nima, tell us about this one.

[Nima Jeromey]

I think it's not completely impossible, but it's also not every day that you get what feels to the world like a brand new Holocaust memoir. But in this case, it seems like the Cold War may have kept what is, I would call a masterpiece, both of that literature and of literature in general. The author was a poet and a journalist. He spoke Hungarian. He was born in 1905, and when he was middle aged in 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz. And he eventually landed up in a hospital camp where he was more or less left to die. The reason that this book wasn't translated into English until earlier this year is because it was first published in 1950 in Tito's Yugoslavia, where he ended up living. And the Americans didn't like it because it ends with a kind of what to them was a sort of triumphant liberation of the camps by the Soviets. And the Soviets didn't like it because it centered the Jewish people as the main victims of the Holocaust. And which. It's hard to say. It's a shame. It's a shame all around. But what really was astounding about this book is that having someone who's a poet and a journalist approach this subject means that what you get is this kind of granular, almost anthropological description of the camps, but also somebody who's worried about how he's representing this experience and the impossibility of representing this experience. He once to immerse you in his own state of mind and the state of mind of the people around him. But at the same time, he knows that's an insane thing and an impossible thing to do. He lets his impressions unfold mostly as they happen and then undercuts them. At a certain point, he is completely reduced to thinking, I hate everybody. Everyone's out for themselves in this horrible place. There's no way I'm going to survive. And at the same time, you realize somewhere it's subtextual. People have been taking care of him even when he's in his weakest state and he gets as close to representing death as he can. And then he just stops and says, no, there's a wall here. I more or less almost died, and I don't know how to represent it to you. It's a beautiful book.

[Greg Coles]

I was curious a lot of the time reading it about its process of composition because he's freed in 1945 with the Allied the Soviets coming in, and publishes it in 1950. And it is so specific and so immediate, but you think he couldn't even have had a pencil during these conditions. And so he's just going back and reconstructing all of this after the fact. But he is a journalist, and so I wondered, is he spending those five years reporting it out? Is he imagining it and bringing it to life that way? And there's not really a sense of that in the book. I found it a fascinating question lurking in the back of my mind while I was reading it.

[Emily Aiken]

Exactly. I think you've put your finger on something, Greg, that is both astonishing and at some level puzzling because you can't quite figure it out. The aesthetic qualities of this book. And it's weird, maybe almost, to talk about aesthetic qualities in a Holocaust memoir where testimony alone is a significant contribution and act, and this book is that. But it's because he's able to give so much dialogue verbatim, apparently, as it happened, and descriptions very precise, as points out, almost like little miniature Max Beckmann portraits or Rembrandt sketches, just with a few strokes. There will be that lawyer from Paris who unrolls a cigarette, divides it in two, and hands half of it to our author.

[Greg Coles]

Cigarettes are big in this.

[Emily Aiken]

Cigarettes are big. You don't get any food. You're lucky to get a stub of a cigarette, and they share it. And this is this incredible act of generosity. And it's described with a vividness that puts you right there. And so how does he do that? And I think as a reader, I'm willing to just not know the answer to that question, because it's just such AIT is such a remarkable testament and testimony.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That was the discussion of the nonfiction books on our top 10 books of 2024 list. Just to recap, we talked about Cold Crematorium by Youssef Deborzeny, I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant, Reagan by Max Boot, Everyone who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and the Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. Before we leave, I want to ask all of you if there was a book that we talked about that we all loved and is not on this list but we think is perhaps worthy of calling out here at the end.

[Emily Aiken]

Yeah. A book that I think a lot of us read and were really impressed by was when the Clock Broke by John Ganz. It's his first book. He's a young political writer. And this book is a fresh and striking account of the 1990s, a decade we usually associate with kind of placid consensus. The Clinton years, the end of history. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The evil empire has disintegrated. And what Ganz does is turn that narrative on its head by showing us that, in fact, it was quite a turbulent time in the United States and that there were characters on the fringe, on the rightward fringe, people like Pat Buchanan and David Duke who were written off by later historians for a while, but who in fact paved the way for some of the more outrageous politics that we've seen on the right recently.

[Greg Coles]

For me, it's also that Gan's book, it was the one that came that I regretted not being in our top nonfiction picks. It has some overlaps with Reagan and with everyone who's gone is here in terms of explaining this moment by looking to history. And it is just a work of great kind of stitching together of different sources. It's this great quilt that paints a picture in a way that if our listeners have read Rick Perlstein's Nixon Land, for instance, it does that, but for the 90s.

[Nima Jeromey]

And I think one of the things that's nice about it is it's both a cultural history and a political history and shows how completely inseparable those two things are. He's talking about political speeches. He's talking about Republican strategy. He's talking about the Northeastern mob scene. But he's also using episodes of Saturday Night Live, talking about music and all these different kinds of things to paint a full picture of this moment where so many things were gestating that only.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Now, Nima, you did it. This is your first time on the show. We gotta get, I don't know, like a Gatorade bucket of books and dump it on your head. Thank you. Thank you for joining us at the end of the year to talk about the best books of the year.

[Nima Jeromey]

Thank you.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Gilbert, Greg, thanks as always.

[Greg Coles]

A pleasure.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Emily, you're wonderful. Thank you so much.

[Emily Aiken]

Thank you. This was fun.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Those were my conversations with two groups of wonderful editors here at the Book Review about the best fiction and nonfiction books of the year. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.