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The Book Review
The Best Books of the Year (So Far)
00:46:14
We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the New York Times Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the ones that just won’t let us go. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the best books of the year so far.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review Podcast. We're more than halfway through 2025 and so it's time to talk about some of our favorite books of the year so far. I'm here this week with Juma Khatib, very, very frequent podcast guests to talk about several of the titles from our recently published list. Joumana, how are you?
- [01:06]
Jumana Khatib
I'm so excited. I love this episode. I love this list. I'm excited to get started.
- [01:12]
Gilbert Cruz
I hope our readers are as excited as you are. I have to imagine they will be by the time we are done with this episode. As always, whether it's our spring preview or summer preview, Joumana and I are going to go back and forth and just talk about some titles and really say whatever comes into our mind. Very wise and helpful.
- [01:30]
Jumana Khatib
Thanks for listening. Yeah, you know how to reach us.
- [01:34]
Gilbert Cruz
We're going to flip a coin. That coin is my wallet here. My license is on one side. My ID is on the other side. Let's see who goes first.
- [01:42]
Jumana Khatib
Is this a heads you win, tails I lose.
- [01:44]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm the license, you're the id. Ready? License. I guess I go first. All right, so I am going to start with a book that I have talked a little bit about on previous preview episodes and I definitely have talked a lot about because I interviewed the author a few months ago. This book is King of Ashes by SA Cosby. Go back and listen to that episode if you haven't already. This is his fifth novel and this is a story of Roman Carruthers. He is a wealthy investment manager. He grew up in a small town in Virginia called Jefferson Run. He left his family long ago because, as many people do, he wanted to get away from them and and strike out on his own.
- [02:26]
Jumana Khatib
Also, they run a cremation business.
- [02:28]
Gilbert Cruz
I was getting there. That's another reason they run a cremation business. They own A crematorium. It's a totally valid thing to do. I hope you're not casting judgment.
- [02:38]
Jumana Khatib
I'm not casting any aspersions. I'm just saying that would be a reason for me to leave home as well.
- [02:42]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, so he leaves home, he goes to Atlanta, he makes a ton of money, and he is forced to come back home after his father ends up in a coma. He's had a serious car accident. Roman is thrown back in with his sister, who's been holding the fort down all these years. His younger brother, who is a definite screw up and who we learned very early on. So this is not really a spoiler, is part of the reason that his father was in this car accident that put him in a coma in the first place. There's some local crime lords, he's in debt and they tried to take their pound of flesh. This is a wonderfully violent and tense novel. If you like crime novels, if you like suspense novels, this is almost certainly one that you should be reading this summer.
- [03:27]
Jumana Khatib
All right, Gilbert, I'm gonna ask you, as somebody who has had.
- [03:30]
Gilbert Cruz
Oh, and I have to pick up my wallet.
- [03:31]
Jumana Khatib
Okay, Very important. As somebody who's had Mr. Cosby in the podcast studio, if you passed him on the street, does he radiate the kind of energy of somebody who writes deliciously violent, tense crime novels?
- [03:45]
Gilbert Cruz
Absolutely not. He is so kind. He's just someone that you want to sit down and have a cup of tea with. He is very not tense or violent seeming at all. And really, that is what often makes some of the best thriller writers. Right. You're existing in this world of what ifs and imagination. And let me think about the most out there extreme scenarios I can come up with. You're just a regular person. He's just a wonderful regular person. I hope you have the opportunity to meet Sean Cosby one day.
- [04:15]
Jumana Khatib
Thank you. I'm wondering who the Sean Cosby's in my life are. These wonderful normal people that I know who are concocting horror. Okay, I am going to take this opportunity to talk about another very tense novel. This is the director by Daniel Kellman and translated by Ross Benjamin. So this is a work, I guess we would call this, of historical fiction because it's inspired by the real Life Austrian director G.W. pabst, and it follows him leading up to World War II and afterwards. So he kicked about in the States for a little bit. He was trying to shoot in France. This is a refrain in the book that filmmakers go where the money is. And he has to come back to Austria to look after his mother and ideally try to sort out her affairs. She sounds like an Austrian Livia Soprano.
- [05:09]
Gilbert Cruz
He has to go back home.
- [05:10]
Jumana Khatib
He has to go back home and.
- [05:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Attend to family matters. This is a theme, honest to God.
- [05:15]
Jumana Khatib
I think at least half the books on our list are about people going back home to tend to family matters.
- [05:20]
Gilbert Cruz
There are only, like, three stories. Yeah.
- [05:22]
Jumana Khatib
Okay, so he's back at his castle tending to, literally, the Austrian Livia Soprano, and war breaks out, right? No trains leaving, like, even with an exit visa, even if you had everything. So he, his wife and his son are stuck there. I think one thing that's so good about this book is that Kelman is really skillful about just building the dread, like, page by page. It really is like that frog in boiling water syndrome, because there's actually not a ton of outright violence on the page. It's all circumspect, it's all imagined. And I think that that translates so well to just creating this climate of paranoia and fear. Of course, Pabst being one of the most eminent filmmakers of the region, the Nazi regime, and actually it's Goebbels who wants him to work for the regime to create these films to uplift the soul and keep up morale of the German people during the war. So even though Pabst himself was anti Nazi, he certainly did not align with the regime he wanted to get out. He finds himself making these kind of absurd films in service of this political regime that he abhors. And his son gets mixed up with Hitler Youth. His wife falls into despair. And there is just so much horror in this. And yet part of what makes this book so good for me is that Kelvin has a very wicked sense of humor. And so you see the absurdity and just. It's almost slapstick. Some of these scenes, like, there's a great scene where Pabst's wife is in a book club with some other wives of prominent artists who are also making work for the regime. And just the dialogue and the cadence of how they talk and the subtext of it, it's so brilliant. And it's amazing to me that this has been translated. And I guess the last thing I'll say about this, I'm quite hot on this book, is that appropriately for a book about filmmaking, I think Kelman is really good at staging scenes in the novel. The pacing, the blocking of it. It's great. It's great. I read it in one day.
- [07:43]
Gilbert Cruz
You said you are surprised at the translation. What is surprising about it.
- [07:48]
Jumana Khatib
I always marvel at a translation that reads so fluently and works on so many levels. And I'm just thinking about, you know, I have no German whatsoever, so I can't even imagine what the original text might have looked like. But in a book where the stakes are such that even the wrong gesture, to say nothing of the wrong phrase or the wrong word, makes such a difference, I think that really is doubly important in a book like the Director. And it reads fluently, the voice is great. And I just. I love this book.
- [08:22]
Gilbert Cruz
I love it, too. So that is the Director, a book that we both love. I am going to mention two books. Two.
- [08:28]
Jumana Khatib
Was that part of the wallet flipping? Did I miss another wallet flip?
- [08:31]
Gilbert Cruz
No, I'm gonna mention two because one of them is a book whose author I had on the podcast last week. So I don't think I need to say too much about A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, since all of our listeners listen to every single episode of the book review podcast. So I'll keep this brief. This is a true story. Sophie Elmhurst is an English journalist, and she found this tale of a husband and wife who were living in England in the 1970s. They decided to give up their life on land, set out for the high seas, and sail from England to New Zealand. How are we doing so far, Shumana? How does that sound to you?
- [09:08]
Jumana Khatib
Horrifying. I live alone by choice. This just horrifies me. I'm of the Whoopi Goldberg mindset. I don't want anyone in my house, let alone on my raft.
- [09:17]
Gilbert Cruz
Great. So you should not do this. And maybe you should never go anywhere. They, however, were very enthusiastic about this. They wanted to be away from people in their own way and set out to New Zealand, which is. There are not as many people in New Zealand as there are in England. They make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They go down Europe, across the Atlantic, Caribbean, Panama Canal. They're in the Pacific, and a sperm whale in its death throes punches a hole in the side of their boat. They only have about 40 minutes to collect a bunch of stuff, throw it in the life raft, get the dinghy going, and they watch their boat sink. And now they have to survive together for God knows how long on a dinghy. A dinghy and a life raft. But still, it's tough to be out there in the middle of the great Pacific Ocean, which is like the vast desert of nothingness, and they have to survive for months and months on end. I won't tell you what happens. It's a great book. It's a great story. And miracle of miracles, it's pretty short. Which I gotta tell you, when you're reading as many books as we do, it's a gift. It's a blessing. So this is book one, A Marriage at A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhurst. And then the other one I'm going to mention is another nonfiction book. It came out earlier this year. This one is one of the surprise hits of the year, certainly of the first few months of the year. And it was a surprise in general because no one knew it was even coming until about a week before it actually came out. And this one is called Careless People, a cautionary tale of power, greed and lost idealism by Sarah Wynne Williams. This is a memoir of someone who used to work at Facebook, the company, of course that's now called Meta. And she was there in a fairly high position. She was its director of Global Public policy. And essentially she has a front row seat to the famous executives of Facebook, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg the CEO and Sheryl Sandberg the CEO. And just how in her words, ridiculous and inappropriate they were at all times. As I said, this book was kept secret until only about a week or even a few days before it was released, which is not something that is common. It's incredibly rare in the world of publishing. And it makes sense once you see what Wyn Williams writes about Zuckerberg and Sandberg and other top level executives at the company. She's describing all of this inappropriate behavior, sexual harassment, incredibly bad decision making. But when you look at what she points out was misinformation that was shared about a minority group in Myanmar which resulted in what some have called a genocide in that nation against that group. You start to see what hopefully we all know is that tech companies have an incredibly outsized effect on things that happen in the real world. Our critic Jen Zelai, who wrote about so many books on the list that we're going to talk about here, when she was writing about this book, she said Careless People is darkly funny and genuinely shocking. An ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. I know a lot of people have read this book and it's not surprising. I don't know if you recall this Jomana right after our review and news stories ran, Meta claimed that the book, the book, should not exist because Wynne Williams had signed a non disparagement agreement when she was an employee. There are all these other parts of her contract that they claimed essentially prevented her from writing this book. And so this case very quickly went in front of a judge and the judge basically said that she could not promote the book. But the book continued to be published and the publisher could promote it. I think it's one of the better selling books of the year. So you have this weird situation where Meta is trying very hard to just get this book out of sight of most readers. And maybe they actually did the opposite.
- [13:12]
Jumana Khatib
It's the Streisand effect, right?
- [13:13]
Gilbert Cruz
It's the Streisand effect.
- [13:14]
Jumana Khatib
Is that what that is?
- [13:15]
Gilbert Cruz
Streisand?
- [13:17]
Jumana Khatib
You know, I don't see movies. I just read about directors and Nazi detainment.
- [13:23]
Gilbert Cruz
Barbra Streisand is also a singer.
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Jumana Khatib
I know, I'm aware.
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Gilbert Cruz
Okay.
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Jumana Khatib
I'm aware. We were not on. We were not like Big Pipe Household, except for Whitney Houston. Okay. I would like to pivot to fiction to something altogether different. This is Isola by Allegra Goodman. So when we're talking about powerful people perhaps abusing their authority, but maybe you want something that's still quite escapist. I think this is really the book for you. I was really knocked out by this book. This is a work of historical fiction. It's based on a real life woman, Marguerite de la Roch de Roberval. She was a French noblewoman in the 15th century and she had a fascinating and harrowing life. So she was orphaned, she had some family money and it was looked after by a male relative. And basically he left her alone to be raised and be tutored and become a genteel young woman. And in the meantime, this male relative who was looking out for her finances, spectated on her fortune and spent it and totally set her up. He did not set her up to marry well or marry comfortably, or live comfortably. He totally gambled on her future. And this cousin, Roberval was a sailor. He sailed for the King. And so he was going to cross the Atlantic to help settle the colony of New France and present day Canada. And he tells Marguerite and her nurse, Damien, you're going with me and you really don't have a choice. Marguerite's 20, so it's horrible. They're on a ship, it's disgusting. They don't know what's laying in wait for them. And Marguerite, bit by bit, realizes she's falling in love with a guy who works for Roberval. And they start this clandestine affair. Roberval finds out. He says he's very displeased, to say the least. And he strands the Couple and Marguerite's nurse on this uninhabited island in the St. James river with whatever they could carry. I won't go much farther than that, but I will tell you, this is such an incredible work of imagination because. So I had no idea about Marguerite. There are at least two historical accounts of her life. And I think the author Allegra Goodman, went down this very deep research rabbit hole and found out everything she could about this woman. A lot of authors will do. They talk about how research is sometimes the best part of writing a novel because it's, in a way, it's like productive distraction from the hard work of actually writing. But one thing that is so good about Isola is that the research doesn't overwhelm the storytelling. You don't get bogged down in detail. You actually just really inhabit this young woman's mind and emotion and grief that she goes through the tenacity and. And she really leans on her faith and that comes through. And I was just. I was so blown away by this story.
- [16:44]
Gilbert Cruz
Would you rather be stranded on this remote island or in the middle of the Pacific?
- [16:50]
Jumana Khatib
Oh, God. I w. I was actually just telling somebody the other day that I really would like to go snorkeling. So if I had like a clear.
- [16:57]
Gilbert Cruz
Bottomed raft, I don't think this exists.
- [17:01]
Jumana Khatib
Okay. I don't plan on getting stranded in Canada either. But, like, that would be my ideal situation with a helipad. And none of these conditions were the.
- [17:11]
Gilbert Cruz
Question I just asked.
- [17:12]
Jumana Khatib
That's the answer you're gonna get. Okay, I flipped your wallet. And that's the answer I'm gonna give you.
- [17:17]
Gilbert Cruz
Isola by Allegra Goodwin. I'm going to stick with fiction. For my next pick, Joumana. And this is a book that is the topic of our next book review book club discussion. That is an episode that's gonna run next week. And listeners, you can hear MJ Franklin and a couple of other guests talk about this debut novel, which is called the Catch by Yersa Daley Ward. And this one is a. It's a psychological thriller. It's about a pair of twin sisters whose mother disappears when they're very young, when they're babies. And as the book begins, it's 30 years later. Sisters aren't really getting along at the moment. They're kind of on the outs. And one day, one of the sisters sees someone on the street who looks exactly like their mother who disappeared decades before. And then she even becomes to believe that it is their mother. The other sister is a little more suspicious she thinks maybe there's a scam going on. There's something more nefarious going on. I don't want to step on next week's conversation because I know MJ's going to have a great roundtable discussion. But the setup of this book is amazing. It's darkly delicious, and I actually am looking forward to reading this one, hopefully later this summer. So that's the catch by Yersa Daley Ward, and we're going to stick with twins. I'm going to jump over to a nonfiction book that many of us at the Book Review have read, and this one is called Daughters of the Bamboo Grove From China to A True Story of Abduction, Adoption and Separated Twins by Barbara Demick. So Barbara Demick is a reporter who covered East Asia for many, many years for the LA Times, I think, amongst other outlets, and she's written several books in the past about other Asian nations. Eat the Buddha, Life and Death in a Tibetan Town. Nothing to Envy Ordinary Lives in North Korea. This one is about China. So for those who don't recall, from 1979 until the end of 2015, China had this national policy. If you had more than one child, you were subject to fines, intense fines that many people can pay, harassment of various sorts, in some extreme cases, medical interventions, and worse. Then, even if you did have a child, if it was a female child, that was looked down upon because at least at the time in Chinese culture, it was presumed that you needed a male child in order to take care of you when you got older. And young girls and women always got the short end of the stick. This particular story is about the one child policy, but it's also about an incredible tale in which a pair of twins, that's where the twins come in, are separated when they're very young by the Chinese sort of state institution that is in charge of family planning, child is taken away and under false pretenses, it is put up for adoption. And this child is adopted by an American family who brings that child back to America. She grows up in America, her twin sister grows up in China, and the two presume that they're never gonna see each other again. And then they do. And they do, in part because of Barbara Dimick, the author of this book, who, through other reporting about what essentially are forced kidnappings that this Chinese bureaucratic institution undertook, hears a story about these two separated twins and brings them together. Did you happen to read this one?
- [20:47]
Jumana Khatib
I did. It's an incredible story. And I have occasionally squeamish feelings about journalists intervening to this degree in their subjects lives. But I think in this case, it's such an incredible story. And there's this one scene that I remember from the book where I think the sisters are finally speaking on a video call, and the biological father asks the American family that adopted his daughter, how much did you pay for her? And it's just like those moments will just kill you. But it's an incredible story, and it's. She tells it in a very straightforward way that really allows the emotional depth to come through. It's pretty good stuff.
- [21:34]
Gilbert Cruz
Pretty good stuff.
- [21:35]
Jumana Khatib
All right, I'm gonna move to fiction yet again. I'm ruthlessly yanking listeners over to fiction, and we are going to talk about another family. This is.
- [21:47]
Gilbert Cruz
You love a family tale.
- [21:48]
Jumana Khatib
I do love a family tale. I know. So this is the Sisters by Yonas Hassan Hemiri. I've written about the author. I've talked about this on the podcast. So I know a lot of you have heard me discuss this book in one way or another. But I think this is a really special novel. So this follows three Swedish Tunisian sisters named the Mykola sisters. And they have these archetypal personalities. So the eldest is rigid and anal and stressed, perpetually stressed. You want to give her Xanax all the time. And then the middle one is very beautiful and adrift and a bit dreamy, a bit lost. And the younger one is a real livewire who I think has the most feistiness of all the three. And they grew up with this totally eccentric mom. She's a Tunisian carpet seller. She would uproot the girls and move. She swore that somebody in the family had put a curse on them, which, if you are at all from the Middle east, somebody has probably cursed you in the past. So the really fun part of this comes in the character in the book who really resembles the author, whose name is Jonas, who himself is Swedish, Tunisian. And he's fascinated by the sisters because they're outsiders like he is. They have the same sort of tortured heritage, and they're just like this fascinating trio. And so the book follows them, all four of them, from Tunis, Stockholm, New York, Germany, all over the place, trying to make sense of their lives. And there's a pretty amazing twist at the end. So even though this novel is over 600 pages, it is totally worth it to get to the end. It's a really. Some people saw it coming. I didn't see it coming. It's profound. Write to me with your feelings about it.
- [23:50]
Gilbert Cruz
You've been stumping for this book for A while.
- [23:52]
Jumana Khatib
So I know it's on my.
- [23:54]
Gilbert Cruz
My metaphorical nightstand. I'm gonna get to it very soon.
- [23:57]
Jumana Khatib
Our critic, I was delighted. I don't know what our critics are gonna say before they turn in their stuff. So our critic, Alexandra Jacobs called this a tour de force. And she does not mince words. So if two of us think you can take our words for it, I promise.
- [24:14]
Gilbert Cruz
How do you respond when you really go hard on a book? You're like, I love this book. It's so great. You recommend it to a ton of people and then someone comes back and says, I couldn't finish it.
- [24:24]
Jumana Khatib
Oh, that happens to me regularly.
- [24:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Great. I'm glad our listeners are like, so why am I listening to you?
- [24:29]
Jumana Khatib
Oh, no, it happens to me regularly. So this just happened in reverse. I'm gonna answer your question in the backwards way. One of my dearest friends has just moved back to New York. She has a PhD. She's a Victorianist. Laszlo Krasnor Kai has a new book out. It's one sentence long and I'm like, abby, I think you're going to like this. And she looked at it and it was like I'd handed her like a dead fish in a paper bag. She's like, jomana, you know, I like realism. I don't like modernism. And I was like, okay, can you just take it? Like, I think you're going to like it. And would you believe she texted me this morning, she got to the end of the novel length sentence and said, I am weeping.
- [25:11]
Gilbert Cruz
Wow.
- [25:12]
Jumana Khatib
I know, I know. You can't make it up.
- [25:15]
Gilbert Cruz
So you answered my question about what you do when a book that you recommended is not liked by someone. By finding a book that someone did like that you recommend.
- [25:24]
Jumana Khatib
It's because I have managed to subvert my family curse and I believe all of you can break through that too. So I think I finally lifted the evil eye off of me.
- [25:43]
Gilbert Cruz
Foreign.
- [25:51]
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- [26:18]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm joined this week by Jumana Khatib we are talking about some of the best books of the year so far. I promise that I'm not only picking people that have been on this podcast talk about, even though it seems like I am. The next person, however, was on the show last year, Stephen Graham Jones. We had him on for our Halloween episode. It was him and Joe Hill separately talking about scary books that they love. Stephen Graham Jones, great horror writer. His new one, the Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is one that I feel like we're always going to have on our list of the best books of the year so far. This one takes place, or it starts, at least, in the late 1800s in Montana. Main character is a gentleman, a member of the Blackfeet tribe. His name is Good stabilizer. Great name. Not a good name. A great name. And he comes across some settlers. They're transporting something. The thing that they are transporting is not good. In fact, it is evil. In fact, it likes to suck blood. It likes to drink blood. And Good Stab ends up having to drink blood and suck blood for the rest of his life. So you have this protagonist who finds himself having a very fraught relationship, to say the least, with members of his own tribe, members of other indigenous tribes in the area, and both he and this evil thing that he encounters, they keep running into each other over decades. This main story is a story within a story within a story. We're reading this through a journal that was written in the early 1900s by a pastor many decades later, and one of his descendants is reading his journal. So it's this fascinating vampiric Matrushka doll, I guess.
- [28:05]
Jumana Khatib
Ah, I'm sure they make those, right? They have trios Goodalls with, like, fangs.
- [28:09]
Gilbert Cruz
Like Dracula within Nosferatu. Within.
- [28:12]
Jumana Khatib
Who's the other?
- [28:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, within the guy from Salem's Lot. If they have made it. Can you get this for me? Thank you. Yeah. Stephen Graham Jones has written a lot of books. He wrote a slasher trilogy a few years ago. He's someone who could just work in many different modes. He's always a pleasure to read. This one is a piece of horrific historical fiction, is just wonderful. So that's the Buffalo Hunter X Hunter.
- [28:37]
Jumana Khatib
I always appreciate how he plays with conventional Western genre, but draws on a lot of native myth. It's really cool. I know you avoided the V word up until you had to say it, but it's cool. It really does make you think about how maybe there really only are, like, five stories in literature.
- [28:54]
Gilbert Cruz
Did you see Sinners?
- [28:56]
Jumana Khatib
Not yet. Okay, I know the premise. I will see it maybe on an airplane. Okay, I will do it. I will do it.
- [29:02]
Gilbert Cruz
So it's Dracula within Nosferatu within Remic, the Irish vampire from Sinners.
- [29:09]
Jumana Khatib
You know what? Just for a little texture, I'm going to go to nonfiction. Oh, I know. Okay. I know.
- [29:16]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm going to break. No idea what you're going to talk about here.
- [29:18]
Jumana Khatib
I'm breaking new ground. Okay, so this is a biography that I really liked called Wild Thing by Sue Prudhoe. And this is a biography about the artist Paul Guga, whom I have adored. Thanks, mom, for taking me to MOMA from the time I was 6. And in recent years, he's. He's accrued a bit of a bad reputation because he lived out his later years in what was then French Polynesia. Most of his most significant work depicts people from the island of Tahiti, for example. And so a lot of people consider it a bit imperialistic or like he's trying to make them look primitive. And then, of course, there is the fact that he had romantic relationships with at least two teenage girls on these islands in recent years. He's been framed as this colonialist pedophile. But this biography really sets out to actually tell the proper story of Gauguin. This galloping exciting, well paced biography of this guy who had a life that you really could not imagine. So he's born in France, his parents go to Peru because they're anti Bonaparte. So they. And at this point, of course, there's no canal, so they have to go around the tip of South America from France all the way up to Peru. And in Peru he has this idyllic, wild childhood. And that sensibility really stayed with him. And one thing that I appreciate about Sous Prideaux is that she has a really good sense of a. How to keep the story moving. She doesn't linger on too much. I think that sometimes biographers who know their subjects so well maybe overemphasize the wrong things for, like, the common reader, we've seen that happen before. But she knows how much hay to make of certain episodes, what threads to elevate to the reader and say, hey, pay attention to this. This will matter later. I learned so much. And she herself is just a wonderful writer, even about art. Her way of describing visual works of art is so lovely. This is a really enjoyable biography. And I'll admit I'm not always drawn to biographies. Sometimes that can be a bit of an uphill climb for me. But this one, totally lucid, totally fun.
- [31:41]
Gilbert Cruz
And what's that one called?
- [31:42]
Jumana Khatib
This one Is Wild Thing by Sue Prido.
- [31:46]
Gilbert Cruz
I am going to talk about another wild thing that is the subject of one of the books on our list. This one is Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton.
- [31:54]
Jumana Khatib
I see what you did there.
- [31:55]
Gilbert Cruz
I really hope you did, because it was quite obvious. This is a memoir about a woman who, in early 2021, so prime COVID lockdown season, particularly in England, she walked outside her home and she discovered a leveret. I really hope I'm saying that correctly. Do you know what a leverette is?
- [32:13]
Jumana Khatib
I'm assuming it's some type of hair.
- [32:16]
Gilbert Cruz
It is a. It's a young hare. Do you know what a hare is?
- [32:20]
Jumana Khatib
No. It's got longer ears than a bunny.
- [32:23]
Gilbert Cruz
Do you know that, or did you just see it in the face?
- [32:24]
Jumana Khatib
No, no, I swear to God, I'm not looking at the dog. I swear to God I didn't look. But that's literally all I know about hares.
- [32:33]
Gilbert Cruz
You are correct.
- [32:34]
Jumana Khatib
Okay, thank you.
- [32:35]
Gilbert Cruz
It is a different animal completely from a rabbit. Same family, but they're larger, they have longer ears, and they have longer feet. And Chloe Dalton, the author of this memoir, she brings this leveret, this young hare, into her home, and she said, screw it. I'm not gonna cage this thing. I'm not gonna tame it. I'm just gonna let it roam free. And by letting it roam free, she learned how to let go of stress and how to slow down and how to appreciate the world more.
- [33:06]
Jumana Khatib
How soon before you think people start naming their children Leverett?
- [33:11]
Gilbert Cruz
I haven't been to Brooklyn in a while, but I would not be surprised.
- [33:14]
Jumana Khatib
I'm gonna. Yeah, I'll report back from the food co op.
- [33:17]
Gilbert Cruz
So that's Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton.
- [33:19]
Jumana Khatib
All right, I'm gonna stick with the indelible images here. I'm gonna talk about a dark horse book that I particularly enjoyed. This is called Two Smithereens by Rosalind Drexler. And this is edging onto our list on a technicality because technically, this was Originally published in 1972, but it's been republished to a broader audience, which I think is wonderful. Cause I think this fell through the cracks of history. And, Gilbert, I actually think you're gonna really like this one. Because one of our very few points in common of taste is that we have maybe we like more than I realize.
- [33:59]
Gilbert Cruz
I can't wait to hear what you're gonna say.
- [34:01]
Jumana Khatib
You know what I'm gonna say is that we both have an affection for bygone New York.
- [34:07]
Gilbert Cruz
Absolutely.
- [34:07]
Jumana Khatib
Yes. Okay.
- [34:09]
Gilbert Cruz
Yes.
- [34:09]
Jumana Khatib
Yes. And this, I think Just almost acts like a period piece of, like, weird New York in the 70s. So I'm gonna give you the briefest of overviews. So the opening scene, you're in a movie theater.
- [34:23]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm already in.
- [34:24]
Jumana Khatib
Yeah. Actually, that's all I'm gonna say. So we're in a movie theater. This woman named Rosa is seated. The guy next to her sort of starts pawing her lap. So she crushes his hand and dumps her drink in his lap. And he likes that. And he goes, would you like to go out with me sometime? So they end up striking up a relationship, and he's totally impressed by her physical prowess and gets her to go on the pro wrestling circuit, which is again, like a sector of humanity we don't hear enough from. I don't even want to ruin some of the amazing stage names that her competitors have. They're really works of art. And the best thing about this book, it's just. It's odd. It's totally idiosyncratic for a book that's so physical. The dialogue's really good. You can feel yourself sticking to the booth in the 24 hour diner where they're having bad coffee. It's great. And I went down a bit of a Rosalind Drexler rabbit hole. She actually drew on her own experiences going to a wrestling gym just a few blocks over from our office in Times Square, where there are a bunch of carnies and all types.
- [35:43]
Gilbert Cruz
Times Square is very different now than it used to be.
- [35:45]
Jumana Khatib
I know.
- [35:45]
Gilbert Cruz
So I can. I can believe that. I'm going to. If that to me was Shumana coded, I'm going to lean into what you would say maybe is Gilbert Coded, which is a book about the American Revolution. This is called the Fate of the the War for Fort ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson. That is a long subtitle. A lot of these nonfiction books have long subtitles.
- [36:11]
Jumana Khatib
They're a little out of control.
- [36:12]
Gilbert Cruz
We're recording this a few weeks out from the fourth of July. Next year's fourth of July marks the semi quincentennial. And listeners, I'm gonna say that again because you should memorize that word. You're gonna be hearing it a lot over the next year. Semiquincentennial. It is going to be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The moment that America began. So there's undoubtedly gonna be a ton of stuff leading up to the next Fourth of July. Ken Burns, who has done in Addition to our poetry challenge. Ken Burns, in addition to our poetry challenge. So many documentaries about important parts of American history. Baseball, jazz, country music. He's doing a series on the American Revolution that's debuting this fall. And this book, the Fate of the Day, is The sequel to 2019's The British Are Coming, the War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. That book was about 800 pages long. Do you know how long this book is?
- [37:16]
Jumana Khatib
I don't.
- [37:16]
Gilbert Cruz
It's about 800 pages long.
- [37:18]
Jumana Khatib
Okay. So cool.
- [37:19]
Gilbert Cruz
I don't know if one needs to have read the first book in this trilogy in order to fully appreciate this second entry, the Fate of the Day, which throws us right in the middle of the war. The war has already begun. The war between the colonies and England. But our reviewer claimed that there's no better writer of narrative history than Atkinson, who, they wrote, is able to transport readers to a different time and place without minimizing the differences of the past from the present. And while I'm sure you and I, or me and someone else could squibble or debate about whether or not there is no better writer of narrative history than Atkinson, what is true is that he is uniquely talented in being able to take a person and put them in a moment in time from long ago. And he does this often through deep research and then translating that research into, like, sensory details. What it looked like, what it smelled like, what it sound like. And through those, even if you're in the middle of a very confusing battle, of which there are many in this book, you're able to close your eyes and imagine what it was like to be there. For those who are interested in American history, for those who want to prep for the semi quincentennial, for those who have dads or granddads in their life who maybe are looking for their next history book, I think this is one that you should take a look at.
- [38:38]
Jumana Khatib
How many times do you think you've said semiquincentennial just in your life?
- [38:44]
Gilbert Cruz
I've said that word, I would say 20 times. And all in the past three months.
- [38:50]
Jumana Khatib
I thought you're gonna say three hours.
- [38:52]
Gilbert Cruz
No, semiquincentennial. Say it.
- [38:55]
Jumana Khatib
Semiquincentennial.
- [38:56]
Gilbert Cruz
Great.
- [38:57]
Jumana Khatib
It really rolls off the tongue.
- [38:58]
Gilbert Cruz
It sure does.
- [38:59]
Jumana Khatib
Okay, we're back to fiction. This is Flesh by David Soloi. He is a Hungarian British writer. He tends to have a very global focus in his writing, which I really like. His last book that I remember reading was a series of connected chapters that followed passengers who encountered each other on A plane. And it's almost like a baton's getting passed between people. And it was just a cool experiment that worked. It was thought provoking, it was elegant. He's back with another very elegant, thought provoking book. He's staying in his lane, his thought provoking lane. So this follows a young man. We meet him in his adolescence in Hungary and we see him have his first sexual encounter. We see him go off to war, he serves time in the Gulf, he comes back, he has this sort of peripatetic existence. He's trying to get a job in Hungary and eventually he finds himself in London. And I think the London. If there is a real plot to this book, it begins in London because he starts doing security for some wealthy people and all of a sudden he's swept up into the upper echelons of British society. So this is a rags to riches, possibly to rags story in the end. And one thing that's so interesting about this main character, Istvan, is that he's very reticent. He doesn't ruminate, he doesn't really readily express his feelings or emotions. He's presented to us as this basically like a physical object. Much is made out of his attractiveness, much is made out of his physical body. And it makes for a very tactile reading experience. I think one thing that I responded a lot to in this book is that Soloi leaves a lot off the page. You know, you turn the chapter and you're in an altogether different circumstance. He's married, he's not married, he's in London, whatever. He's back in Hungary after serving. And it makes for a reading experience where actually you feel like you're entering a contract with the author. This was another book that I read basically in one sitting and it felt strange afterwards. But I think that's a good sign if you're in an altered state after you finish a book. But I've been thinking about it for a long time, ever since finishing it. That was Flesh by David Soloi.
- [41:36]
Gilbert Cruz
I do not want to end on a down note, so we're gonna have to find something else to talk about after this book. But there's a memoir that came out this year that we reviewed and that our reporter wrote about that is both sad and moving and meaningful in a way that many memoirs of this type maybe aren't. This one is called Things in Nature Merely Grow. This is by Yiyun Lee. Yiyun Lee is a novelist and this is a true story. In 2024, her son James, who was 19, took his own life. And for any parents, this would have been crushing beyond measure. And of course, it was crushing for Ian as well. But this terrible event was informed by the fact that six years earlier, her other son James, older brother Vincent, also took his own Life. He was 16 at the time. And this is a story that in other hands would just be a story about grieving and maybe what it means to heal. This is not that story. This is a book in which she pays tribute to both of those sons. She tries to grapple with how she has dealt with these tragedies. And as our reporter Alexandra Alter, who profiled Lee, wrote in her piece, quote, in some ways, Lee's memoir is a radical rebuke of the convention surrounding grieving. Early on, she warns those who expect a narrative of healing or solace to stop reading. This is not a story about overcoming loss or moving on. Later in that piece, Lee says, people always say you're going to overcome this, she said. And she responds by saying, no, I'm not even in reading about it. I haven't read the book yet. It seems like a refreshingly frank look at what it means to deal with loss.
- [43:20]
Jumana Khatib
It's amazing to me that for something that is universal, we are all going to lose someone. We still just don't have a good understanding about how to talk about grief. I actually find these kinds of books to be the most difficult to read, but I am always interested in grief literature because it's so important. I would love if we could all find a way to talk about it in a more emotionally complete way. However, I hear your point about not wanting to end on a down note. So I am going to offer up Best book Recommendation in Action right now. Okay, okay. So this is a romance novel by a wildly popular romance novelist that I've never read. I'm not a big romance reader, but I think this could be one for me to read just to see what's going on. So this is called these Summer Storms by Sarah Maclean. So even I know that Sarah Maclean is a wildly popular romance novelist of typically historical romance. This one is set in the present day, set on Rhode island, which is not the reason that I want to read this summer.
- [44:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Appropriate.
- [44:33]
Jumana Khatib
It has strains of succession of, I don't know, like a good 90s rom com, which I've been hungry for. It follows a family whose patriarch is this tech gazillionaire. He dies unexpectedly and one of his daughters, who's semi estranged or at odds with the rest of her family. They all descend on the family home on their island off Rhode Island. On the way she meets this handsome interloper and sparks fly. So she gets to her family home and it turns out that her father has left a series of tasks for everybody in the family to complete.
- [45:15]
Gilbert Cruz
This is a great plot and if.
- [45:17]
Jumana Khatib
They don't finish the tasks before leaving the island, they don't get their inheritance. Then the handsome interloper turns out it was her father's right hand man.
- [45:30]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm sold.
- [45:31]
Jumana Khatib
I know. And Rhode island, this is a good kicker.
- [45:33]
Gilbert Cruz
And Rhode island, this is a good final recommendation. That is a great one. What's it called again?
- [45:39]
Jumana Khatib
That's called these Summer Storms by Sarah maclean.
- [45:43]
Gilbert Cruz
We mentioned several other books on our Best Books of the Year so far, a list that you should definitely go check out to read about the ones we have mentioned and titles such as Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E Schwab, Stonyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which we have definitely talked about on this podcast. Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins and several other books that we just don't have time to talk about here. But between those and the titles that we have blathered on and on about, you have more than enough to last your summer. I think there's something here for everyone. These are our best books of the year so far. I'm sure there are others who would say they have other best books of the year so far. The wonderful thing about the world of books is that maybe everyone can be right at the same time.
- [46:36]
Jumana Khatib
Yes, experts will disagree.
- [46:38]
Gilbert Cruz
Some say it's semi quincentennial. Who knows how you say that word. Joumana, as always, thank you for coming on here and talking it out with me.
- [46:49]
Jumana Khatib
Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure, Gilbert. Thank you for having me.
- [46:53]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Zumana Khatib about some of our favorite books of the year so far. You can find those books and many other titles on our Best Books of the Year so Far list over@nytimes.com I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and thank you as always, for listening.
- [47:12]
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