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Chapter 1: What books should you read this summer?
I'm Winna Liu. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem.
New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from.
Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today.
Bookerview listeners, hi! I'm Wesley Morris. I host a show called Cannonball. And I'm here to let you know that Cannonball is going to be live at the Tribeca Festival this year. I'm going to be on stage with Cynthia Nixon, which is very exciting. And we're going to talk about, yes, that Cynthia Nixon moment. And we're going to talk about some great art about New York City.
And the show, we're going to do it Friday, June 12th at 6 p.m. I'll say it again. Friday, June 12th at 6 p.m. And you can get your tickets right now as I speak at TribecaFilm.com slash audio. That's TribecaFilm.com slash audio. Can't wait to see you there. Please come join us.
Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review from The New York Times. I know that there is an official astronomically based beginning to summer, the solstice and all that stuff. But it is after Memorial Day, everyone. And as far as I'm concerned, it is summer. And what do we all like to do in the summer? Sit inside, get out of the sun, find an air conditioner, read some books.
But what books should you read this summer? That's what we are here to figure out. I have called in some fellow editors from the book review to assist me to go through the next three months and call out a few things that we're all excited about. Jumanica team, you came back. I'm here. Hello. Hello. MJ Franklin, host of our monthly book club discussions. Hello. Howdy and happy summer.
Happy summer.
We're all summer birthdays in here. Summer birthdays are hard.
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Chapter 2: Who is James Ellroy and what is his new book about?
I love them. They're great. Being a twin is truly simply the best. It's great. And you're an identical twin. I am an identical twin. My brother lives just across the park from me. Love it. We see each other all the time. Last question about this. Do you ever mess with people? Not intentionally. I have far too much anxiety for that.
I'm going to talk about a nonfiction book coming out in June that is about the Kennedy assassination, which took place, as we all know, November 22nd, 1963. Did either of you have a JFK assassination phase? Or was that just me?
Silence in the studio.
I was obsessed with the JFK assassination when I was 9, 10, 11 years old.
Nine?
Yes. My grandfather took me to see the Oliver Stone film JFK when I was 10. But I'd already been reading a bunch of books about the JFK assassination and watching documentaries and really trying to figure out, like, who did it. I didn't figure it out. I like the idea that nine-year-old Gilbert Cruz is on the case. He's going to crack it.
I remember taking my grandfather's... He had an old typewriter and typing my theories on a typewriter and putting them in an official-looking folder and being like... I think it was the Cubans.
It's an amazing montage for when they make your life into a movie.
There is a book coming out called The Housewives Underground, the untold story of the women who made the JFK assassination our most enduring mystery. This is by Caitlin Tiffany. Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic. A few years ago, she wrote a book called Everything I Need I Get From You, How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It. And so this is a very, very different topic.
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Chapter 3: What can we expect from Andrew Sean Greer's 'Villa Coco'?
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All right. It is time to move to July.
I don't have any July books, so it's the two of you.
It's guy time. Okay.
July is guy time.
Okay. I want to talk about genuinely one of my favorite authors who has a book coming out in July. It's not like a swerve. Everyone knows who he is. This is Colson Whitehead. Very famous author. He has the third book in his Harlem trilogy coming out. This one's called Cool Machine. All of them star a character named Ray Carney. He owns a furniture store, but he's also, he dabbles in crime.
He is a fence sometimes. He takes stolen goods from people and then sells them over here. Sometimes he gets involved in heists. Each of these three books is set in a different decade. in New York City and in Harlem. So the first one was the 60s, second one, 70s, and Cool Machine, this last one, is set in the 1980s, the decade in which I was born in New York City.
I'm very excited to experience it through Whitehead's eyes. He's just a great writer, right? He can do anything. Obviously, he's won two Pulitzers. He can write literary fiction. He can write a zombie novel. He can write nonfiction. He's done these crime novels now. And he is also a New Yorker, and each of these books so far has just been an incredible evocation of a time in New York.
Can we do some podcast psychoanalysis? Gilbert, I noticed that all of your recommendations, all the books you're looking forward to, are set in the past. Yeah. What's that about?
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in 'They All Fall in Love at the End'?
So he enlists this hustler to disguise himself as a feng shui expert, infiltrate New York's elite, and incriminate them in a variety of ways. It's gay revenge chaos, but it's also a satire on New York's upper crust and literary types. I'm so into this. I'm so into this. That's what you love to hear when you give a book recommendation.
I'm going to tell you about a new book by the author of one of the scariest books I've ever read. This is a book that's coming out in July. It's called Biological War. Annie Jacobson published a book called Nuclear War. I'd been meaning to get to it, but I didn't pick it up until last summer. I was in Chicago. I visited this amazing bookstore.
I was like, all right, this is what I'm reading on the plate right back. I read a lot of horror. I watch a lot of horror movies, read a lot of horror books. This book, Nuclear War, was terrifying.
It presents a minute-by-minute and sometimes even second-by-second account of what would happen if a rogue nuclear missile was fired at the United States, how each corner of the American government would respond, how much we could do, which is not that much, what would happen. It's basically how the world can end in the span of like a couple hours. It really messed me up.
And this book, I think, is going to do the same. But I gravitate towards that experience. I want to know how biological war is going to end all life as we know it.
Is it going to change anything about how you live your day-to-day life?
Absolutely not. I live every day to the fullest.
I have one really quick book I want to shout out because I know very little about it, but it's also an author that I'm like, they're writing it, I'm in. This is We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Hartman. You may remember Jacqueline Hartman from her book, I Who Have Never Known Men, which was reissued recently and has become this big TikTok trend. It's also just an incredible book. Very haunting.
It's a dystopian novel that is completely unsettling. Jacqueline Hartman also has another novel that was translated into English recently, Orlando, which is a romp of a gender swap novel that is inspired by Orlando by Virginia Woolf. This new one, We Were Forbidden, is a collection of three novellas The Hartmanissance continues. We'll find another name for that. We'll workshop it.
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Chapter 5: What is the plot of Ann Patchett's 'Whistler'?
I think this is 200 pages. Oh. I know somebody's been listening to this podcast.
That is the right line.
As I said, I do think that Rachel Cusk has been... She's been writing for a very long time, and I'm delighted that the Outline trilogy, which is beloved and revered and sort of like, you know, everybody was like, she's doing something new with the novel. Like, that's, you know, that merits attention. However, Rachel Cusk had a very rich writing life before... The Outline Trilogy.
And I think that this new book is kind of a return to that form. So that excites me. So the premise of this, MJ, this will tickle you because it's about a doppelganger. There's a child actor who's now an adult, but like... In my head, I picture like female Ron Howard, but I think that's like not the right association.
So Ron Howard's daughter?
Moving right along. So basically this person agrees to participate in a biography. But the writer of this biography not only knows nothing about this individual, her subject, which is unusual for somebody who has been in the public eye since childhood, but they... totally resemble each other, which is nuts. I don't think I could be comfortable with that.
Also, because I don't resemble anybody else on earth. So I'm excited for non-outline Cusk. Something new.
If you're keeping score at home, it sounds like the trend of the summer, the themes of the summer, crime, dives into the past, doppelgangers.
Doppelgangers doing crime would be something.
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Chapter 6: What unique storytelling style does Isabel Waidner use in 'As If'?
Or is he? Because we also get chapters from his perspective in... We see he has a lot of brain activity, though he's uncertain who he is, where he is, and what's going on around him. And it's how their stories intertwine on this kind of deranged road trip.
I have a piece of nonfiction that comes out in early July. This is You Won't Get Free of It, Stories of Mothers and Daughters. It's by Rachel Aviv. Rachel is one of the great New Yorker writers. Her book Strangers to Ourselves, I don't know if the both of you recall, was one of our top 10 books of 2022. And this is one of those...
collections where, you know, they take a bunch of pieces that were previously published and put them all in and add one new piece and make it feel real. The thing I always say when someone describes it that way is, yes, but did you read all seven of those pieces when they were in The New Yorker? And if you haven't, this is probably a good thing to own.
The only thing I would say about this is it comes out in early July. Mother's Day just passed. It seems like there's a real... Every day is Mother's Day. A real missed opportunity.
Every day is Mother's Day.
My mom who got every year when I was in elementary school a chicken noodle soup book. Do you remember those? Oh. For the soul? For the soul. For the soul. For every type of soul. For the mother's soul. If there was a chicken noodle soup, I was like, perfect mother's day gift.
I have yet another novel about surreal life and the instability of memory. This is Awake, Awake by Fiona Mosley, coming out in August. I'm a big fan of Mosley. Every book of hers feels very different, and I think that's a real achievement for This one, too, is strange and unexpected, and I didn't quite know what to do with it. So the premise is a writer moves back to her hometown.
She's tending bar. She's flooded with memories that she knows are impossible. And this comes early on in the book, so it's not ruining anything. But like the memory that she has somehow received is that her Jewish grandfather killed Hitler and Britain covered it up to protect her and her family.
I have Triage by Claudia Rankine. It's the return of Claudia Rankine. Enough said. I know very little about this one other than that I love Claudia's previous books, Citizen and Just Us. I read whatever she writes. I think this is about a pair of friends, but it's a blend of fiction and nonfiction.
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