Chapter 1: What are the best books to gift for the holidays?
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Welcome, everyone, to the Sunday Special. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanksgiving has come, Thanksgiving has gone, and that can only mean one thing. The holiday season is fully upon us, and it's time to start thinking about gifts for your family and friends. I know, I get it, this can be a stressful activity, but do not despair. because I am here to tell you that books are the best gifts.
You can literally find a book for every single person on your list, no matter what they're into, no matter if they even read books. So that is what we're going to talk about today. With me today are two of my colleagues who I often pester for gift ideas for people in my life. Both are editors at The Book Review, Jumana Khatib. Welcome, Jumana. Hi, Gilbert. And Sadie Stein.
Thank you for having me. Okay, before we dive in, you both read books for a living. Amazing job.
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Chapter 2: How do editors choose their favorite books of the year?
But what does reading for pleasure look like for both of you?
Okay. I know myself well enough that this is going to sound like parody, but I will read any book that doesn't have a plot. I will read any book about a narrator in some kind of lowercase d distress. Okay. I don't like true crime. I think left to my own devices, I tend to read mostly fiction. I salivate at translated fiction. I think that's very exciting.
And I like a book that really surprises me. Oh, and also the dialogue can't be bad. That is something that will make me put down a book, is really bad spoken conversation.
All right, Sadie, you were on the Sunday special earlier this year when we talked about going back to school, things that we read when we were younger. However, I sit next to you and I know that particularly when it comes to nonfiction, although you're one of the most well-read people I know, the sort of the range that you possess is absolutely insane.
What are the type of things that you go to, you know, when you don't have to read a ton for work?
Yeah, my tastes are pretty Catholic. I guess I do like eclectic books. I like anything about dolls and ghosts, of course. But that's really the same thing. That's just about absence and humanity, right?
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Chapter 3: What unique categories of books can be recommended for gifts?
So basically, anything to do with that. I like things about crafts. I like interiors. I like books with really good rooms described in them. I like fiction with good food. That's very important. I don't love apocalypses, but, you know, I'm learning to love them. I... don't tend to love novels about mothers and children.
Oh, do not say that to Jumana, by the way.
That's all I read.
She loves a book about a mom.
Especially a single one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
Very fair. And... But yeah, as you know, looking at my desk, it's stuff I'm interested in. It's stuff I in real life will never do, like gardening.
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Chapter 4: What are the top translated books recommended for holiday gifts?
It's museum exhibits I won't get to. It's things that remind me of when I was five years old. It's random books my grandparents gave me. There's no rhyme or reason to my reading. I think I can break an algorithm.
Yeah.
All right. Well, I think that is a great transition into what we're here to talk about, which is some of the best books of the year. We, as a group, over the course of a year, read hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of books. And at the New York Times Book Review, somehow we distill that down to 100 books, which we call our 100 notable books.
The two of you, in addition to many of our other editors, are involved in this process. You are reading a lot of these books. Before we get into... incredibly specific category recommendations, which we're going to do in the second part of this conversation. I would love for the two of you to reflect on the things that you loved from this year most, because we read so many.
Okay, so one of my best reading experiences was, no surprise, was a translated novel, translated from the Swedish. This is The Colony by Annika Norlin. It's a debut novel. And the premise is actually pretty fascinating. So our sort of avatar is this journalist who's totally burnt out.
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Chapter 5: Which novels are perfect for the foodie in your life?
She can't pick up the phone. She's just like, she's beyond spent. So she goes to the woods and observes this group of people living in the middle of nowhere. She can't exactly figure out how they know each other. She eventually becomes very entwined with them. And I thought, this book, I was talking about this with a colleague and we both agreed this was the kind of book that was so well-drawn.
It was so unexpected. Every single turn took me by surprise. This is the kind of book that reminded me of why reading is exciting. And I'm not even like I felt that kind of I made contact with that childlike sense of joy reading this book.
So that's The Colony by Annika Norlin. And that's one of the books on our hundred best books of the year list. And we're going to put all of these titles in the show notes so you can take a look later. Jumana, you mentioned that you love translated literature. Why? What is that about?
Oh, I mean, I love understanding like different ways that thoughts can be communicated or, you know, when you have access to different reference points or idioms, then it becomes totally mind expanding. And I have such an affection for translators because they toil in invisibility. And I think it's one of the hardest things to do. I mean, I grew up in like a, you know, mixed language house.
Chapter 6: What cozy mysteries should you consider for gift-giving?
And so I understand how hard and frankly existential it can be. And like, I had no idea that this was a whole subset apparently in Swedish literature is like the burnout novel. This is fascinating.
Sadie, I think you have a book that you want to talk about that was translated.
I do, although surprisingly, I think not a great favorite of yours. This is Perfection by Vincenzo Letronico. And this is, in fact, his reimagination of another book originally written in French, a book by Georges Perrec from the 60s called Things, which I also recommend. Basically, this is about... an expat, youthful couple, millennial couple, living in Berlin and then Lisbon.
They are trying to sell their apartment on Airbnb, sell it as a desirable property. And essentially it goes through their lives object by object, signifier by signifier. And it is a novel, which although a rewrite of the 60s novel could only have been written this year, that's depressing for some, too close for some. For others, I think it's incredibly well observed and interesting.
And it's short, too. Have I seen this book on my... You've seen it everywhere. On my Instagram. You have seen it everywhere.
With a pink lily on the cover.
A lot of people out there of a certain age sort of toting this book around.
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Chapter 7: How can books enhance the holiday gifting experience?
Every commuter on the F train. It's an easy read, and it's very much about appearances, ironically, and... signaling and what things mean to young people today, what materialism means.
Do performative men read this book?
I should think so, but the joke would be on them.
It would be.
Yes.
Jumana, so many of us at the book review read this. A lot of big books this year. The one Sadie just talked about, pretty small, but the one you're going to talk about, quite large.
Quite large. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that another one of my sort of tentpole qualities as a reader is like the longer it is, the more interested I am. This has become my legacy.
Very annoying for your colleagues who you recommend books to all the time.
I know, but I'm usually right. You know, The Bee Sting. The Bee Sting, you're welcome. Okay, The Bee Sting was so good. I know, I know.
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Chapter 8: What are the most memorable book recommendations from the episode?
Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, listeners, if you haven't read it from a couple years ago. So good. It's fantastic. Tell us about this next one.
Okay. So this is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny. This has been a long cooking book. This has been like 20 years in the making. This is by Kieran Desai. And this is what you think of as an old-fashioned, sweeping, time-spanning, continent-jumping, rich kind of
romantic epic and it follows two immigrants um sonia when we meet her is a college student and she's lonely and she's miserable and like hates the dorm food and she gets mixed up with this like horrible older painter and and then sunny who is a journalist and and trying to make it in New York. And of course, both Sonia and Sunny are, you know, grappling with their family ties back in India.
And their paths cross, first on a train, and then it turns out that their families know each other in these increasingly entwined ways. It's lush, it's sensual, it's completely absorbing. There's a real wit to this book. And I think that for me...
And the representative anecdote that I have about this book is that I was reading it when I was visiting my family over the summer, and I was so absorbed in this book that I did not notice that the neighbor's orchard was on fire.
Metaphorically?
No, no, no, literally.
What happened to the orchard?
The orchard burned. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. No plot.
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