Title: NYT's 10 Best Books of 2024

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll take the last few minutes of today's show to look back at some of the literary gems that have graced our bookshelves in 2024. My guest for this is Gilbert Cruz, Editor of The New York Times Book Review. Here to talk about the book reviews, 10 Best Books of 2024, always so highly anticipated. We'll get through this pretty quickly, but there's really something for everyone. Five fiction, five nonfiction. Gilbert, thanks for doing this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Gilbret Cruz: Oh, it's a pleasure to be back.

Brian Lehrer: Let's just dive in here. We'll see if we can cut through all 10 in brief. The very first work of fiction on the list is Miranda July's All Fours. What made this book one of the best of the year?

Gilbret Cruz: One of the things that we hope distinguishes at least the five fiction books is a sense of surprise. We all read a lot of books. These books have to be great. They have to surprise us. All Fours by Miranda July was utterly surprising. It's about a middle aged female artist who sort of blows up her life, has a bit of a midlife crisis as she approaches perimenopause, and it was a delight to read. It's a book for adults. It's about being in a marriage, it's about desire, it's about middle age. It's also very funny. I'm very dubious when someone tells me a book is funny. I just loved it.

Brian Lehrer: Number two, I don't think you ranked them, right? This is just five--

Gilbret Cruz: No, we did not rank them.

Brian Lehrer: Just number two out of my mouth is Dolly Alderton's Good Material. You describe Alderton as a latter day Nora Ephron. You're still on the funny beat here.

Gilbret Cruz: A little bit. She is a British author and newspaper columnist. This book is about a sort of a middling stand up comedian who has just been dumped by his girlfriend of several years. He, over the course of this book, tries to figure out why. It's both light and serious at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Another selection is James by Percival Everett, "A radical reworking," you say, "of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn." How do they do that in 2024?

Gilbret Cruz: We all or many of us know the story of Huckleberry Finn. This tells that story from the perspective of Jim James, the enslaved person who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi. By shifting that perspective, it's like a whole new story, even though it hits very familiar beats.

Brian Lehrer: Rounding out the fiction list is Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Let's take each of those. How about Martyr!?

Gilbret Cruz: Sure. Martyr! is a debut novel. It's about a youngish man, a poet. He's an Iranian American immigrant who's sort of obsessed with death. His parents have died, and he's trying to find meaning in life. The reason that Martyr! stood out to us, and this is harder and more rare than you think it is, Brian, is because the voice was just so unique and so fresh, which is just a delight to find.

You Dreamed of Empires, sort of historical fiction, a little bit cracked. It imagines the first meeting between Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs in 1519 in what is modern day Mexico City. It's a comedy of errors, a comedy of manners. There's violence that hangs over the whole situation because you have these two cultures coming together. It's also about two different types of people trying to suss each other out.

Brian Lehrer: Is that originally in Spanish?

Gilbret Cruz: It was, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Any review? I guess it takes a certain kind of expertise to review how good a translation is, how much it literally and culturally holds up.

Gilbret Cruz: Unfortunately, we don't read the book in Spanish and then read it in English. We rely on the translators to do their job. Natasha Wimmer, very well known translator from the Spanish. She also worked on the works of Roberto Bolaño many years ago. It's a wonderful translation.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we're going to go to the nonfiction list. Best five from The New York Times. One, I guess it's kind of a redo, you'll tell us. First published in 1950. Cold Crematorium by, if I'm saying this right, Josef Debreczeni.

Gilbret Cruz: Josef Debreczeni, I think, is how I've been saying it.

Brian Lehrer: It's a memoir of Auschwitz. What's the new hook here?

Gilbret Cruz: It's a Holocaust memoir. Was first published in 1950 in Yugoslavia. Again, on the translation point, sometimes, books just do not make it to English for years and for sometimes decades. There are a lot of Holocaust memoirs out there, obviously, sort of one of the defining events of the 20th century. The reason this stood out for us is because the author was a journalist. He was a writer, he was a playwright. His eye for detail was incredible. Of course, what he's detailing, you know, are among the worst atrocities that humans have ever enacted upon others, but there's something about the way that a journalist writing in real time almost approaches this situation, sheds new light on something that we all think we know very well.

Brian Lehrer: Next, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by New Yorker Staff Writer, Jonathan Blitzer. He was on the show for the book during the year. It's about Central America and U.S. southern border policy. So much, obviously, being written on that topic these days. Why'd you pick this one?

Gilbret Cruz: You know, pretty well timed, as you say, given how prominent a role immigration played in this year's election. This focuses on Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and the situation at the southern border over the past 50 years. He talks about American intervention in Central America. He talks about how administrations, Republican and Democrat have dealt with this knotty situation at the border.

Incredibly, it's not a dry piece of history, right? Even though it is about history. The sheer number of people that Blitzer talks to in order to bring this story alive while also underscoring how it's defined the past 50 years in American policy, is just very impressive.

Brian Lehrer: You've got The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides, which is about James Cook's third and final voyage around the world. You've got Lucy Sante's memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. You write when the veteran literary and cultural critic came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 66, she described in an email to her loved ones the devastating realization that her parallel life had passed her by. A very relevant read. Then there's Max Boots biography, Reagan. We have 30 seconds left in the segment. Why'd you pick that one?

Gilbret Cruz: [chuckles] Some might argue we don't need another Ronald Reagan biography, there's so many out there. This book, incredibly well researched, arrives at a moment in which we're looking at another former screen celebrity turned president. It's just well timed, incredibly well researched, and it's quite entertaining. If you think you might at all be interested in a Reagan biography, I would urge you to pick this one up.

Brian Lehrer: Well, there is speed reading in this world, and there's also speed talking through The New York Times list of-

Gilbret Cruz: We did it.

Brian Lehrer: -the 10 best books of the year. Gilbert Cruz, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, thank you for going on this romp with us.

Gilbret Cruz: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks for listening, everybody, on WNYC. Next is All Of It with Alison Stewart, speaking with Actors, Leonie Benesch and Peter Sarsgaard from the film September 5. Also cartoonists of The New Yorker at Wit's End, they'll talk about that new book, plus holiday cookies, and your calls with Eric Kim from New York Times cooking, all coming up with Alison right after the news.

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