[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and yes, here we are, in gift-giving season, and we know many listeners to the show love to give books. Each year, around this time, The New York Times chooses its 100 best books of the year. Well, as of this very morning, it has winnowed that list down to the top 10 books of 2023. They publish a list like that too, five fiction and five non-fiction books. The list was just released a few hours ago.

Let's check out their top 10 picks with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review. Gilbert, thanks so much for joining us for this on the morning your list came out. Welcome to WNYC.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh, so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Five works of fiction, five of non-fiction. Since we do mostly non-fiction on this show, let's start there. You include a book that we featured on the show, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. For listeners who don't know, that's an account of the big 2016 Fire in Fort McMurray, Canada. Let's take a listen to a 40-second snippet of the author, who was here on the show back in June.

John Vaillant: It was 90 degrees that day, 30 degrees above normal. The relative humidity was comparable to Death Valley in Southern California. That created conditions in the forest that are almost comparable to spraying it with gasoline. The heat being projected by this massive fire was about 1,000 degrees. That projected radiant heat moves at the speed of light and everything in front of it desiccated and became fire hot instantly.

That fire moved right into the city. Two-story houses that cost half a million dollars basically exploded into flame, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: Very timely, given the smoke we experienced this summer, in the New York area. He was a great interview. Gilbert, why do you think it was a great book?

Gilbert Cruz: Well, Brian, it was quite surreal, actually, reading the book this summer when the skies here in New York City were so frighteningly orange. There are so many climate change books that are published now, and appropriately so, and we review many of them well, but there's just something about the language in this book that made it feel so forceful and urgent.

What Vaillant does-- he makes it seem easy, but it's not easy, which is to take this incredible story of the Fort McMurray wildfire, give a beat-by-beat account, but also weave in the history of petroleum extraction in Canada, the history of climate change science. He puts all those three strands together in a way that is never boring or didactic. It's exciting, which is a weird thing to say about climate change, which is terrifying.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Another non-fiction book from your top five list, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo. This is a true story about an enslaved woman. You want to take it from there?

Gilbert Cruz: Absolutely. It's a non-fiction account of an enslaved couple who make a daring escape North, from the South, all the way up to Pennsylvania, by disguising the wife as a wealthy white man. They make up the story about how the white man is sick, and he has to have all these bandages on his face, and he has to wear this top hat all the time. They travel by train, steamboat, and stagecoach.

It's this very tense, incredibly detailed story. It's an amazing feat of research that Ilyon Woo put together. You get a real visceral sense of this journey that they take North. I don't think I'm spoiling by saying they get away, but the escape is only the first part of the book. The rest of the book is equally fascinating. It's an adventure. It's a love story between these two people who have to band together in order to make this escape.

It actually happened. It's very impressive. It came out early in the year, and we were measuring so many non-fiction books against it, as we discussed candidates throughout the year.

Brian Lehrer: She dressed up as a white man and her husband pretended to be her property. What an adventure, and how horrible, as a note of history, that anybody even had to think of an idea like that. All right. Book number three. Here's the title, that's hard to forget, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, by Patricia Evangelista. Tell us about that.

Gilbert Cruz: Sure. This is a book about the Philippines. It's a book about Rodrigo Duterte, who was president of the Philippines between 2016 and 2022. During his term in office, he pursued a quite blatant campaign of extrajudicial killings, is what they're called, of suspected drug dealers and drug addicts. The author, Patricia Evangelista, was a journalist that lived there, she worked for an outlet called The Rappler. She covered these killings.

This book is part memoir, part history of the modern Philippines, part account of this strong man, president Duterte, and part investigative journalism. It intertwines history and personal history in a way that we're all impressed by. It also talks largely about how violence is connected to language, which maybe we've seen here in the United States a little bit over the past few years, when someone in authority, power, and political power, uses language of a certain sort, that can have real-world effects.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio, and live streaming at wnyc.org at a minute before eleven o'clock. We are with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review. Their 10 Best Books of the Year list just came out this morning. Five fiction, five non-fiction.

We've been sampling from the non-fiction list so far. Let's touch on some of your five best fiction books of the year in our remaining time. First up is Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore. This one is very timely. It's about a young conscript deserting the Russian army. Tell us more about why Eastbound is on this list.

Gilbert Cruz: Sure thing. Eastbound is published by a small press, Archipelago. It's a very slim book in contrast with some of the other books on this list. It's only about 120 pages. It was published in France, in 2012, and it's only out this year in English. As you say, it's a story of a 20-year-old conscript in the Russian army. He's on the Trans Siberian Railway, headed east, and he does not want to fight. He could not afford to get out of the draft. He's on the train. He's not a violent person. He doesn't know what he's going to do.

Also on the train is a French woman, who doesn't speak Russian, fleeing a relationship. This soldier-to-be and this woman cross paths, and we get this very compressed, but propulsive intention-filled story. It's very claustrophobic, and it's very suspenseful. It's also very satisfying. There's something wonderful about sitting down with a book, and then maybe finishing it two hours later. Even though this book was written more than a decade ago as a tale, partly, about the Russian call to war, it feels very current.

Brian Lehrer: By contrast in the length department, a historical novel set in the not-too-distant past, The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. This one's 650 pages long, I see. Tell us about this once-wealthy Irish family at the heart of this story.

Gilbert Cruz: This is the last book on this list of 10 that I read. I fell in love with it, and so many people at the Book Review fell in love with it. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which is a fairly big prize that was just announced. It's four members of a successful family in a small Irish town who, when we meet them at the beginning, are dealing with their plummeting fortunes following the 2008 financial crisis.

As the book starts, each family member gets their own section, and we learn about their internal lives, hopes, and frustrations. It just feels like a very classic novel about a family. It's funny, it's sad, it's dramatic. I did, many of us, as I said, fell in love with each character in the book as a whole. There are moments of tension, but it's also warm, and so emotionally intelligent. It is not an exaggeration to say that every time I put this book down, I was wondering what those characters in the book were going to do next.

Brian Lehrer: We'll do one more from your fiction list. I see that Zadie Smith's The Fraud made it to your top five novels of the year list, her first historical novel. I know she was on Alison's show for this. Maybe I don't even have to ask, but why did Zadie Smith's The Fraud make your list?

Gilbert Cruz: Sure. I think many of us at Book Review think she's one of her generation's great novelists. This is a historical novel set in Victorian London. It's about a Scottish housekeeper. It's about the cousin that she lives with, who, himself, is a writer famous at the time, a real writer, and the real-life court case that took place in England and captured the public imagination, which there's this man who claims to be a long lost noble.

It's very clear that he's not, but the English public are so obsessed with the idea that someone from low standing could possibly jump class, that they become absolutely obsessed with this case. It's a book about writing. Charles Dickens himself is a character. It's a courtroom drama. It's a book about how England benefited from the slave trade in Jamaica. It's a very rich book, and I will say this, you should definitely read it.

Obviously, we think so, it's on our list, but if you are an audiobook listener, please, please, please listen to the audiobook. Zadie Smith reads it herself. She does all the voices, all the different accents, and I dare say it's an even more satisfying experience to consume the book in that format.

Brian Lehrer: The New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year list just out this morning. Five fiction, five non-fiction. We've been going through it with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the New York Times Book Review. This is fun. Now I've got my bedtime reading cut out for me, probably, for the next year. Thank you very much for sharing. That was great.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you.

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