Our Book Critics On Their Year in Reading
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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. Recently, we released our Top 10 Books of the Year episode, in which we discussed our collection of books collectively chosen by the editors and writers here. But this week, we want to hear from the bold-faced names. No anonymity here. I'm joined by our staff critics, Jen Zelai. Hello, Jen. Hi, Gilbert. Hi, Gilbert.

Dwight Garner. Hey, Gilbert. And Alexandra Jacobs. Hi, Gilbert. The three of you, as you've done for the last several years, have written a piece looking back at your years in reading. We're going to talk about some of the highlights that each of you wrote about. I do want to start with Dwight. At the beginning of your little section of this piece, you write, this year's best books mattered because they offered refuge from the wheels grinding in our heads. They made us feel less alone and reminded us that we are still sane.

Do you still feel that way? It was such a year of turmoil for so many people and uncertainty and angst. And books, at least for me, is they're where I went to escape. And these themes, these kind of these themes that we worked out in this year's fiction and nonfiction are themes that are there every year. But I think this year they really stuck out for a lot of us. The things that spoke to our concerns and when we weren't escaping, that spoke to the things we were all thinking about.

One of the books that you were big on this year, I don't know that you called it out in your piece, but I did want to briefly touch on it, was Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. As you recall, and I think as you might have said, this was a book that going into it, you had heard people on this desk sort of talking smack about it. And then you dipped into it yourself and you fell in love with it.

It's carbs, it's cheese, it's butter, and it's really smart. It's just the book that I dove into and found deep pleasure and indeed escape in, even though she's quite a serious writer, as I'm sure most listeners know. She's no joke as a novelist and one of the best writers in the world right now, I think. This was her sort of, I don't know, it felt like she let herself go a little bit more. She had more fun. You know who

really let herself go was Miranda July. And it's like everybody was expecting and anticipating the Sally Rooney book to be a big book of the year. But what I was surprised by was that here was Miranda July being taken seriously, as seriously as Sally Rooney. And her book was the one, it seemed to me, that the people, young and old, were embracing with excitement. I still haven't read that book. Can you convince me in two sentences to read it?

The first three quarters of it are fantastic. It's being celebrated as a novel of perimenopause. It's about a woman in a marriage partnership with a young child who, despite all the progress we've made with feminism and everything, feels somewhat stifled and confined in her domestic arrangement. And she embarks on a road trip to

She's going to drive, you know, to celebrate her 45th birthday or something. I may not be remembering this correctly. But anyway, she she embarks on a road trip. She doesn't make it very far. And then she begins to have an extremely explicit affair with a young guy. She picks up at a gas station. Again, I might not be remembering that exactly right. But she she she begins to have an extremely explicit affair.

The older woman and the younger man. That's one of the through lines in Sally Rooney's novel as well. We should get them on a panel. Jen, did you read either of those books? I read All Fours by Miranda July. You see. And I think it was a rental, a car rental agency where she... A car rental agency. Where she met the guy. Right. And then they have This Affair.

Everything just calls into question like where she is in her life. And the main character herself is a Miranda July-esque figure. I think a person of, I can't remember what term she uses, but it's sort of like semi-celebrity. Yes. Where she's artistic. She has some renown, but she's not like super famous like Taylor Swift. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And you feel like she's and she's very committed to making her life, her art and vice versa. Yeah, exactly. It's so wonderful to see live critics giving each other recommendations. You are probably among the three most well-read people that I know. And this still proves that you

you can read that much and still not have gotten to one of our top 10 books of the year, all four by Miranda July. But Dwight, you did write early on about another one of our top 10 books of the year. And I think it was your piece that really put it on a ton of our radars, which was You Dreamed of Empires.

which was a book by Alvaro Enrique that we all just love so much. God, atmospheric, funny, sort of a surreal version of deep history in Mexico. And it's one of those books you pick up and you think, where's this writer been all my life? He's such a talent. And what did you think, Gilbert?

I talked briefly about it on our Top 10 Books podcast. I happened to read it right as I was going to Mexico City. So I also it was sort of like right book, right place. But it's it was completely surprising. It's sort of an alternative history of this moment when Cortez and his people land in what is now Mexico City and encounter Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor there. And it is it it just feels lively and funny, right?

Because it's this sort of comedy of manners, slightly gross, slightly tense. It just it mixes so many different tones. And what in the end is only about a 200 page book. I think I loved its humanity. It's small bore humanity the most. It's novel where mosquitoes bite people and they get colds and their butts itch. And it's just really funny. And it's just humane as well as being complicated and intellectual about Mexican history.

So this is a very hard pivot, but it was an election year. And Jen, as you wrote, if you work at a book review long enough, you learn that presidential election years are vexing for publishers, especially when it comes to nonfiction. Are they vexing for nonfiction critics like you? I think it depends. This year was...

a hard one for publishers, not just because of the election. And there's always this issue where because American political campaigning just consumes so much time and so much of the news cycle that publishers are

who want to get publicity for their books, find it difficult to penetrate that maelstrom. Unless you're Melania Trump dropping your memoir right at the end of the campaign. That was interesting. Yeah. Some books, some books will make it through. I think for publishers, there is this sort of feeling of the news cycle is just going to consume everything. And I think this year in particular was difficult because

Because the election was very close, both before and after in terms of the actual numbers. And so there was this sense of, OK, what is the political reality that writers are publishing into? What?

What kind of country do we live in? I think that we're still trying to figure out those questions in a way. And so that, of course, has bearing on what people want to read, what they're excited to read. Do people want to read more political stuff? Do they want to have something that's totally unrelated, that's like counter-programming? I think those questions were all up in the air.

I think one thing that was definitely true when you write about this is that you could not escape that one of your favorite books of the year was one that dealt intimately with American politics, not American politics of the moment, but American politics from the early 90s. Tell us about When the Clock Broke by John Gans. Yes. So this is a book that is about, as you mentioned, Gilbert, about the early 1990s, which is

is an era that marked the end of the Cold War, the sense that American capitalism had essentially won. It was the end of history. And I think, you know, sort of in the common memory, I mean, for those of us who lived through the 1990s, we remember in 1992 that Bill Clinton won and that sort of the sense of maybe sort of a bland consensus around the middle coalescing around that time. And

And what Gans shows is, in fact, there was a lot of seething resentment. There was a lot of discontent. There's a lot of stuff that I think we're reckoning with now. And it was really bubbling up. And you saw it in

Third party candidates, you saw it in people like Ross Perot. You saw it in the political candidacy of people like Pat Buchanan. You saw it in somebody like David Duke. And so what he does is he tries to give us, as he puts it, a history of the losers. And I was really impressed with how he combines that.

This sort of marshalling of historical evidence, all these details, some of them totally absurd with his very impressive storytelling skills. This is his first book. I feel like Gans came out of nowhere this year and became one of the intellectual stars of the year. And I'm sure, who, where did he come from? It's really interesting. He...

Apparently worked for this website called Genius for a while. You know, the website that annotates... Genius.com? Yes, exactly. Rap lyrics, right? I think all lyrics at this point, but started with rap lyrics. Started with rap lyrics. Not always correctly attributed as like... Right. And he started a sub stack several years ago and...

He started getting attention because he obviously is incredibly interested in history and how history bears on the current moment. And I think really made a name for himself, drawing connections, connecting the dots,

And I think writing with style. And I will also say that I think on online, on social media, he has a reputation for getting into fights with people on X. So maybe that also has something to do with it. This idea of sort of like the intellectual pugilist, which I think is like a lost tradition that maybe he's trying to revive. But in any case, I was really pleasantly surprised by this book to have a first book written

really come out right out of the gate with something I think so ambitious and impressive. He is also a co-host of a podcast

called Unclear and Present Danger that he co-hosts with Jamel Bowie. Right, exactly, about post-Cold War movies. Yeah, I think it's Hunt for Red October maybe is one of the first ones. It's good to have very specific, very hyper-focused podcast topics. And I think also because he is talking about the culture wars of the 1990s, I think the fact that he himself is so clearly interested in

not just in politics, but also in movies and music. He brings all of that to bear in this book. So it's really kaleidoscopic.

I was at an independent bookstore in the West Village recently, a Three Lives bookstore, and I bought another copy of this book. And they said we, I think they only have two at a time, but they said they can't keep it on the shelves. People keep buying it. A guy came up to me as I was buying it and said, that's a really good book. I feel like he was planted there. It was John Gantz who said that.

I can't discuss when the clock broke without speaking up for the year that broke America by Andrew Rice, the New York Magazine writer, which is about the year 2000 and how it was the foundation for everything that followed. I just think the two go nicely together. Why was the year 2000 the foundation? Well, think about it. The Supreme Court decision about the election and also everything that Donald J. Trump was doing that year. He lays it out. Really?

really well. Okay. You got a two for here. If the John Gans book is sold out, you could get, you could buy the other one. What an endorsement. Alexandra, something that you wrote about a lot this year were biographies and memoirs. And as you wrote, I'm thinking a lot these days about how biography and to some extent memoir is soon to change irrevocably. Modern subjects don't send or save very many handwritten letters and

And many have abandoned diaries and date books for social media and Google Calendar, which will be a lot harder and less fun for researchers of the future to rifle through. I think about this all the time. I think about how will it even be possible to write a biography of someone who is a notable personality right now, given that there largely is no written record.

Yeah, I think not unless they're incredibly assiduous about preserving things for posterity. And I think archivists are thinking about this a lot. But also, it's just no matter how many emails you get printed out, it's just not going to be the same as going through the fun handwritten material. So I did think about that. I reviewed a lot of biographies and a few memoirs this year that were very dependent on that kind of material. And

It was just a joy. One of the books I reviewed that I was very surprised to like as much as I did was the one of Christopher Isherwood, the biography of Christopher Isherwood.

Christopher Isherwood, Inside Out. I remember when I took that assignment, I think, Dwight, you said you had 900 pages. Are you sure? Something like that. And then when I embarked on it, I was reminded that, in fact, there had already been an almost 900 page biography of Christopher Isherwood. So you would think this would be like a kind of why does this exist? In fact, it was wonderful. It was one of my favorite books of the year. Now, that was by Catherine Bucknell. You also wrote about

A Keith Haring biography, Radiance, The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. Yes, I was interested by that book for a number of reasons. I grew up with Keith Haring. He was like the wallpaper of my teenage life. I grew up with those dancing figures and I was very aware of him. I hadn't remembered he died quite so young. It's just...

astonishing. Brad Gooch is the perfect person to write this biography. They're they're absolute wonderful match of biographer and subject, which can be a difficult thing to do. And it's just it's just amazing what he accomplished in that short time. I'm going to ask the same question of Dwight in a few, but I'm curious as as someone, Alexandra, who reviews both fiction and nonfiction, what is it about biography or memoir that is particularly interesting to you as a critic?

Oh, my gosh. I think about this. A long ago, editor of mine once said it's easier to write about a person than an idea.

And I think that is I've I've never forgotten that it's it's a person is an entire world that leads to other worlds and and and a idea a generator of ideas. There's no argument that needs to be made for writing about a person's life. I think actually you could write a biography of everyone in the world. You look at the obituaries. Our obituaries are wonderful. I also read our biographies.

are short little obituaries that are placed that people pay to put in the newspaper that I still read. I do too. I love them. Yeah. Don't be embarrassed for reading the newspaper. Dwight wrote a memoir this year. Are we allowed to talk about that? It was last year. It was last year. Shoot. Why did I think it was this year? Do you even know him? No, you know what it is? It's that I'm old and like the years are starting to blend together. This is what Miranda July was writing about. Yes.

Paramount? No. Dwight, you also wrote on a fair number of biographies this year. You wrote about Elaine May. You wrote about Carson McCullers. You wrote about one of my favorite bands, because I am a middle-aged man of a certain age, R.E.M., the R.E.M. biography. What is it about...

biographies that sort of always seem to capture your camera. Oh, I'm so in love with the form. I just like a life well met. I frankly reviewed a lot of biographies negatively this year. Some of the books were too distant. They were just printing fact after fact and I felt no presiding intelligence. What I want, I want to feel like I'm reading like a novelist on this person's life, making fine distinctions, saying things, having a good time while giving you the real life. So I didn't like the biography of Randy Newman very much. I didn't like the Carson McCullers biography. There's a better one written

written 25 years ago. Anyway, but the Arianne biography is terrific. If you are like me, Generation X-ish, right on my alley and it's sensitive and it's well put. And also the Elaine May biography by a young writer. She just has a way. She writes like a millennial in a good way. She's very...

and very in your face and she'll curse. And it just feels like a new form of someone reinventing what's happening out there. That book was surprisingly good. I was expecting it to be awful. Yeah, me too. Because Elaine May's famously no cooperation won't give an inch. And she pulled it off.

And this was a book called Miss May Does Not Exist, The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius. Yeah, and A, it's hard to go wrong with Elaine May. She just multifaceted, fascinating from the word go, succeeded in so many areas, had huge failures, massive successes, and quirky and a total New Yorker, a stone New Yorker as much as Fran Lebowitz is. And yeah, I recommend it highly. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Lori Lebowitz, editor of Well at the New York Times.

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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by our three staff critics, and we're talking about their year in reading. And as anyone who knows you, Alexandra, knows you are devoted to your cats, and you wrote about a cat memoir this year. This is the year that cats entered the chat. Okay.

Okay. Say more. They entered. LeShaw entered. There we go. The chat. There we go. Nice. It was... Who knew that cats would be such an election talking point? And in fact...

For me, and I think for Jen as well, this was one of the really enjoyable things about keeping an eye on the election was that all the discourse. It was double edged because there were some negative. Oh, there was definitely the cat ladies. The cat ladies. Right. But the the angry memes that rose up and presciently before he died.

Caleb Carr published a memoir, a memoir about his... I'm sorry, what? A memoir, which I got into the... My proudest accomplishment this year is that neologism is now in the archives of the New York Times. And Caleb Carr is an author. Talk about back to the 90s when the clock broke. Caleb Carr ruled the 90s with The Alienist. And he was... It was just... I...

I felt for men who own cats, there can be a bit of a stigma. And he just ripped that off. It was like this was a love letter to his cat, Masha. And it was it was but it also it was a portal to again, as we were describing about memoirs and biographies, I had forgotten who his father was. Love.

Lucian. Lucian Carr. And like this whole Lucian Carr, the beats and this murder and whatever. And Caleb Carr goes into his sort of literary family background, dysfunctional childhood, everything. And the kind of crazy bohemian atmosphere, which included animals wandering around. And it's a history of his life with cats and how cats saved him. And anyway, it's a pretty powerful, powerful book. And then, you know,

You know, I was, yeah, sorry. It's like, you can't, once you start, you can't stop. But, but it stayed with me. So thank you, Jen, for letting me have it. That, that. We clawed it out over that book. I'm going to put an end to this. That book is called My Beloved Monster. My Beloved Monster. Alexandra, I don't know what this says about 15-year-old Gilbert, but I think I read The Alienist six times. Yeah. Like Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, it's a huge bestseller. And so was the sequel, I think.

Angel of Darkness. Yes. See? I wish he had kept going. Yeah, he did. But with more, he wrote it, he did a lot of military history and he went into other things. So we'll go from my beloved monster, Caleb Carr's memoir about his cat to a book about different kinds of monsters, which is Rejection, a book by Tony Tulithamudi. Yes. Yeah. I did not review this book. Dwight reviewed it beautifully for The Times. So this is a book about

about monsters slash losers who live a lot of their lives being extremely online and they experience the very, I think, common situation of being rejected, but maybe in more extreme forms. And for example, the first story is

is called The Feminist, and it's about a guy who considers himself an ally of women. A lot of his friends are women, and so that makes the fact that he's unable to find a romantic relationship even more hurtful. And he's essentially an incel-like protagonist, and I don't want to give anything away, but

The story, I think, ends with a surprise. And you could say that about a lot of the stories in that book, which have these endings that, at least in my experience, I literally gasped at several of them. I did, too. I did, too. And Jen gave a very polite, succinct description of some of these stories. I can't go into detail because it's too disgusting. But every moral, philosophical and physical pimple gets popped in this book. It's just really downright.

down and out rejection cut from the herd no one wants to touch you or kiss you or be your friend that this happens to these characters and oh god it really pounded me but he is such a good writer jen actually first turned me on to his work because i had not read his first novel write me the title private citizens private citizens and i've since read it and it's terrific and god he really he really captures what it's like to be just terminally online

Now, I read several of the stories in this book and a bunch of the people at the book review the book and discussed it. And it was one of those where it's like, this is amazing writing. And I will I can think of 75 percent of the people in my life that I would not recommend this book because I find it so disturbing and troubling. What is it about this book that that makes it so powerful, despite the fact that it that it is sort of hard to read at points?

I think it's the quality of the writing that make it so captivating in one sense, but also so repellent in another where you get... He's just... Tulith and Moody is so good, I think, at the immediate sensual details, I think, of feeling lonely, isolated, resentful, outraged. There's a way in which he captures, I think, the feeling...

of when you spend a little bit too much time online, where he captures the most extreme version of that. So he's able, I think, to bring to life

This experience that's really incredibly powerful, but I think in another way, very off-putting. So I don't know if enjoy is the word, but I love this book. I agree with that. I would just add that I think achieved art, great art is never really depressing. It's so good that it raises you despite...

the fact that he's staring these horrible things directly in the face. So somehow it leaves you lifted up. It's just he writes that well. Also, it's the honesty about where we are now. I mean, I've been searching for a novelist or fiction writer to depict, to not go to other eras, which are easier to actually depict the cruel, the horrible reality of online writing.

what online existence has done to us as humans. I think, yeah, I think I really, the book is very short and there are short stories that are connected. There's something really ambitious about it. I think that that was also what I was impressed by, that he's really capturing the way that we, and I use the term we very loosely, but the way that we live now, I think in a way that is just,

completely unforgettable. As I said, I gasped when reading these stories. But you didn't gag. You didn't. I mean, it's pretty, there's some stuff here that's pretty extreme, but I also laughed. I mean, the sort of his sense, like his dark sense of humor and his comic timing is really impeccable. It's so much funnier than it should be, given what so many of these stories are about. Yeah.

I would like to ask you, Alexandra, about a book that is so sweet. It's the opposite of rejection. Are you going to say Beautyland? I want to ask you about Beautyland. Yes. It's funny because I was going to offer Beautyland as a sort of counterpart or a feminine, perhaps counterpart to this book. The...

protagonist of Beautyland by Marie-Hélène Bertineau is actually, even as the novel, she's born in 1977. And even as the world goes online, she doesn't go online. And part of the reason is she's an alien. She is from outer space and she communicates to these sort of overlords in outer space via fax machine, which, as I think I said in the review, it's like the best communication

narrative use of a fax. I mean, what more useless technology do we have than the fax machine? But this is just a beautiful book. It really is a jewel. It's about...

I think it's really about, it could be about being neurodiverse in a way, you know, it's about being an alien on Earth, but it could also be about being a woman and how not really, Beautyland, the title comes from, it's a cosmetic store that the character's mother takes her to. And it's like where you like become a woman, like you buy your curlers or your makeup or your perfume or whatever.

And it's about the same thing that rejection is about, which is about feeling alien on this earth and feeling alone. And it's so much nicer. It's, believe me, it's so much nicer. Yes, it's prettier. You say you laughed at rejection. I cried at Beautyland. Again, another box set we can offer our listeners. Oh my God, what a perverse double feature those two books have. Yeah.

I'd love to draw this conversation to a close by asking each of you if there are any books that you got into sort of arguments or let's say strong debates about with people here at work or people in your personal lives. I'm sure this never happens as book critics. We've talked about this a bit, but for me, of course, it was Sally Rooney and this was a book that split readers right down the middle. Some people, especially younger readers, in my experience,

who expected something more wise and cutting and small and political out of her. Something, something, this book was more, it was her just being generous and trying to, she's pleasing a mass audience, but in a way that I found very effective and very wise. But this book, everyone I meet, I probably 50-50. Half the people say, thank God you nailed it. Other people like, what were you thinking? So that was it for me.

A book that I found myself getting into, I don't know if I'd call them disagreements, but at least lively discussions about the book itself was Free and Equal, A Manifesto for a Just Society by Daniel Chandler. And it's a book that is basically about

a manifesto for how the philosophy of John Rawls can direct us toward a better future. And the review that I wrote was mostly positive, but I had some qualms about whether or not resuscitating a 50-year-old

philosophy texts would really be something that is helpful nowadays. And John Rawls had this idea, the idea that people, if they have heard of the name John Rawls, probably associate him with is this idea of the veil of ignorance.

And so he proposed that to create a truly just society, what we should do is try to imagine that each of us comes into it behind a veil of ignorance. So we don't know if we're born a woman or a man. We don't know if we're born rich or poor. We don't know what race we are. And so what is the kind of society we would create if

that we would be happy with not knowing what kind of privileges or disadvantages or situation we're born into. And so ultimately, the kind of society that this philosophy supports is this pluralist liberal democracy. And so Chandler, I think, makes a very spirited case that

in favor of adopting that thought experiment and seeing how it would play out in our political society. But I think one of the concerns that I had when I reviewed it is that sounds great. That sounds really reasonable. But at the same time, it sounds a little bit out of step with politics.

where we are right now. The idea of adopting a veil of ignorance, this sort of very, I think, lofty philosophical ideal doesn't really fit in, I think, with the immediate issues that we're thinking about. It doesn't match the times, maybe. Right. Yeah. Alexandra, come out from behind your veil of ignorance and tell us about a book that you... I'm not the only one coming out from behind a veil of ignorance. Ricky Ian Gordon, the composer, also came out from behind

behind some kind of veil to write his memoir, Seeing Through a Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera. This is a book I definitely fought about with people this year. A lot of people think of opera as something stuffy. He really takes out the stuffing and he leaves it all over the floor. It's very delicious talking about other composers. Stephen Sondheim, he talks about Tony Kushner, the playwright. It's gossipy. It's full of letters. I also love the fact that he's an opera composer who goes by Ricky. How many of those are there?

Indeed. And his family also was already chronicled in the book Home Fires. This is another one of those portals to other books and stories that I like by Donald Katz, who happened to be the founder of Audible. There are all these connections. He had three older sisters. One was a celebrity journalist who also wrote a memoir. It's very sexually frank. He wrote a lot about his sexual initiation as a teenager. Episodes that these days would be classified as abuse, but he remembers fondly. It's a messy book.

And a kind of put everything on the table kind of book. And I love that. And not I feel like some people want a little more tightness in their in their literature. Sounds like a messy book. This was not a messy podcast. Thank you all for joining Dwight, as always. Thank you. Thanks, Gilbert. Alexandra. Thank you. You're welcome. Jennifer. Jennifer. Jennifer. Jennifer. Are you angry at me? No. Thank you. Thanks, Gilbert.

That was my conversation with Jen Zelai, Alexandra Jacobs, and Dwight Garner about what they have read this year. Next week will be our monthly book club episode hosted by M.J. Franklin. He and several other editors will be discussing the book Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Thanks for listening.