Barnes and Nobel opened up a sick new store here. Havent made it over yet. But I imagine it's been packed
Yeah there is a new one in Houston too that I’ve been to a couple of times. It is really really nice. apparently they got a new CEO and they’re opening new stores and making a bunch of money now. kind of funny to be rooting for the massive book store brand that put all of the independent bookstores out of business
the Barnes and Noble here is pretty small but they've had a great fiction selection the couple times I've been in it books I had hoped to read this year but am gonna have to try to tackle in 2025: Intermezzo - Rooney Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar Playground - Powers James - Everett Long Island - Tóibín Two-Step Devil - Jamie Quatro Tom Lake - Ann Patchett North Woods - Daniel Mason The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright Day - Michael Cunningham Milkman - Anna Burns Atonement - McEwan A Gentleman in Moscow - Towles The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller Prophet Song - Paul Lynch Blackouts - Justin Torres Oil! - Sinclair Red Rising, Fellowship of the Ring, Heat 2 and Dune
Sarah Jessica Parker named a judge for the 2025 Booker Prize. They apparently have to read 170 novels in 7 months I wanna win the lottery and buy a sweet place in Tucson so bad. Just read in the sun all year
I was looking at my list to figure out my best reads of the year. Kind of a down year for Non fic for me.
Been monitoring this list. Guessing they'll have a non-fiction entry soon https://www.theguardian.com/books/best-books-of-2024
I'll try to copy and paste the WaPo and NYT lists when I get home https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/11/21/best-nonfiction/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/26/books/notable-books.html This seems like a list of all genres https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2024/ The Guardian's book coverage is as good as I have seen anywhere on the web
A couple 2024 lists I've come across: Contingent Magazine (history site...highlighting non-tenure type historians) The Atlantic
WaPo 50 notable nonfiction books Spoiler ‘The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq’ by Steve Coll Coll’s book presents Hussein as a human being, not a caricature. Relying in part on newly translated Iraqi documents, it reexamines the mutually reinforcing delusions of the Iraqi leader and four U.S. administrations. ‘All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess’ by Becca Rothfeld In 12 essays, Rothfeld, The Post’s nonfiction book critic, makes an impassioned case for abundance, staking out her dissent from the culture’s “adventures in parsimony.” Her writing dances across media, experience and scholarship to deliver surprising conclusions. ‘America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators’ by Jacob Heilbrunn In lucid and springy prose, Heilbrunn writes about how the right’s love affair with Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and other strongmen is merely the latest manifestation of a long-standing authoritarian “persuasion” in American politics. ‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’ by Jonathan Haidt Haidt is a social psychologist whose work always inspires heated debate. Here he argues that the worrying state of mental health among Gen Z is due to its being the first generation to grow up under the thrall of smartphones, forming their identities in the universe of social media. ‘Any Person Is the Only Self: Essays’ by Elisa Gabbert The delightfully digressive, exuberant pieces in this collection are a record of Gabbert’s shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. She is both funny and serious, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity. ‘At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning With China’ by Edward Wong Wong tugs at the thread of a personal story — his father’s stymied military career and eventual disillusionment with communism — to offer a sweeping history of modern China from an unusual vantage point: its far-flung frontiers. ‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi’ by Wright Thompson Thompson’s book is not only an intimate history of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America. It is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel. ‘Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics’ by Elle Reeve CNN correspondent Reeve has produced a feat of fearless reporting among self-proclaimed white supremacists and other members of the so-called alt-right who have reshaped the Republican Party in their image. She shows how a political vision that started out as a digital fantasy became a living nightmare. ‘The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America’ by Aaron Robertson This extraordinary work of history and memoir uses the author’s family history as an entry point to the broader idea of Black utopias. Unlike many other sweeping narratives of Black life in America, Robertson’s is concerned with life on the fringes, the less-explored but no less important avenues of survival. ‘Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space’ by Adam Higginbotham Higginbotham makes fresh a well-known tragedy. This is a compelling and exhaustively researched chronicle of one of NASA’s darkest moments that traces its full arc — the evolution of the enabling culture that allowed it, the terrible day itself and its enduring legacy. ‘Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball’ by Keith O’Brien O’Brien has written a significant, fascinating biography of baseball’s all-time hits leader, who died in September at 83. Rose was expelled from baseball for gambling, and his fall from grace is a grim tale, but there’s still some fun to be had in the telling, including a cast of seedy characters that would do Elmore Leonard proud. ‘Christopher Isherwood Inside Out’ by Katherine Bucknell Isherwood, the diarist and fiction writer whose work inspired the musical “Cabaret,” lived one of the 20th century’s great literary lives. He pushed to make homosexuality a mainstream subject and a pursuit seen as beautiful, like any love. Bucknell sensed that no other biography (and there have been several) had quite managed to illuminate Isherwood’s “inner life.” ‘Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church’ by Eliza Griswold Pulitzer Prize winner Griswold spent four years reporting on Circle of Hope, a progressive church in Philadelphia, to write this generous and character-driven book. She witnessed the fellowship torn apart by racial strife, gender issues and profound disagreement over a fundamental question: What is a church called to do in contemporary America? ‘Connie: A Memoir’ by Connie Chung The pioneering reporter and news anchor recounts her childhood, her career and the many people she tangled with along the way. Chung doesn’t hold back, and the result is a memoir that’s both dishy and inspirational. ‘Consent: A Memoir’ by Jill Ciment Ciment fell in love with her art teacher Arnold Mesches when she was 17 and he was 47. The two ended up married for 45 years, until Mesches’s death in 2016 at 93. In “Consent,” Ciment asks whether her marriage was all “fruit from the poisonous tree.” It is a daring question, and she is unsentimental and unflinching enough to answer it convincingly, which is to say, complexly. ‘Didion & Babitz’ by Lili Anolik Anolik’s sparkling book about the literary doyennes of 1970s Hollywood, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, is not exactly a dual biography, nor is it a conventional work of literary criticism. Instead, it is part chronicle of Didion and Babitz’s ambivalent friendship and part examination of their sharply conflicting sensibilities. ‘Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis’ by Jonathan Blitzer Writing with clarity and grace, Blitzer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, makes a compelling case that the United States and Central America are knit as one. Far from reading like a dry policy tome, Blitzer’s book tells in vivid detail the stories of a cast of representative figures spread over five decades. ‘Fi: A Memoir’ by Alexandra Fuller Fuller’s fifth memoir is as crackly as her previous books, which chronicled her hardscrabble youth in Africa and her divorce. This time the subject is the shocking death of her son at age 21, an experience Fuller does not wrap in platitudes but lays bare as she processes it — in stark, beautiful terms. ‘Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America’ by Rebecca L. Davis This important, ambitious and entertaining study tracks sexual life in America from 1600 to the present day. In many ways it’s a story of prudery, sanctimony and moral panic contrasted with those who muster the bravery to stand up against them and for the transports of individual pleasures. ‘Grief Is for People’ by Sloane Crosley Crosley’s book, centered on the story of her best friend and his suicide, is not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is. And given Crosley’s gifts as a humorist, it is very funny as well as terribly sad. ‘Hell Gate Bridge: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness, and Hope’ by Barrie Miskin Miskin’s searing memoir about her experience with a mysterious mental illness during and after her pregnancy provides a haunting window into the state of health care in the United States. A proper diagnosis of a rare and incurable disorder began her journey away from darkness, allowing her to fully experience being a wife, teacher and mother. ‘Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses’ by M.G. Sheftall This compelling oral history brings together the voices of people who were children in Hiroshoma when the city was bombed in 1945. Sheftall interviewed dozens of survivors, and his comprehensive book weaves their stories with the events that unfolded around them. ‘LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority’ by Marie Arana Arana’s book contemplates the many meanings of Latino identity, based on her own lived experience, decades of reading on the subject and hundreds of interviews with others. Arana understands LatinoLand’s depth, nuance and variation as well as anyone, and her fragmented and beautifully written narrative is a perfect representation of its diversity. ‘The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth,’ by Zoë Schlanger Largely abandoned at the close of the last century, the study of plant behavior has reemerged in recent years as botanists debate the possibility of plant consciousness. Schlanger’s extensive reporting on the latest scientific thinking, paired with her own salient observations, allows for a fresh understanding of plants and their role in the world. ‘Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World’ by Peter Godfrey-Smith “Living on Earth” treats organisms as “causes, rather than evolutionary products.” In other words, it treats us (along with other living things, from corals to birds) not as the passive outcome of our environments but as the active architects of our world. Godfrey-Smith is possessed of a prodigious curiosity, and his delight in the natural world is infectious. ‘Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success’ by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig This book builds on Buettner and Craig’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting for the New York Times, using tax returns and a trove of other documents to meticulously detail Trump’s business failings. The backbone of the book is the numbers, but it’s also a page turner that includes spectacular anecdotes. ‘The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony,’ by Annabelle Tometich After Tometich’s mother was arrested for using a pellet gun to shoot out the car window of a mango thief, the author was surprised by just how harshly people judged the Filipina immigrant. In seeking to understand the complexity of her mother’s life, Tometich reveals the difficulties that many immigrants and multiracial families face as they try to find a way to belong. ‘The Minotaur at Calle Lanza’ by Zito Madu In the fall of 2020, Madu traveled to Venice for an artist’s residency and found himself adrift in a city emptied out by the pandemic. That evacuated milieu becomes an occasion for Madu’s elegant meditations on alienation, especially from his family but also from the overwhelmingly White world he moves through. ‘Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People’ by Tiya Miles Harriet Tubman is celebrated as an antislavery icon, towering in history as the heroine of the Underground Railroad. Miles offers an “ecowomanist” account that portrays Tubman as a mystic who drew strength and knowledge from a God-Spirit. ‘No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape From the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust’ by Chris Heath During World War II, an estimated 70,000 Jews were killed and buried at a site in Ponar, Lithuania. A few people escaped, hand-clawing their way through tunnels. Heath follows their stories from the end of World War II through the present day, inviting readers to consider how history is recorded and sometimes repurposed. ‘Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals’ by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy This well-researched book is an enlightening survey of how our treatment of animals has changed over the past century and a half. Moving through the early animal welfare movement and toward the present, it also offers a dispiriting reminder of how much has stayed the same. ‘Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022’ by Frank Trentmann This is an ambitious account of Germany’s rise from a moral abyss to a prosperous democracy. What emerges is a picture of a divided nation focused on its own very particular circumstances and only rarely on the wider world. ‘Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism’ by Sebastian Smee Smee, an art critic for The Washington Post, examines the relationship of Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. With exquisite sensitivity, he reads the similarities in the work they produced in the wake of the city’s Terrible Year. ‘Patriot: A Memoir’ by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel This posthumously published memoir by the Russian dissident politician brings a wry and sensible touch to a range of subjects. Throughout, his argument is that the corruption and dishonesty of the Putin reign are not that complicated. ‘Q: A Voyage Around the Queen’ by Craig Brown Do we really need another biography of Queen Elizabeth II? Apparently so, because when the author of “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret” applies his signature treatment to the late monarch’s life — creating a mosaic of seemingly random anecdotes and snippets of official records — the result is both delightfully breezy and deeply informative. ‘Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring’ by Brad Gooch Gooch’s biography of the artist who captured the special energy of 1980s New York before dying in 1990, at 31, does exactly what biographies of the exceptionally famous should do: Gently, graciously, it reels in the myth, restoring the flesh-and-bone reality of its subject. ‘Reagan: His Life and Legend’ by Max Boot This splendid new account of the 40th president’s life by Boot, a columnist for The Post, shows that Reagan’s influence doesn’t loom so large 35 years after he left the White House. It’s a vivid portrait that draws on prodigious research to depict a man whose paradoxes stymied many previous biographers. ‘The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon’ by Adam Shatz The psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anticolonial violence as “a cleansing force.” But Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing biography that Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, by enemies as well as allies. ‘Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb’ by Iris Jamahl Dunkle This biography revisits the remarkable life of an author whose account of the Great Depression might have been seminal — if John Steinbeck hadn’t barely beaten her to it. But that hardly scratches the surface of a colorful history that also included friendships and affairs with literary luminaries. ‘Selected Amazon Reviews’ by Kevin Killian As its title suggests, this book contains a selection of the cheeky, erudite and discursive reviews that poet and provocateur Killian wrote between 2004 and his death in 2019. Across its pages, he demonstrates an astonishing critical range even as he effectively creates a new genre in the form of the cumulative unconstrained online review. ‘The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World’ by Ben Macintyre The best-selling Macintyre’s latest book is a gripping retelling of the hostage crisis and eventual rescue operation in 1980 at the Iranian Embassy in London. It’s an event whose significance persists, even as its particulars have faded. Macintyre’s superb reconstruction restores it to vivid, complex life. ‘The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime’ by Sara Fitzgerald Missing letters, a secret love affair, a famous poet, a beautiful actress: Fitzgerald delivers all that in an engrossing literary history that delves into the correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale, who engaged in a long-term, hidden relationship that is revealed in his recently unsealed letters to her. ‘Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel’ by Edwin Frank Frank, founder of New York Review Books, brings the eclectic and searching spirit of his publishing line to this study of the novel throughout the 20th century. It is a history of books — by H.G. Wells, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison and a host of others — and a way to tell the history of, as Frank writes, “a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description.” ‘The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade’ by Hannah Durkin In 1860, more than 100 victims of an intraregional political conflict in Africa were put on the Clotilda, the last known ship to make the Middle Passage. They were unloaded, traumatized and emaciated, near the port of Mobile, Alabama. After emancipation, some of them bought land near Mobile and established a town. Durkin folds a century of research and a multitude of human lives into this fine book about their story. ‘There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension’ by Hanif Abdurraqib This memoir by Abdurraqib, an award-winning poet and essayist, is deeply rooted in Ohio, and explores the intense sense of affinity and mutual betrayal that can exist between a person and their hometown. Part chronicle of LeBron James, part love letter to the city where Abdurraqib grew up, it examines why people leave home — and why they might stay — with his trademark lyricism. ‘Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell’ by Ann Powers Veteran music journalist Powers captures the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise: the beloved artist’s romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism — as well as the subtle trade-offs she made while navigating a male-dominated industry. ‘Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation’ by Sune Engel Rasmussen Rasmussen combines social history with rigorous reporting in this account of the span from the beginning of the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001, to America’s hasty exit in 2021. He showcases a handful of diverse individuals trying to make the most of their time and support their country. His ability to delve into their lives lends his book the feeling of a novel. ‘An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s’ by Doris Kearns Goodwin Goodwin’s book manages to be different than all the many others about American politics in the 1960s. She and her husband, Richard, were both extremely close to the Kennedys and Lyndon B. Johnson, and each of them held on to their fierce and competing loyalties to the presidents. This memoir draws on 300 boxes full of Richard’s personal documents, which the couple began mining in 2011. ‘Whiskey Tender: A Memoir’ by Deborah Jackson Taffa Taffa writes with great insight and emotion about growing up as a Native American in the 1970s and ’80s, and how the American Dream that her parents bought into came at the expense of ties to her Native culture. This distinctive memoir is a mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and the excavation of a particular place and time. ‘We Loved It All: A Memory of Life’ by Lydia Millet The first work of nonfiction by Millet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose novels have explored the effects of environmental degradation, is an elegy to the natural world. She explores the history of life on Earth, the sweep of deep time, and our own small but disproportionately influential place within it.
NYTimes notable nonfiction books Spoiler The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll This history stretches from Hussein’s earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, tracking the dictator’s state of mind with the help of 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein “recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon,” Coll says. For fans of “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” by George Packer and “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” by Thomas E. Ricks All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood This memoir by a former public relations operative for the wealthy and the corrupt is greasy fun — stocked with scoundrels, cocktails and guns, and showing off the charm and quick wit that catapulted Elwood to the top of the sleazy, amoral world of high-end spin. For fans of “Thank You for Smoking” by Christopher Buckley All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld A striking debut by a young critic who has been heralded as a throwback to an era of livelier discourse. Rothfeld has published widely and works currently as a nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post; her interests range far, but these essays are united by a plea for more excess in all things, especially thought. For fans of “Having and Being Had” by Eula Biss and “Stranger Faces” by Namwali Serpell The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media. For fans of “Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children” by Susan Linn and “My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind” by Scott Stossel Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys. For fans of “Love, Loss and What We Ate: A Memoir” by Padma Lakshmi and “Eat a Peach: A Memoir” by David Chang The Black Box by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In his latest book, the Harvard scholar shows how African American writers have used the written word to shape their reality despite constraints imposed on them from outside, using the metaphor of the box to reflect ordeals withstood and survived since Africans were first brought to this continent. For fans of “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race” by Thomas Chatterton Williams and “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” by Jeffrey C. Stewart The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson The farm Robertson’s grandparents owned in Promise Land, Tenn., a town founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, serves as the springboard for this sensitive, often deeply personal exploration of utopianism in Black American thought and life. For fans of “The Unsettled” by Ayana Mathis and “The New Naturals” by Gabriel Bump The Bluestockings by Susannah Gibson Before Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony or Virginia Woolf, there were the Bluestockings, a group of British women writers and thinkers who, as Gibson writes in this intimate social history, transgressed sexist conventions to educate themselves, produce books on a range of subjects and contribute to some of England’s liveliest salons. For fans of “The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age” by Leo Damrosch and “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science” by Kate Zernike Challenger by Adam Higginbotham As recounted in this history of the 1986 space shuttle disaster, the tragedy was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error. Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the players involved even as he focuses on the relentless string of snafus that plagued the mission. For fans of “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle T. King In 1971, this newspaper called Fu Pei-mei “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But as King’s biography notes, it was really the other way around: The legendary Fu, who taught generations to cook dishes from all over China, preceded Child on TV by two months. King interviews women who learned from Fu’s cookbooks and show, making the case that she was a cultural force. For fans of “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing” by Anya von Bremzen and “Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child” by Noel Riley Fitch Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold As many American evangelical congregations moved to the political right over the past decade, Circle of Hope, in Philadelphia, became more progressive. With sensitivity and compassion, Griswold chronicles the church’s fateful decision to embrace a mission of racial justice, delivering, in her account of the crisis that followed, a portrait in miniature of our passionate, divided nation. For fans of “The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism” by Tim Alberta and “Reading Genesis” by Marilynne Robinson Cocktails With George and Martha by Philip Gefter Rarely seen diary entries from the screenwriter who adapted Edward Albee’s Broadway hit are a highlight of this unapologetically obsessive behind-the-scenes look at the classic film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. For fans of “Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’” by Melissa Maerz Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni In this transcendent Holocaust memoir by a journalist and poet internee, translated by Paul Olchváry, the details of the concentration camps and their horrors are rendered so precisely that any critical distance collapses. Debreczeni’s account was published in 1950 and lay obscure for decades because of Cold War politics. For fans of “Fateless” by Imre Kertész and “Night” by Elie Wiesel Connie by Connie Chung Chung’s entertaining and revealing memoir traces the triumphs and disappointments of her groundbreaking career in broadcast journalism, which reached its pinnacle when she was named co-anchor of the “CBS Evening News” alongside Dan Rather — only to see herself sidelined by a controlling Rather and by sexism in the industry. For fans of “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters” by Susan Page and “Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at ‘60 Minutes,’” by Ira Rosen Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum From “Queen for a Day” to “The Real World,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” it’s all here in Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story of reality TV. With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, the New Yorker staff writer outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent pop-culture concoction that we love to hate, hate to love and just can’t quit. For fans of “When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today” by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong Do Something by Guy Trebay Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself. For fans of “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever” by Will Hermes and “M Train” by Patti Smith Every Valley by Charles King King uses Handel’s “Messiah,” possibly “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub whose spokes radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain. For fans of “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” by Jan Swafford Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer This urgent and propulsive account of Latin American politics and immigration makes a persuasive case for a direct line from U.S. foreign policy in Central America to the current migrant crisis. For fans of “Solito: A Memoir” by Javier Zamora and “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965” by Jia Lynn Yang Fi by Alexandra Fuller In her fifth memoir, Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. Devastating as this elegant and honest account may be — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart — it also leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man. For fans of “Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir” by Jayson Greene and “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir” by Meghan O'Rourke Health and Safety by Emily Witt Witt’s boyfriend, Andrew, started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. “Health and Safety” — which braids that scene, Andrew’s breakdown and Witt’s work as a journalist during the first Trump administration — also encompasses a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large. For fans of “The Vulnerables” by Sigrid Nunez and “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” by Jonathan Rosen The Hidden Globe by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian A journalist who grew up in Geneva, Abrahamian explores the spread of freeports, free zones and other “extraterritorial domains” of the sort common in her hometown, all created to benefit wealthy people or countries by offering them special perks or exempting them from local laws and regulations. For fans of “Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies” by Alastair Bonnett and “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain” by Peter S. Goodman I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante Sante, who for decades has been a leading literary and cultural critic, here traces her late-in-life gender transition, reflecting on a career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself. The book vividly presents New York in the 1970s and documents a transformation both internal and external. For fans of “Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan” by Darryl Pinckney and “Just Kids” by Patti Smith I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter Painter, a historian and author who left academia to attend art school at the age of 64, highlights her original mind and irreverent wit in this collection, with reflections on Black American figures including Sojourner Truth, Martin R. Delany and Clarence Thomas, interspersed with artwork by Painter herself. For fans of “Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse’” by Emily Raboteau John Lewis by David Greenberg This panoramic and richly insightful biography tells the full story of the civil rights hero who became a long-serving U.S. representative and a moral force in America. It gives Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves — and shows how this mild-mannered seminarian submerged his pacifist tendencies to succeed in the bare-knuckled world of electoral politics. For fans of “You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingam That Changed America” by Paul Kix and “King: A Life” by Jonathan Eig Knife by Salman Rushdie In this candid, plain-spoken memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here. For fans of “Experience: A Memoir” by Martin Amis Language City by Ross Perlin In this history of New York, Perlin, a linguist, focuses on residents fighting to preserve their spoken heritages. The result is sweeping and intimate, simultaneously a call to arms and a tribute to a place that contains almost as many tongues as speakers. For fans of “Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place Names” by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and “New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time” by Craig Taylor Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson Crediting the mentors who lifted her up on her path to success, this memoir by the Supreme Court’s newest justice is deeply personal and full of hope, and highlights a fairy-tale marriage to her college boyfriend. For fans of “Becoming” by Michelle Obama and “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey” by Ruth J. Simmons Madness by Antonia Hylton Hylton spent a decade researching the history of Crownsville, a segregated mental hospital that operated in Maryland for 91 years. The result is not just a work of painstaking reporting, but a deeply human, often tragic story of an American failure to care for Black minds and bodies. For fans of “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation” by Linda Villarosa and “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates Fusing a meditation on the political potential of storytelling with intimate accounts of trips to Senegal, where he visits the former slave-trading center Gorée Island; South Carolina, to support a high school instructor under fire for teaching his prize-winning book “Between the World and Me”; and the West Bank, where he witnesses life under the Israeli occupation, Coates decries injustice and the Western media’s complicity in it. For fans of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall and “The Question of Palestine” by Edward Said The New India by Rahul Bhatia An Indian investigative journalist, Bhatia watched in dismay as relatives, friends and fellow citizens embraced the increasingly extreme politics of his country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi. In this ambitiously reported account, he chronicles India’s turn toward authoritarianism and violence through the stories of ordinary people and public figures. For fans of “I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India” by Rollo Romig and “A Burning” by Megha Majumdar The New York Game by Kevin Baker What makes New York baseball unique, the novelist and historian argues in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative — which concludes with the end of World War II — is its role as a chronicler of cultural change. Whatever baseball’s roots in cow pastures and small towns, it came of age as an urban game. For fans of “Summer of ’49” by David Halberstam No One Gets to Fall Apart by Sarah LaBrie In her affecting debut, the TV writer chronicles her mother’s descent into what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia, while also exploring the through-line of mental illness that snakes through her family history. In an inner monologue that reveals snippets of bizarre behavior, LaBrie also worries about her own tenuous grasp on emotional stability, imagining her mother’s mental illness “making its way through her into me.” For fans of “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” by Jonathan Rosen and “The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays” by Esmé Weijun Wang Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang For six years, Yuan Yang, a journalist, followed four very different young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order” — a country changing dramatically into an industrial superpower. The result is a moving work of reportage that toggles between global and personal. For fans of “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” by Jung Chang and “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future” by Ian Johnson Reagan by Max Boot Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan. But in this measured, comprehensive biography of the 40th president, he explores the legacy of the Reagan years to ask whether they paved the way for Donald J. Trump, whose rise led Boot to abandon his embrace of the right. For fans of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” by Beverly Gage and “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century” by George Packer The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels. For fans of “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life” by Jon Lee Anderson and “The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud The Return of Great Powers by Jim Sciutto Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days before Russia’s invasion to the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. The author also shows how the battles are waged not just on the ground and in the air, but also in undersea communication cables, across satellites in outer space and over the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence. For fans of “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire” by David Remnick and “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West” by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks Salvage by Dionne Brand Brand, a Trinidadian-born poet and novelist, wears her erudition lightly in this eloquent and witty book of essayistic meditations on English literary classics, teasing out the ways in which novels from Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” conceal within their pages the ravages of British colonialism for its Black and Indigenous subjects. For fans of “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León A feat of immersive fieldwork, this account by an anthropologist, nearly seven years in the making, shines needed light on the lives of human smugglers, many of them fleeing the same violence and poverty as their clients, who ferry migrants across the southern border. For fans of “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream” by Patrick Radden Keefe and “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” by Katherine Boo Splinters by Leslie Jamison Jamison, who has previously written stylishly about her experiences with addiction, abortion and more, here delivers a searing account of divorce and the bewildering joys of new motherhood, cementing her status as one of America’s most talented self-chroniclers. For fans of “Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill and “Liars” by Sarah Manguso Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild The renowned sociologist returns with a sequel to her prescient “Strangers in Their Own Land,” a Trump country dispatch from the Deep South. This time, she takes stock of the financial and emotional struggles of an Appalachian coal mining town, where a caravan of white supremacists arrived to find new recruits shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win. For fans of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Matthew Desmond and “An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country” by David Finkel The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby For those who believe that the narrative of Black prima ballerinas begins and ends with Misty Copeland, Valby’s rich, prismatic portrait of the five dancers who formed the core of the Dance Theater of Harlem’s inaugural 1969 class offers a joyful and spirited corrective. For fans of “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib Growing up on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib — a cultural critic and poet — was hugely influenced by LeBron James, but basketball was also a more personal utopia for him and his community, “our little slice of streetball heaven.” For fans of “Shooting Stars” by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger Undivided by Hahrie Han When Han, a political scientist, learned that a mostly white and broadly conservative Cincinnati megachurch had resolved to fight racial injustice in its community, she decided to follow the story. The result is a sensitive study of admirable intentions, earnest action and the often painful price of real change. For fans of “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church” by Eliza Griswold A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko Two friends decide to walk the length of the Grand Canyon. What could go wrong? As this wildly entertaining book demonstrates, everything you can imagine, and then some. Fedarko takes us for a ride that’s often harrowing, frequently hilarious and full of wonderful nature writing. For fans of “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed When the Clock Broke by John Ganz For this account of America in the 1990s, Ganz ditches the familiar narrative about a decade of relative peace and prosperity for a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today. For fans of “Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980” by Rick Perlstein The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides Sides tracks Captain Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait of an explorer reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. For fans of “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann and “The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World” by Greg Grandin A Wilder Shore by Camille Peri Robert Louis Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift, was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, and a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life. For fans of “The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism” by Megan Marshall and “Alice James: A Biography” by Jean Strouse everyone at my local indie store is raving about that Grand Canyon book
Need a very engrossing fiction read that is at least a decent size for the week I am spending in rural Texas next week for Christmas with my family pls help
Have you read Look at Me by Jennifer Egan? The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen? They're both over 400 pages and got major award consideration in 2001
Irush based on what you've said you've liked - Birnam Wood by Elenor Catton The Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson #608A moment ago
The Blackfish does this work? If not I'll have to find something else on monday https://filetransfer.io/data-package/DnBgX8pm#link
Hmm it emailed to my kindle but never showed up. I’m listening to the audiobook but I want to see the sketches.
Sometimes it takes a while to actually appear on my kindle. Like 10 min or so But you were able to DL the file? That's my main concern
anyone use Spotify for audio books? Is there a better app? I have a couple very long drives over the next few weeks and have been thinking about maybe listening to a book instead of blowing my ear drums out with loud music the entire time
Libby and Hoopla will be good resources with your library card. I've used Spotify too and it's good - just know you only get 15 hours (1x speed so if you listen to faster it'll actually be less than 15) and it resets each month.
Hoopla is really awesome. Been sitting around my parents house reading Spawn comics on it. Gonna download some audiobooks for the drive home. For a relatively small city we've got a great library and this is a really nice perk of having a card there Thanks for the heads up on this
I'm thinking that I'm going to dive into the Cosmere next year. I think I've only read one Sanderson book, Steelheart, probably a decade ago.
I've only read the first mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker. I see why it's so beloved. I plan to work my way through all of it
Love seeing my parents and old friends when I'm in town every couple years. But the best part of being in Nashville is generally going to McKay's, one of the best used bookstores in the nation Got like 20 books for $45 Also made a trip to Parnassus and got a couple new releases and NYRB titles. 2025 should be fun
Missed this last week National Book Critics Circle Award announced long lists for the first time ever https://www.bookcritics.org/2024/12/16/2024-nbcc-longlist-fiction/ The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury) Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead) Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon) Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth) James by Percival Everett (Doubleday) My Friends by Hisham Matar (Random House) Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (Archipelago) Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Us Fools by Nora Lange (Two Dollar Radio)
Put together a list of books im interested in that come out in the first half of next year. Maybe some will pique your interest. 1.7 Breath of Dragon, by Fonda Lee 2.25 Mesopotamia and the Birth of History byMoudy Al-Rashid 1.14 Death of the Author by Nnendi Okafor 3.14 The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica 3.14 The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami 3.18 Hunger Games Hamich Prequel 5.13 Mark Twain by Ron Churnow 6.3 My Friends by Fredrick Backman 6.10 King of Ashes by SA Cosby 6.17 The Poppy Fields by Nikki Erlich
Sign me up for Backman. Also I'm only on #3 but the final Empire of Silence book comes out late next year, along with the final red rising (only read book 1 thus far). Shaping up to be a great year.
About 150 pages into Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, I’m still not sure what’s happening here but it kicks ass
I'm also reading Creation Lake. Probably the final thing I tackle in 2024 Lady who was serving me breakfast in OKC this morning asked me what it was about and I was like uhh let me get back to you
On this note, saw this today. I dunno how good the list is https://www.theguardian.com/culture...-francis-the-books-to-look-forward-to-in-2025
anyone familiar with Calibre? have a Kobo trying to edit a couple of my downloaded books' titles for the life of me I can't figure out how to sync between the program and my Kobo
I use it. Are you saying you've updated book titles in calibre and it's not reflecting the changes on the device ?
more like how to I get calibre to see my Kobo in the first place I've tried the connect/share button and starting up a server option with no luck, looked at tutorials, and still am lost
Oh man. It's been so long since I've had to set that up. I remember there being a setup assistant or something like that. But I do remember my kindle didnt just show up. Had to run something within calibre. I'
This is what happens when I go to 6 bookstores in a 12-day span Gonna read a lot of westerns in 2025 Spoiler