STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today, NPR is releasing the 2024 edition of our Books We Love. It's a reading guide that we produce every year. And Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book Of The Day podcast, is here to tell us about it. Andrew, good morning.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so what is this thing?
LIMBONG: Yeah, so it is a kind of democratic way to approach year-end lists. We ask, every year, NPR staff and critics for their favorite reads and compile it all. So at the end of the day, we've got, like, 350 titles in total.
INSKEEP: OK, small-D democratic - I get that. But recommending 350 books - that's so many...
LIMBONG: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: ...It's like recommending none. What's going on there?
LIMBONG: Listen, you don't got to read all of them.
INSKEEP: OK.
LIMBONG: That's not the point, right? So there are these little filters you can use on the side to narrow down the books that you prefer for your tastes, right? And the whole point of it - right? - is not to tell you, like, from up on high, hear ye, hear ye, here are the 10 best books of the year. It's like, hey, here's a stack of books. You're guaranteed to find at least, like, one or two that you would love.
INSKEEP: And they include books recommended by NPR staff. So what's a book you recommended?
LIMBONG: One of my favorite books this year was this book called "Victim" by Andrew Boryga. He's a debut novelist. It's about a guy named Javi who kind of lies and fudges his background to get ahead in the, like, personal essay literary space, right? He makes his life seem a lot harder than it actually was. And he becomes, among, like, literary elite circles, the voice of a marginalized community (laughter), even though he's...
INSKEEP: Oh, I'm sure this never happens...
LIMBONG: ...Full of it.
INSKEEP: ...In real life.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Please go on.
LIMBONG: Yeah. No, and it's just, like, a really - obviously, like any great story about liars, the house of cards comes tumbling down. But it's a really funny, satirical take on, like, the literary elite class. You've got a book on this list this year, right?
INSKEEP: Oh, I did, and I was excited to recommend it. It's by Hampton Sides. It's called "The Wide Wide Sea," and it's a story of Captain James Cook, Captain Cook, the British explorer who, in the 1700s, brought European attention to a lot of different places like Tahiti and Hawaii, ultimately died in a conflict in Hawaii - extraordinarily famous story. And I just love being on the boat, so to speak, in a book like this, with the rats and the cockroaches and the shortages of food and the extreme cold and the extreme heat and everything that his crew went through. And it's also an effort to research the interactions with the Indigenous peoples of these islands. It's really an incredible work.
LIMBONG: Yeah. And I just want to note - on sort of the Books We Love platform, we have that listed under nonfiction, of course, on Staff Picks. But we also have it tagged as rather long, if you're looking for something beefy...
(LAUGHTER)
INSKEEP: OK.
LIMBONG: ...To jump into.
INSKEEP: But it went quick. I read it straight through. I mean, I - really, a number of nights.
LIMBONG: Yeah, no...
INSKEEP: It was great.
LIMBONG: Nice. I'm just saying if you want something on the shorter side, that's available, too.
INSKEEP: OK. Is there a book that a lot of our co-workers recommended again and again and again?
LIMBONG: Oh, people were fighting over writing about Miranda July's "All Fours." That's a novel about a middle-aged woman who leaves her family to go on a road trip, cuts the road trip short to go on - let's call it, like, an adventure of sexual self-discovery.
INSKEEP: OK.
LIMBONG: Yeah. And it's an interesting take on, like, the state of marriage today.
INSKEEP: All right. Well, this sounds like an amazing start, and there are hundreds of other books for you in the Books We Love reading guide. I hope you love some of the books that we love. NPR's Andrew Limbong, thanks so much.
LIMBONG: Thanks, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF SARAH, THE ILLSTRUMENTALIST'S "LOOK HOW PRETTY TODAY IS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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