AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
OK, I just realized I have less than two weeks to meet my reading goal for this year, and now I'm paralyzed by indecision. Where to start? Luckily, I know just where to look.
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RASCOE: NPR's Books We Love has hundreds of recommendations, including these fiction books from a few of my colleagues.
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ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, my name is Andrew Limbong. I'm a host of NPR's Book Of The Day Podcast, and I cover books and publishing for NPR. The book I want to talk about is "Mina's Matchbox." It's by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder. It's about a little girl in the 1970s. It takes place in Japan. And she moves in with her much richer aunt and uncle and makes friends with her asthmatic cousin.
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LIMBONG: This book is just a warm blanket of a read. She discovers some things about her family that are both unsettling and weird but not that weird, and so there's a strange, eerie undercurrent to it.
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LIMBONG: But she also does find the kind of love and connection you have with your cousins that you can only have when you're about, like, 11 or 12. It's just a fantastic and wonderful book.
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ROMMEL WOOD, BYLINE: My name is Rommel Wood, and I'm a producer on NPR's Wild Card With Rachel Martin. The book I'm recommending today is the debut novel from Lottie Hazell, "Piglet."
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WOOD: If you routinely devour episodes of "The Great British Bake Off," and you don't mind a little bit of body horror, "Piglet" might be for you.
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WOOD: The book begins about 90 days before a wedding. And Piglet, our bride-to-be, is an ambitious cookbook editor with working class roots. Her fiancee, Kit, is handsome, and, you know, he comes from family money.
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WOOD: Thirteen days before the wedding, Kit confesses to her that he's done something awful, leading to one of the most catastrophic meltdowns involving the croquembouche perhaps ever depicted in fiction.
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VIET LE, BYLINE: Hi. My name is Viet Le, and I'm a producer at The Indicator From Planet Money. I'm recommending the novel "Help Wanted" by Adelle Waldman. It centers on a team of workers at a Target-like big box store. It's their job to move merchandise off the trucks and onto shelves, though it works routine, behind the scenes and doesn't pay great. So when the store manager announces his departure, it creates a chance for the group to improve their work life, that is, if they can come together and pull off an off-the-wall scheme.
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LE: "Help Wanted" is a funny and insightful workplace novel with stakes. The most poignant moments of the book, to me, were peeking into the minds of the employees and hearing what each might do if they got promoted - job security, better benefits, a bigger paycheck. It's what dreams are made of.
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CHRISTINA CALA, BYLINE: The book I want to recommend is "Catalina" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. My name is Christina Cala, and I'm the senior producer of Code Switch.
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CALA: It is a book about this young woman who is going to school at Harvard. Her name is Catalina, and she's this incredibly intelligent, unapologetic young woman who's navigating school, her relationship with her grandparents, trying to fall in love for the first time. The book is an opportunity to really just spend time in her head and in her world. You will not be able to put it down.
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CORY TURNER, BYLINE: My name is Cory Turner, and I'm an education correspondent for NPR. And the book I loved is "The Mighty Red," by one of my favorite writers, Louise Erdrich. Her latest novel is set in North Dakota's Red River Valley.
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TURNER: And it's kind of like a river. It covers a lot of ground from the toll of large-scale farming - in this case, sugar beets - to the sanctity of a good bookstore. Our heroine is a goth teen named Kismet, who ping-pongs between tragedy and comedy and literally between two young men who could not be more different, except that they both somehow desperately love Kismet. This is my favorite kind of book, one that can make you laugh and cry and even laugh again in just a paragraph or between the periods of one holy sentence.
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RASCOE: Those recommendations, again, were "The Mighty Red," "Catalina," "Help Wanted," "Piglet" and "Mina's Matchbox." For the full list of books we loved this year, check out npr.org/bestbooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLUE DOT SESSIONS' "THE SUMMIT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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