Critics reveal their picks for the best and most important books of 2024

Transcript

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Nick Schifrin: And finally tonight, ’tis the season for year-end lists.

And our Jeffrey Brown sat down with two of our regular literary critics to highlight their favorite books of 2024 for our arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s been another year of great releases across a number of genres.

And to help us recap the highlights we’re joined now by two familiar faces, Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review.

Nice to see both of you at this time of year.

Let’s start with my own favorite. Because I get to choose, that’s fiction.

So, Gilbert, you want to start us off with a couple of fiction picks?

Gilbert Cruz, Books Editor, The New York Times: Absolutely. It’s good to see you both.

The first book I want to talk about is a book some of you may have heard of. It’s called “All Fours” by Miranda July, certainly was a big book this summer. It is — it’s kind of a wacky premise. You have a middle-aged female artist who decides to take a road trip from L.A. to New York; 20 minutes outside of town, she stops at a motel, decides to completely redo the motel, becomes obsessed with a younger man, and the story takes off from there.

It’s a crazy start, but in the end it’s a very serious book about what it means to be middle-aged, particularly a middle-aged woman, what it means to be a parent and a mother, what it means to be — to have desire and be desired as you approach middle-aged.

And while humor is very subjective, I found it very funny. It was quite an entertaining read.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, how about one more?

Gilbert Cruz: Sure.

I love books in translation. There was one that came out earlier this year called “You Dreamed of Empires.” This is by Alvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer. And it takes place in what is now Mexico City, it was then called Tenochtitlan, in 1519.

Hernan Cortes just rolled into town with all of his soldiers, and he meets the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma. You have these two cultures coming together. There’s this threat of violence that hangs over the whole thing, but there’s also this comedy of manners elements to the entire book.

For Cortes and his people, they’re wondering, are we speaking the right language with our translators? Are they going to kill us? For the Aztecs, they’re looking at these horses. They have never seen them before. It’s a sort of a fascinating melange of different tones that Enrigue puts together. Incredible book.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, Maureen, so he went with very contemporary and historical fiction back to Cortes.

What have you got?

Maureen Corrigan, NPR Book Critic: Well, I have got, in a sense, historical fiction and very contemporary too, “James” by Percival Everett, which I think has landed on so many best-of lists this year.

Jeffrey Brown: National Book Award winner.

Maureen Corrigan: Yes, I mean — thank you.

And it’s a retelling in a sense of “Huckleberry Finn,” but from the point of view of Jim, James, the enslaved person in the novel. I usually am suspicious of these kinds of appropriations of classic texts and through the point of view of a secondary character.

Jeffrey Brown: Retelling, yes. Yes.

Maureen Corrigan: This is alive. It is very much its own novel. It’s funny. It’s heartfelt. The opening scene is James educating young children in the community how to speak through a slave filter, so that white people will listen to them. And it really makes you rethink “Huckleberry Finn” in ways you can’t even anticipate.

So that’s one.

Jeffrey Brown: OK.

Maureen Corrigan: And then this is a peculiar year, right?

Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television.” Danzy Senna happens to be married to Percival Everett. So, I would love to be…

Jeffrey Brown: Yes. You’re showing a lot of love to this household.

(Crosstalk)

(Laughter)

Maureen Corrigan: I would to hear their dinner table conversations.

Really sharp social commentary, funny, satirical. It’s about a woman who — mixed race who is trying to write this epic novel about what it means to be mixed race in America. And she’s not getting any — having any success with the novel. So she decides to sell out. She lives in L.A. She goes to TV.

Such a smart novel about the writing life and also about class, as well as race, I mean, what it means to have a lot of cultural capital without a lot of financial capital, which is the plight of a lot of writers.

Jeffrey Brown: And “News Hour” viewers know we had both of them on this show.

Gilbert Cruz, what about nonfiction?

Gilbert Cruz: So, “The Wide Wide Sea” by Hampton Sides is about the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook, Captain Cook, very, very well-known British explorer.

This is the journey that he took from England in 1776 to the South Pacific in part to return a Tahitian man or a man from those islands to his own island, but also to try to find the Northwest Passage, which, as you both know, was a thing that people really tried to do back then.

And it’s one of those classic pieces of historical nonfiction that anyone who loves seafaring adventure will enjoy, but it also has that very sort of necessary realization of what it means to have engaged in these sort of imperialist endeavors back then. And so it has a modern understanding of history while also being incredibly detail-oriented and incredibly entertaining.

So, that’s one. And the other one I will talk about is very contemporary. It is “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” by Jonathan Blitzer. We just came out of a presidential election in which the immigration situation at the southern border was one of the key sort of points of debate. And what Blitzer, who is a staff writer at “The New Yorker,” has done is put together a history of a half-century of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It focuses on three nations, three Central American nations, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. And through administrations, Republican and Democrat, it sort of tells the story of how we have gotten to the point where we are today.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, Maureen Corrigan, two nonfiction?

Maureen Corrigan: Yes, “A Wilder Shore” by Camille Peri. It tells the story of the marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson. And she is the star of the show in this telling.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s her story, yes.

Maureen Corrigan: It’s her story, as it should be. I mean, she was a woman who really fled from an abusive marriage, went to Europe on no money, decided she wanted to be an artist, taking her three children with her, met Stevenson, and we go on from there.

But it is an inspiring story about having a larger life. So that’s one.

The other suggestion is the new edition of “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” which Harvard’s Belknap Press has brought out.

Jeffrey Brown: “The Letters of Emily Dickinson.”

Maureen Corrigan: Yes, 300 new letters have been collected that we haven’t seen before.

Jeffrey Brown: Wow.

Maureen Corrigan: It’s the closest thing we’re ever likely to get to an autobiography by Dickinson. And I tell you, you can’t put it down.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Wow. I wasn’t expecting that.

OK, so I want to give you each in the time we have left a bonus pick, OK? So,whatever — maybe a book that just didn’t get as much attention as you hoped, but that you tell your close friends, you got to read this.

Gilbert Cruz, you want to pick one?

Gilbert Cruz: Absolutely. So a book that came out sort of late in the year that I really enjoyed is called “Karla’s Choice.” It’s by Nick Harkaway. And it’s a new John le Carre story. So, John le Carre died in 2020.

His son, Nick Harkaway, is also a writer. He’s a novelist known primarily for science fiction work. And he has written a new story starring George Smiley, so George Smiley, one of the most famous spy protagonists of all time, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and all of those books. This is set in the period between “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

And he does just a remarkable job of not really mimicking his father’s voice as much as inhabiting it. And he tells a story of George Smiley and his nemesis on the Soviet side, Karla. It was quite entertaining.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, Maureen, a final bonus pick.

Maureen Corrigan: OK, this is out of the box for me.

Jeffrey Brown: Out of the box.

Maureen Corrigan: “The Dog Who Followed the Moon” by James Norbury.

It’s an illustrated, inspirational book for adults. And it’s really all about a dog who’s lost and follows the moon and doesn’t know where he’s going to end up. For those of us who are feeling a little lost these days and unsure about what paths to take, the illustrations are gorgeous. And, again, I guess inspiring is my theme for my picks this year.

I found it very inspiring.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, great picks, as always.

Maureen Corrigan, Gilbert Cruz, thank you both very much, and happy new year.

Maureen Corrigan: Happy new year.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you.