Of the thousands of books published each year in English, The New York Times has the task of winnowing that list down to the very best. Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the best nonfiction and fiction books of 2024, from an 800-page biography of a president to a funny romantic comedy — there’s a book for everyone to enjoy. The list is “The 10 Best Books of 2024.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] As a person who has loved to read since I learned to read, I feel really fortunate that I don’t have to limit my reading time to whatever spare time I can carve out. Books are a big part of my job. As it happens, I actually do make time for books that have nothing to do with work. But I’m aware that in ten lifetimes I could never come close to reading everything that piques my interest. So I am always grateful for recommendations from Kera in Dallas. This is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. The smart, passionate staffers at the New York Times Book Review also get to read for a living and a key goal of all that page time is providing insights for the rest of us about what is worth our time in a world where there is so much competing for our attention. So their list of the “10 Best Books of 2024” is a great place to start. If you are looking for a gift for your favorite book bibliophile, especially if that bibliophile is you. Gilbert Cruz is book review editor for The New York Times. Gilbert, welcome back to Think.
Gilbert Cruz [00:00:59] Thanks for having me back.
Krys Boyd [00:01:01] All in all, would you call 2024 a good year for books? Like was it as challenging as ever to cull the list down to just ten titles?
Gilbert Cruz [00:01:09] I think honestly, I think every year is a good year for books. And I will tell you, having done this for several years now, every year is a challenging year in terms of breaking it down just to ten. There are many thousands of books published every year, possibly more in the English language here in America. We try to read as many of them as possible and and winnowing it down to ten. I honestly don’t know how to do it, but here we are.
Krys Boyd [00:01:37] So let’s start with the nonfiction titles on this list. “The Wide, Wide Sea” is all about the voyages of Captain James Cook. First of all, what shines about Hampton Sides storytelling here?
Gilbert Cruz [00:01:50] So Hampton Sides, a long time nonfiction writer. His his mind is very rangy. He has written about Arctic exploration. He’s written about the manhunt for James Earl Ray Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. And now he’s written about Captain James Cook. And what he does what what all great nonfiction writers do is combine incredible research with sort of lyrical writing. And he applies those skills here to the story of Captain Cook, very famous explorer. This is the British seamen who mapped out large parts of the Pacific Ocean for Europeans. And this is about his third voyage, his final voyage. I don’t think that’s a spoiler. I think it might be on the cover. And it’s this great seafaring tale. Right. You have this man who has discovered, again, for Europeans, so much of the world going out, sent by the king of England to try to find the Northwest Passage, which is is a thing that has vexed many an explorer. He goes to the South Pacific, he goes to Polynesia, he goes to the west coast of America and Alaska and the Bering Strait and Russia. And then he ends up in Hawaii where he doesn’t make it out. It’s just it’s a great book that I think anyone who likes adventure stories will appreciate.
Krys Boyd [00:03:20] I mean, we often think about European colonizers as being sort of blithely or deliberately unaware or at least unconcerned with the harms associated with their conquests. Cook, in this book, seems to understand some of the suffering that his arrival unleashed.
Gilbert Cruz [00:03:38] So it’s it’s for decades now and possibly longer, we’ve had, you know, a more realistic view of what it meant to be a European explorer. Right. These are people that went out and they claim that they discovered parts of the world that the residents of that part of the world didn’t need, discovering that they you know, that the Polynesia and the South Pacific existed. And Captain James Cook didn’t need to to tell the people that lived on Tahiti about it. The way we look at explorers now, the way we think about imperialism and colonialism is much more complicated than it was decades ago. However, you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, which is those things are true. But also Captain Cook was a genuinely sort of thoughtful sea captain who certainly on this third voyage he went out and he tried to prevent his men from, you know, going ashore and and having assignations with the locals there because he knew was very possible that they would spread diseases that should not be spread. He was very aware of the impact, sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle, like you write, you can’t observe without affecting. He knew that his presence there in the presence of his sailors was affecting the locals in a very negative way.
Krys Boyd [00:05:00] Lucy Sante’s book “I Heard Her Call My Name” also appears on your list this year. And this is the story of a woman who transitioned from male to female quite late in life. Right?
Gilbert Cruz [00:05:11] Correct. So this is a memoir by the writer and critic Lucy Sante, who has been writing widely for decades but is possibly best known for a book called Low Life, which is about a sort of crime in the underbelly of New York City in the mid 1800s and early 1900s. And in her late 60s, Lucy transitioned from male to female. What happened was, in early 2021, during the pandemic, she found herself using this photo app. You can take a selfie and it has this feature that allows you to to swap genders or to switch your gender. Andshe as she says, she knew as soon as she saw her face as a female for the first time something that she had possibly always known maybe became undeniable which was that she was a woman. So she writes this memoir in the memoir structured in two parts, the sort of chapters alternate. The first is her life up to this moment. She immigrated over from Belgium with her parents. She she grew up as a lonely single child in the suburbs of New Jersey. And then she really came into her own as a young person in early 1980s New York City, where she socialized with all these famous people and famous artist, you know, Jean-Michel Basquiat and and and people of that ilk. And then the second part of the memoir is, is everything post her transition, the difficult decision. Well, the revelation and then the difficult decision to tell her, her friends and her partner, her grappling with what it means to be an older woman. It’s it’s sort of straightforwardly written. It’s not a very strident book. But by laying out this one person’s life and by virtue of the fact of who they are and the journey they’ve taken, I feel like it really lands with most readers.
Krys Boyd [00:07:00] I think for all the reasons that you’ve just described, this would be a really interesting story. But what is also fascinating about this book is that, as you’ve alluded to, Sante was a well-known writer under her dead name of Luke Sante not long before she transitioned. And so in addition to what she hoped to gain from living in a way that felt true to herself, she had to cope with this palpable loss of identity and questions around what might happen to her career.
Gilbert Cruz [00:07:28] Absolutely. She, you know, is very sort of blunt and realistic as as she writes in in her book about this fact. She was previously known under her dead name of Luke Sante and the idea that she has built up this social capital as as a well-known writer and critic under this name. Once she makes her transition, does that what does that do to her career as a writer? This thing that that is all she has ever known. You know, she can come to the realization that this is who she is and this is who she always was. And I also understand that there are possibly tradeoffs in this society that come with it.
Krys Boyd [00:08:07] Next on your nonfiction list is the book “Cold Crematorium” by József Debreczeni . This is an interesting book to pick in that it was published this year, but it was written, what, essentially in real time during the Holocaust.
Gilbert Cruz [00:08:23] Absolutely. So this is this is a Holocaust memoir. And one might think that maybe we have more than enough testimonials of what it was like to live through the Holocaust. I think if you were to say that, you’d be wrong. This is a book that was written by a Hungarian journalist, a poet, playwright. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 after Hitler invaded Hungary late in World War Two. He ended up being interned in several different camps around Auschwitz. He survived, and he wrote this book, and it was first published in 1950 in Yugoslavia. It was it was written in Hungarian. And this year is the first time that it’s been being translated into English. And so, you know, I’ve read many a Holocaust book, maybe many of your listeners have as well. The amazing thing about this one is because he was a journalist as well as being a poet and a playwright. His eye for detail was in credible. Now, of course, what he’s detailing are among the worst atrocities that humans have ever enacted upon others. But as sort of a a primary source, it’s amazing to read. It’s troubling. It’s disturbing. This is this is nowhere near a happy book. It’s very grim. It’s about 200 pages. But it’s it’s an incredible piece of history, an incredible piece of literature. And I think it’s an important addition to sort of like the Holocaust record.
Krys Boyd [00:09:56] Do any of the to I don’t want to put you on the spot here because I know you read Gilbert like 7000 books this past year. But do any of those details come to mind? Is there something that will stick with you?
Gilbert Cruz [00:10:06] I mean, you know, early on in the book, he talks about being on on a, you know, on a train to to Auschwitz and seeing a local a local businessman or a local tradesman. I can’t recall who who who was always seen with a cigarette this is just a man who smoked all the time and there are no cigarettes to be had now. And so he watches this man on the train, you know, sort of bring his fingers up to his mouth every so often as a weapon. I mean the act of smoking a cigarette because this thing that was probably an anchor of this man’s life has been taken away from him. That is a a fairly innocuous detail. But I think it speaks to the the author’s ability to sort of conjure a scene.
Krys Boyd [00:10:59] Yeah, it is the kind of devastating detail that makes you think and really takes you to the space in a way that just, you know, writing that, that everyone seemed miserable doesn’t just doesn’t get you there.
Gilbert Cruz [00:11:12] Absolutely. And again, I don’t think I need to say this, but this is a very sort of realistic account of what it was like to be in one of these camps around Auschwitz in the final years of the war where where if you survived or if you weren’t sent to the gas chambers and you were used as slave labor, he he works to build underground tunnels where the Germans hoped to hide if there’s an invasion. He works in the mines. And so it’s a reminder that not only were millions of people exterminated, but there were many, many other millions of people who were used essentially as as slave labor for the Germans and and what it means to be dehumanized in this way. It’s a very sad, grim, but sort of undeniable book.
Krys Boyd [00:12:05] The story also reveals this kind of cruel hierarchy among the doomed or tortured inmates that had at least as much effect on everyone’s lives as their interactions with the guards. That, again, is something that if we think we know these stories, we may not have considered that.
Gilbert Cruz [00:12:22] Totally. The the Nazis are almost in the background here. Obviously, they’re everywhere in this book. But he lays out the ways in which fellow prisoners were essentially used to keep down the rest of the group. Right. As he writes and I have a quote here, the the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position. So if you pick one person and you say you are a prisoner, but you are in charge of these three prisoners and you have to keep them in line, and if you do that, you’ll get some extra food and maybe you’ll get some extra clothes. It was sort of a psychological experiment almost, that the Nazis performed on these prisoners and they knew or they learned that if you give someone a little bit of power over others, it’s very likely that they will take advantage of that.
Krys Boyd [00:13:13] What do you know about how it took so long for this book to be published in English speaking countries and why now?
Gilbert Cruz [00:13:18] It’s so again, it was first published in 1950 in Yugoslavia. The Russians had a certain view of of what kind of books should be written about World War Two, the West there as well. We often talk here at The New York Times Book Review about how important works in translation are. And translation is an incredibly difficult career to go into. But I think you look at this book, you look at other books that we’ve reviewed this year, it’s worth it.
Krys Boyd [00:13:47] Gilbert in the nonfiction column, you and your colleagues also put Max Boot’s biography of Ronald Reagan on the list. One might reasonably ask what is left to explore about Ronald Reagan’s life given all the books already written about him?
Gilbert Cruz [00:14:02] That’s a good question. And as we sort of debated whether or not to put this book on our top ten list, that was a question that several people asked. There are many biographies of Ronald Reagan and there’s a famously. So so Ronald Reagan was inscrutable, I think, even to those who worked alongside him for years and years. And that quality has made writing a buyer of biography about him sort of tricky no matter who you are. He had an official biographer. He and Nancy assigned Edmund Morris to be his official biographer. This is a man who had written a great biography of Teddy Roosevelt early in his career. And he was so stymied by Ronald Reagan, I feel like it sort of broke him. He ended up writing this book called “Dutch,” which is a very bizarre book that ended up inserting fictional characters into the life of Ronald Reagan, including himself, Edmund Morris. So so the number and the range of Reagan biographies is pretty vast. The thing that is true about all biographies is that over time, more information comes out, more records are released, more journals come out, you know, different different people are interviewed. And so I think you can write uncertain. Presidents probably write a biography every 10 or 15 years and it will be different in some way. It also depends on when it lands the context in which a Reagan biography has been released. This is a look back at another former screen celebrity turned Republican president who also used the phrase Make America great again, albeit in a different context. His approach to government defined the Republican Party and defined conservatism for almost half a century. And I think it’s arguable that we’re right now on the cusp of a different phase of what it means to be a conservative. And so it seemed like an interesting moment, not only for Max Boot to publish this, which he had been working on for a decade or something, but to sort of elevated to one of the best books of the year.
Krys Boyd [00:16:11] Yeah, it’s a really interesting parallel to draw to, you know, our present moment in that Reagan now reads as a fairly conventional chief executive who entered politics by a then unconventional roots. But there really are things that we can draw from this story that give context what the Trump era.
Gilbert Cruz [00:16:35] Absolutely. I mean, Ronald Reagan had a fascinating career for those who don’t recall. He started as a radio announcer. Then he was a Hollywood actor, Then he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, which is the Hollywood Actors Union, where he first sort of got to practice politics in a certain way. Then he was a TV host for many years. Then he was governor of California, and then he was a two term president. And, you know, he’s known as the great communicator. He was an incredibly gifted politician. When he was elected, he was able to tell America. I think, a story about itself that it needed to hear in the early 1980s coming out of sort of the doldrums of the 70s. He was able to do all those things while still being largely uninterested in the minutiae of governing. You know, he’s someone that really delegated a lot of the work of being president to to his staff, which maybe is a good way to to do certain things. I don’t know. That’s a great way to be president. Max Boot, it’s interesting that he wrote this because he’s a former conservative who loved Reagan, but he turned away from the Republican Party after 2016 because of the turn that it was taking that he was not sort of in favor of. And so to return to, again, someone who a large part of this country considers to be one of the great presidents, not only one of the great Republican presidents, but one of the great presidents, and give this clear eyed look at this presidency that is often wreathed in the fog of nostalgia, I think is a very valuable thing that he did at this moment.
Krys Boyd [00:18:22] And this idea of Reagan as national storyteller in chief is interesting. He wasn’t constantly accused of lying in the way that Donald Trump seems to be, but Reagan sometimes did not let the truth get in the way of at least a good anecdote.
Gilbert Cruz [00:18:39] Absolutely. He you know, I don’t think by the record that Max Boot paints certainly was someone who lied deliberately. But he he was not necessarily he was interested in telling stories. And if the story wasn’t based in fact, if it felt to mostly true, then that’s all that mattered to him. Again, coming from Hollywood, coming from radio, coming from the big screen, coming from TV, he knew how to hold an audience. He knew what it was like to communicate to people not only in person, but through the screen. And that often involves telling stories, telling people a story about the country, telling people a story about where they have been, where we should go. And, you know, if you have to sort of use an anecdote from a movie that you saw once, that you then conflate into something that actually happened in real life, then, you know, so what.
Krys Boyd [00:19:40] Of course, when you implicitly or quite directly compare to people and draw out similarities, you’re also going to notice the differences. Reagan was not a nativist, and Reagan was eager to engage with the world and sort of take on this role of America as leader.
Gilbert Cruz [00:19:57] Absolutely. I mean, he again, one of the things that Boot and I think other biographies have have sort of grounded Reagan is is the mid-century America that he came out of sort of you know Midwest 1950s America. And the idea that we you know, we’re that shining city on a hill, that we were the ones that should lead, that’s America can end the Cold War, that America can sort of show the rest of the world what it means to not only be a democracy, but to be sort of a great nation. That is that is something that. He was very good at. You look at a lot of the policies underneath that. If you look at the details, it’s arguable. But he was more of a pragmatist, certainly than an ideologue. You know, he even though he came from this sort of conservative wing of the Republican Party and sort of threw his lot in with them, I think he saw. When a deal could be made, when one needed to negotiate with the Russians, when one needed to sort of, you know, take a different view on Social Security and things like that. He was a fascinating person. Some would argue that he was a great communicator, through which the winds of history passed. You know, that he just allowed things to happen. But Boot shows that it’s a little more complicated than that.
Krys Boyd [00:21:29] All right. Rounding out the nonfiction list is Jonathan Blitzer’s book, “Everyone Who Is Gone is Here.” This is a study of how U.S. immigration policy has shaped what happens along the southern border.
Gilbert Cruz [00:21:42] Yeah. So it is very interesting to read this. Around the same time as, as I read the Reagan biography, because a lot of what the Reagan administration did in Central America sort of has a bearing on the immigration situation now. And obviously, it’s also pretty well timed given how prominent a role immigration played in this year’s presidential election. So Jonathan Blitzer, the author of this book, is the staff writer for The New Yorker. And this book is about the history of the situation at the at the southern border over basically the past half century. And it focuses on it focuses primarily on these three nations, the so-called Northern Triangle, Central America, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. And he starts by laying out how American intervention in Central America in the 70s and 80s during the Reagan administration as a result of the Cold War. As a result of our fear of communist infiltration in our hemisphere. What that did in terms of propping up authoritarian regimes that ruined the lives of people in their nations, who then decided to, you know, come north to the United States in great numbers. There used to be a time long ago when the average migrant at the southern border was, you know, a small group or a single Mexican man, you know, 1 or 2 people coming across in drips and drabs from from Mexico. Now, of course, it’s a completely different situation. You have large groups of people, men, women, children and families coming not only from Mexico, but largely from Central America. And Blitzer lays out sort of the decades long history of how we have gotten here. It may sound dry. Honestly, I thought it would be when I started the book. It’s it’s sort of the opposite of that, Right. He tells the story through people, and the sheer number of people that he talks to is truly impressive. He talks to migrants. He talks to the coyotes trying to smuggle them across the border. Politicians in our nation and in the nations of Central America, church volunteers, border activists, detention staff. It’s a truly impressive book. You know, it’s sort of broad in its history while also being deep in its reporting. And again, I think it’s perfectly timed.
Krys Boyd [00:24:06] Might be too much to ask, giving given all the achievements of the book that you’ve just laid out. But does Blitzer offer any ideas, any hope that lawmakers will be able to effectively reform immigration policy to achieve the goals many Americans now say they want?
Gilbert Cruz [00:24:23] I, I don’t know that that is the that the purpose of the book or that’s what Blitzer tries to achieve. I will say that what he has achieved, which is to give pretty deep context in the history that can help explain how we got here. And then maybe it’s for other people hopefully to solve. I think is pretty valuable.
Krys Boyd [00:24:44] Okay. We’ve just gone over all of the nonfiction titles and I want to move on to the fiction books first on the list. And these are in no particular order, right? All the books that made the list are equally great, correct? Okay. Correct. First on the list, though, is “James” by Percival Everett, who just won the National Book Award for Fiction. So. Good call to your team. This is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that centers the enslaved man known in the original story as Jim. What makes this book such a gem?
Gilbert Cruz [00:25:19] So I and many of us at the Book Review feel that this was sort of always going to be one of the year’s best books. And and, you know, we read it early on and we said this is that this is this is a top contender. And as the year went on, it just sort of held its place. As you say, it’s a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It switches to the perspective of Jim the slave who accompanies Huck down, down the Mississippi or up the Mississippi. I forget if you’re going up as a down. If you’re going down as it up. But, you know, this is a book that many of us had to read in school. And so I feel like when you tell people to retelling of Huckleberry Finn, they get a little their shoulders go up a little bit because they say that’s grade school. So I don’t want to revisit that. Like I didn’t have a good time reading in the first place. And I can understand that. But Percival Everett is sort of a master, right? He is best known, I think, at this point for writing the book that was adapted into the film, American Fiction, which won a screenplay Oscar earlier this year. He’s written many, many books, most of them with a smaller press. He’s sort of jumped to one of the big American publishers. And maybe not coincidentally, this is really the book where he has broken out. Right. It’s award winning now. It’s bestselling. It’s critically acclaimed. And I think it’s because he, while taking this book very seriously, is also a very funny and witty writer. And I wouldn’t I wouldn’t necessarily think that I would sort of laugh or chuckle while reading a book this serious. And there are many serious things that happen in it. You know, don’t forget, this is a book about an enslaved person, but it also makes you fall in love with this character of Jim, who, you know, eventually goes by James and Percival Everett’s book. And it it sort of recasts him as someone, of course, who’s the center of his own story, someone who is well-educated, someone who understands the world better than all the white people around him think that he does incredibly well spoken, very well read. And one of the earliest parts of the book, when you understand that the the way that Everett is playing games with James and Twain and language is he’s with a bunch of his fellow enslaved people and they are essentially training themselves to talk. The way that white people think they should talk. They all talk very wonderfully with wonderful vocabulary. And they they understand that if they were to speak that way around their masters and the other white people who are around them, that would be dangerous for them. So they have to effect this, you know, the stereotypical way of speaking. And that’s just one of the ways in which Everett plays with with with language and expectations. It is it is a delight. I can’t wait to read it again.
Krys Boyd [00:28:31] I loved it, too. And I have to say before I read it, I expected it to be sort of worthy, but I thought it might feel gimmicky. At no point does it feel that way at all. I was struck very early on in reading the book by the poignancy of James’s struggle not just to stay alive and out of captivity, but like his primary motivation is his family, which is mentioned in the original book, but not deeply explored, so that we as readers, I think with the original Twain work, it’s a biographical detail rather than a part of his identity.
Gilbert Cruz [00:29:06] Absolutely. There are stakes, you know, to very early on to sort of his journey. And and it’s also, you know, a reminder that in a great piece of literature, every, you know, every person could potentially be sort of the center of the story. And picking Jim as the one to focus on, I think was just genius of first of all, ever.
Krys Boyd [00:29:30] And this code switching that you’ve described, it does help James and other enslaved people stay alive. But for him, it also contributes to, one, his humiliation and his deep loneliness. I mean, he’s like this classic autodidact who nobody suspects can think and talk like a university professor. And who does he have to share this with?
Gilbert Cruz [00:29:53] I mean it sort of is an example of, you know, what it means to be educated, to be an artist, because he also, we learn eventually, as someone who is a writer or potentially a writer, language in the way that Percival Everett presents it, and I think in reality can be a balm. It could be a way to move up in society, but it could also be something that isolates you from others.
Krys Boyd [00:30:25] Gilbert Just to go back momentarily to “James” by Percival Everett. I will also say the book never lets up on the immorality of slavery or the white people who engaged in it. But I think it also manages to tease out the bizarre ways people found to justify the existence of the practice and somehow think of themselves as decent humans. That’s not an easy thing to do.
Gilbert Cruz [00:30:49] I agree. But I think it is sort of one of the wonderful things that that literature in particular, that books in particular can do, which is sort of put you in the mindset of someone or a group of people who you may disagree with, who you may even hate and make you understand the world from their perspective. I think that is an inherently good thing about literature that sort of makes us bigger as people. And I’ve seen something over the past few years where I feel like and this has always been true in movies and TV, where if if someone reads a book and there’s a main character, maybe we’ll talk about a book like this down the line here, who makes decisions they wouldn’t make or who they think is bad or who they don’t like, Then they think the book is bad. And I think, you know, it’s not the point of literature to sort of to reinforce our beliefs. It’s the it’s one of the purposes of literature to sort of give us a peek into the lives of others in the minds of others. And I think when it comes to the enslavers in this book, it also does that.
Krys Boyd [00:31:57] I haven’t read Martyr by Carrie Ackbar, but it is on my list. This is the story of a young man who loses his mother. I think before he’s old enough to have any memories of her and yet feels this kind of crushing survivor’s guilt that he cannot shake off.
Gilbert Cruz [00:32:15] So “Martyr” by Kaveh Akhbar is a debut novel and at the Book Review, we’re often reading months ahead. It’s December now and several of us on the desk are reading books that are coming out in February and March and they’re about. So I think it was late last year when one of our editors came across this book and said, I think this is going to be one of the ones that we’re going to have to discuss for the top ten books of the year. And she put it up for discussion. And it it lasted all year as we debated and as we put it, against other books, which is sort of impressive and is definitely impressive. Her debut novel so far. It’s a poet, and he has written a novel about this man in his late 20s. Cyrus Shams is his name. He’s an Iranian-American immigrant. He is a poet. He is a recovering addict. And when we meet Cyrus, he is. He’s sort of drifting, you know, he is newly sober or trying to be sober. And he’s become obsessed with death. And that’s because, as you note, when he was a baby, his mother died. She was on a flight from Iran to Dubai that was accidentally shot out of the sky by an American cruiser. This is based on on something that actually happened in reality. And in the wake of that tragedy, his father takes young baby Cyrus and they move to Indiana. And his father works on a chicken farm, sort of a terrible, grueling, painful, slightly embarrassing job. But he does it for his son. And then when Cyrus goes to college, he dies. So he’s essentially left with no one trying to figure out what his life is. And he’s trying to look for meaning. And he alights on this idea. Maybe not surprisingly, given what has happened to him in life of becoming a martyr or thinking about what it means to be a martyr. Now, when you see. A book titled Martyr. And it’s starring an Iranian American immigrants that could lead your mind down certain negative paths. That that’s that’s not what this book is about. It’s about a young man who is really just trying to make meaning out of his life. He goes to a museum. At one point in the book where he comes across a woman who has discovered that she has a disease that is going to lead to her death. And she’s an artist and she decides to to make an installation out of this where she is going to sort of die in person and answer questions about death and the way that those two plot points come together sort of leads to the rest of the book. The thing that stood out to us about “Martyr” was not only the sort of story, because it’s not the most plot heavy book, but it really was the language. It’s not surprising that Caveat Bart is a poet because the book manages to be both lyrical and funny about very serious things.
Krys Boyd [00:35:22] Speaking of funny, I picked up Dolly Alderson’s novel, good material because it has the flavor of a rom com. And sometimes I like to just not, you know, trouble myself too much with my recreational reading. There is lots of humor here, but it also plumbs the pain of anybody who’s had a romantic relationship fall apart and cannot quite figure out what went wrong.
Gilbert Cruz [00:35:44] Absolutely. I think this probably is relatable, maybe the most relatable to most people. So Dolly Alderton is a British author. She is a British newspaper columnist. She’s currently writing an advice column, I think for The Sunday Times, focused on romance and dating. And in this book material, Andy is a middling standup comedian. He is in his mid-thirties. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend of several years and he is at loose ends. He has to move out of their place. He needs to find a new place to live. He simply doesn’t understand why he was dumped. So this is a book about heartbreak. It’s a book about modern dating, but it’s also about this phase, I think, that some people enter in their mid-thirties. So your friends are starting to have kids. Maybe you don’t have them yet, or maybe you choose not to have them. You never will have them. And your friends can’t just pop out for impromptu drinks whenever you want. All that energy, all that quote, freedom that you had in your 20s, that’s turned into something else. And so Andy is also sort of grappling with what it means to be a person who’s getting older when everyone around you has coupled off, has made a family from whence is is meaning derived, as you say. It’s a funny book. I think there’s great, great, great, great snappy dialog and it’s just incredibly relatable. I think most of us have been through some sort of romantic pain, even if it was decades ago, mine was decades ago, and I still could summon up those feelings which are not good feelings to summon up. You know what it what it means to have broken up with someone or to be dumped or to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you. It’s it’s funny. It’s lighter than the other books on this list, but it’s also deeply, deeply relatable to most people.
Krys Boyd [00:37:38] And I think Alderton has a lot of fun here with the unreliable narrator. Andy is unreliable because he doesn’t quite know what’s going on, not because he’s necessarily lying as this story plays out.
Gilbert Cruz [00:37:49] Absolutely. I don’t you know, I don’t want to sort of ruin the back to the latter part of the book. But but his girlfriend, you know, gets her say later in the book and surprise, surprise. Maybe this guy was a little bit annoying in his own way.
Krys Boyd [00:38:06] Miranda July’s novel, “All Fours,” is also full of humor and initially sets up a bit like the classic road trip story undertaken by this woman who finds herself unfulfilled by her marriage and her life. As we get deeply into this story, though, we realize the narrator’s foundational anxiety is about the coming of menopause and what that might mean for her, not yet fully explored sense of who she is and what she wants.
Gilbert Cruz [00:38:34] So this boy, this book, this I think this is one of the summer’s big novels. It inspired many a book club. It certainly inspired many a group chat. It’s written by Miranda July, who was a sort of multi-disciplinary artist. She’s a novelist, obviously. She’s a filmmaker. She she works in other artistic sort of disciplines and media. And this is about a middle aged female artist. She decides to go on a road trip. She comes into a little money and she says, I’m going to take two weeks. I’m going to drive from Los Angeles to New York. In Los Angeles, she lives with her husband and their child, and she’s going to visit friends in New York. She makes it 20, 30 minutes outside of town. And then I laugh, even sort of relating to this plot. She comes across a younger man who works at a car dealership and she decides to rent a motel room and use her $20,000 to remake this motel room. And she’s going to stay there because she’s obsessed with this young man. And they have a very odd relationship that starts and they do some things that I certainly cannot talk about on public radio or on radio, on any sort of radio. But but so it’s it’s this odd relationship. But underpinning it, of course, as you say, is this change that’s that’s that’s coming upon this unnamed narrator. It’s about perimenopause, right? That moment before this great change. This book is about what it means to be an artist. It’s about what it means to be in a family, a mother, a wife. And it’s definitely about what it means to be a woman getting older in this culture, in this American society. It is an odd book. It’s incredibly funny. And I do not laugh at many books. And it’s pretty racy in parts, but it’s also secretly moving. Right. And and you put that all together and it’s a very rare combination.
Krys Boyd [00:40:38] Álvaro Enrigue ‘s book “You Dreamed Of Empires,” is also on my list for my break over the holidays. And this I mean, based on what I now know of the book, I want to read it. Ordinarily, a fictionalized account of Hernan Cortes’s catastrophic encounters with Moctezuma doesn’t sound interesting to me, but this what is often also a funny book. Where does he find humor?
Gilbert Cruz [00:41:03] So I’ll tell you where he finds humor. But let me I’ll just tell you a little bit more about the book. It is it is, as you say, an imagined account of Hernan Cortes and his soldiers there just arriving and what is now modern day Mexico City, Tenochtitlan. It’s 1519, and the book is imagining this, the first meeting between that group and this Aztec emperor Moctezuma, who in the book is at this point sort of out of it on psychedelic mushrooms. Half the time there’s this threat of violence that hangs over this whole book. But it is also, as our critic described it, a comedy of manners. Each side is trying to consider how to approach this situation, how to approach the diplomacy of this situation. We are people who have arrived in this culture that we have not encountered before. How should we negotiate with them? How should we talk to them? We are the Aztecs. What should we do with these people who are now in our palace? Are we going to welcome them in? Are we going to welcome in their horses these creatures that we’ve never seen? Should we kill them? Are they going to kill us? Is this translator conveying exactly what we’re trying to get across? It is this this sort of weird. It’s a very slim book, but it is this weird combination of history, imagination, as I say, sort of psychedelia in parts, but also this this thing that, again, I think we can all or that we’re all familiar with, which is how do I deal with people I’ve just met? What are the stakes?
Krys Boyd [00:42:38] So in other words, very modern, recognizable forms of unhappiness and anxiety in an ancient setting.
Gilbert Cruz [00:42:45] Absolutely. And then, you know, you add you had some human sacrifice in there and you got yourself a stew.
Krys Boyd [00:42:52] Enrigue also seems to be very definite twisting timelines, right, to throw in references to much more modern bits of pop culture to kind of reinforce what he’s doing here.
Gilbert Cruz [00:43:02] Absolutely. You know, he does it sparingly. But there are a couple of parts in the book where he sort of references, you know, music or other things that that will not be invented until hundreds and hundreds of years later. It at one point, possibly, he himself appears. And I think that’s only for a few paragraphs. But it all is part of this. You know, I cannot undersell the presence of of psychedelic mushrooms in this book. It all lends itself to this sort of woozy feeling that the book has as a whole. Again, and I want to underline this. This is true of “James,” it’s true of “You Dreamed of Empires.” There are a couple of books on here that are relatively short. And I think that it’s important when you’re recommending a book to someone, you could say this is your big 700 page Ronald Reagan biography or this is your nice 250 page book translated from the Spanish.
Krys Boyd [00:43:57] Let me ask you this as someone who reads all the time, do you when you don’t have to read a book to, you know, work on a review, do you give yourself permission to let go of something that you don’t really that doesn’t grab you? How much time do you give a book? If you have the luxury of not finishing it before you decide not to?
Gilbert Cruz [00:44:15] I find this, as I think many people do, a very difficult thing to do, to just stop and put a book down and move on with my life. I’ve had to become better at it given what my job is now. But it is. It’s still painful to say I’ve read 100 pages of this book and I’m bailing because, you know, you you feel like this. Is it the sunk cost fallacy or like I’ve put 100 pages in of my life. Surely I need to finish this. But I’ve come to learn and I would tell anyone listening to this. Resist that urge. There are too many books out there, and if you find that you’re reading something that you are not enjoying, even if other people, including the New York Times, is telling you that it is good, just put it down and move on to something else.
Krys Boyd [00:45:02] Yeah, I did that this year with a book, I won’t name it. That is on many of the best of lists. Not the one that the Times put out, and I just couldn’t get into it. And I feel no guilt because life is too short.
Gilbert Cruz [00:45:13] I say this all the time. A book can be good. That doesn’t mean it is good for you. Those two things can be true at the same time.
Krys Boyd [00:45:22] Gilbert Cruz is Book Review Editor for The New York Times, where you can find the list of the Ten Best Books of 2024. Gilbert, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you for making time for the conversation.
Gilbert Cruz [00:45:32] Thanks for having me on again. It was a pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:34] Think is distributed by PRX the Public Radio Exchange. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
