Judy: The year in books.
We take a look at some of the
best writing of 2022.
Jeffrey brown leads the way for
our arts and culture series,
canvas.
Jeffrey: It's always one of our
favorite discussions of the
year, even if we can only get to
a handful of top books.
We'll do our best.
Joined this year by Gilbert
Cruz, books editor of the new
York Times, and Maureen
Corrigan, book critic of NPR.
Nice to talk to both of you.
And Maureen Corrigan, book
critic of NPR.
Gilbert, let's start with
fiction.
How about two or three picks?
Gilbert: Sure.
I will mention two books that we
recently put on our top ten
books of the year list.
The first is trust by Hernan
Diaz.
This is a novel that tells the
rise of a financier in New York
City in the early 20th century.
But it tells it from four
different perspectives.
It is historical fiction, but
it's also literary fiction.
It's something that I honestly
did not know anything about
going into it.
I picked it up off the shelf
this summer, and I think in the
first five or six pages I was
just totally taken by it.
This is one of my favorite books
of the year.
Jeffrey: Okay, how about a
second pick?
Gilbert: Sure.
Another of my favorite books of
the year is the candy house by
Jennifer Egan.
So Jennifer Egan wrote the
pulitzer prize winning novel a
visit from the goon squad.
This came out in 2010.
And the candy house is a sequel.
A follow up, I think she calls
it a sibling novel.
You find some of the same
characters but it sort of takes
them in a completely different
direction.
It presupposes that there is a
technology that has been
invented called own your
unconscious.
So it's sort of a social novel
in that it is grappling with
what it means to be hooked into
technology and social media.
It's relevant.
It's endlessly inventive.
It's it's fantastic.
Jeffrey: I'm glad you picked
that one.
And I hope our viewers will
remember my talk with Jennifer
Egan earlier this year for that
book.
So Maureen Corrigan, two
fiction.
Maureen: Claire Keegan's foster,
this is a novella.
It was originally published in
2010 in the new Yorker.
It's been out in great Britain
for years.
It's the first time it's been
published in this country.
Jeffrey: She's an Irish writer,
right?
Maureen: She's an Irish writer.
She's telling the story of a
young girl who's shipped off to
relatives she doesn't know to
live for a summer on a farm.
Keegan raises the question of
whether this is a kindness or
not to introduce a child who has
of living and different
relationships when she's going
to be shipped back to her
parents at the end of the
summer.
The other book that knocked me
out was a debut by Jonathan
escoffery called if I survive
you.
It's about a Jamaican American
family.
The parents come to Florida to
to escape political violence and
to try to give their two young
sons another kind of life.
They keep getting knocked down.
The 2008 recession.
Hurricane Andrew.
Racism.
Escoffery is a terrific writer.
He's funny.
He's witty.
He's sharp.
His characters are more than
just sort of ideas.
They're fully realized human
beings.
And the "You" his characters are
trying to survive is America.
Jeffrey: All right.
Let's turn to nonfiction,
Gilbert, want to pick, give us a
couple?
Gilbert: I sure do.
The first is a book called stay
true by a gentleman called hua
Hsu, hua is a writer for the new
Yorker magazine.
And stay true is a memoir.
It's a memoir of growing up as a
child of Taiwanese immigrants in
California.
But it's also the memoir of
going to Berkeley in the mid
1990's.
He becomes friends with the son
of Japanese American immigrants,
a boy named Ken, who he first
thinks is sort of this very
simple frat boy, but then grows
to learn it's much more
complicated than he first
suspected.
It's a book about grief.
It's a book about youth and
nostalgia.
There's so much that is packed
into such a small, such such a
small amount of pages.
It's quite wonderful.
The second is called an immense
world.
Ed Yong is a writer for the
atlantic magazine.
Some might know him for his
wonderful stories over the past
three years on coronavirus.
But this is a book about animals
and specifically about the ways
that animals perceive the world
and how those perceptions are
different from the way that
humans see the world.
And whether you like animals or
not, it was just endlessly
fascinating.
Jeffrey: Okay, Maureen,
nonfiction.
Maureen: Ada Calhoun, also a
poet.
Ada Calhoun is writing about her
father, Peter schjeldahl, who
was an art critic for the new
York Times.
Jeffrey: Yeah, very prominent.
Maureen: Very prominent, but
kind of an elusive, emotionally
elusive father.
Ada goes down to the basement of
the east village apartment house
where her parents lived for
decades.
She comes upon these cassette
tapes that her father made when
he was trying to write a
biography of the New York poet
frank O'Hara.
And she decides she's going to
use these tapes to try to
complete what he never
completed.
He never wrote this biography.
Also a poet is literary
criticism.
It's biography of both her
father and frank O'Hara.
And it's also a daughter's
memoir and a love letter to new
York City.
So it's fabulous.
The other book I that has stayed
-- the other book I -- that has
stayed with me is by the medical
historian Lindsay fitzharris,
and it's called the face maker.
It's about the pioneering
plastic surgery work of Harold
gillies, a doctor during world
War I, who's faced with this
catastrophe of all of these men
who've had their faces shattered
by the new technology of warfare
during World War I.
There are no textbooks, there
are no guides.
He's trying to put these men's
faces back together again and to
give them their lives.
Jeffrey: Gilbert, you know, I
know in your position you get
lots and lots of books sent your
way.
I'm just -- I'm wondering, do
you see any themes jumping out
at you or subject matter that
speaks to our moment, whether
it's the pandemic, the politics
of our time?
Anything hitting you?
Gilbert: One book that came out
this year that was particularly
well-received, book called Lucy
by the sea, by the author
Elizabeth strout.
And this was a novel starring a
character that she's written
about several times before, Lucy
Barton.
And in this novel, Lucy
experiences the pandemic.
She is an older woman who has to
leave New York to go up to Maine
to join her husband in a cabin
so they can sort of get away
from what they imagine is is a
very dangerous place to be at
the moment.
It's a little too close for some
people at the moment.
I found it extremely readable
and I imagine we're going to
continue to see books like that
over the course of the next many
years.
Jeffrey: Maureen, you get a lot
of books coming your way.
What do you see?
Maureen: I do.
The pandemic novel and
nonfiction.
I see the pandemic entering in
ways that I don't expect.
Something like Alexandra
Horowitz's the year of the
puppy.
Alexandra Horowitz is the head
of the canine cognition lab at
Barnard, and she's written a lot
of nonfiction about the way dogs
think.
Kind of connecting with what
Gilbert said about Ed Yong's
nonfiction book.
MC: She and her family adopted a
puppy during the pandemic.
And so it's partly that personal
story.
So many people adopted dogs and
cats during the pandemic, but
also this attempt yes, to get
into the mind of a creature who
we love but who is not us.
So I think we're going to keep
seeing those pandemic stories.
Jeffrey: All right.
Just some of the best books of
2022.
Maureen Corrigan, Gilbert Cruz,
thank you both very much.
Gilbert: Thank you.