Gilbert Cruz: Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review. Here at the New York Times, we spend almost the entire year discussing, debating, sometimes arguing the 10 best books of the year. It's really a year-long process. We've been working on this year's list since February, I think. But it's summer now. It's halfway through the year according to the calendar. Uh, and I think it's time to talk about some of our best books of the year, parenthesis, so far. So, joining me today to talk about uh, a bunch of the books on our list are two editors at the book review. [music] Very familiar voices on this show, Joumana Khatib. Welcome.

Joumana Khatib: Hi, Gilbert.

Gilbert Cruz: And MJ Franklin, host of our monthly book [music] club episodes. MJ, welcome.

MJ Franklin: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to stump for some books.

Gilbert Cruz: Excellent. Excellent. You got to you have to do some massive stumping. We the three of us just got together several months ago to talk about summer book recommendations. I had a great time. I thought let's get the the gang back together and talk about genuinely some of the great books of the year so far on a list that we recently published that people can see and browse at their own pace. We're going to split this into fiction and non-fiction. We're going to start with this caveat. There are a few books of the year that we've talked about so many times on this podcast. probably not going to get into them. One of them is a title that MJ just hosted a book club episode about that is Yesteryear by Caro Burke. Go listen to that episode. We're also now going to talk about strangers, the divorce memoir by Bel Burton, which we've mentioned many times. I'm going to start, however, with a book that we've only mentioned once or twice. A book called Whistler. Thank you. by Anne Patchet. I can't whistle.

Joumana Khatib: I can.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. Whistler by N Patchet. We all know N Patchet. She is a great literary citizen. She's out there on the internet lifting up other books. She's one of the more popular authors on the border of literary fiction, popular fiction. She also owns a bookstore that I've been trying to get to for years and years down in Nashville. And she has a new one. This is about a middle-aged woman who runs into her former stepfather one day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They haven't seen each other in many decades. Here was her stepfather for a couple years when she was young and then her mother separated from this man. They reconnect. This encounter leads to them reflecting on an incident from their past that they shared, a very dramatic incident. And the woman in particular starts to think about what this has meant to how the rest of her life has played out. What has it meant about her relationship to her mother? What is it meant about memory and family and how she has turned out as a person? I love this book. I think it is not surprising to anyone who has read Anne Patchet over the course of her career that she we can discuss this. It feels like she's in a different phase. like she started with these very high concept or maybe not high concept but high drama books like um

Joumana Khatib: bocanto and state of wonder

Gilbert Cruz: and now she is in a phase in which the stories are very personal or delicate there's personal drama but there's not a lot of like drama drama I think they're sort of sweet I'm thinking of Tom Lake her last book as well loved Tom Lake

Joumana Khatib: I loved it too

Gilbert Cruz: good things happen to good people are just good things happening to good Here's a question. We talk about this a lot when we are debating the best books for you for this book. What elevates this from a good book to a great book to a best book?

MJ Franklin: Yeah, I think there is a way again to talk about this line that she straddles between literary fiction and popular fiction. There is a way that reading an Anne Patchet book, you immediately fall into it. The insight and perceptiveness she has into relationships, particularly family relationships, is unique and it is done in a way that other types of particularly literary fiction just don't try to do it. It feels very approachable and humane. It's easy to take an Patrick for granted, but I think she is a very good writer who does a very special thing.

Joumana Khatib: I thought I read this was like a one sitting book for me. It was a one bath book. Uh because I was on vacation. I was over stimulated. I was ready to murder the friends I was with. And I said, "Do not disturb." And I emerged pruny and appreciative of the relationships I had in my life. It also made me think of the time that I was at the Met with my mom and there was a very persistent guy following my mom around the gallery,obviously hitting on her, and I was convinced I was going to leave the Met with a stepdad.

Gilbert Cruz: Wow. Uh, we have to have your mother on the podcast next time.

Joumana Khatib: No, we don't. [laughter]

Gilbert Cruz: Joumana, I'd love for you to talk about a book, a very, very large book that has come out this year that I know you're a fan of.

Joumana Khatib: Uh, okay. So, this is The Calamity Club by Katherine Stockett.And as Gilbert said, it is a big bursting at the seams kind of joyfully oversted book by the author of The Help.And it's been a long time since she's had a book come out because The Help really took on a life of its own. And this is a very different type of story.It's still set in the South. We're in the Mississippi Delta. We meet Birdie, who is actually It's one of the great opening scenes I've read this year.Actually, we meet Birdie, who is this sort of like gangly 24 year old woman.She's a bookkeeper.She's in the pharmacy and she has to buy basically every single condom that they have in the pharmacy. It's like 1920s Mississippi, right? And she's dodging people she knows. So Birdie is one of our main characters. The other main character is Meg, who is this plucky, lovable, intelligent, fierce orphan who has suffered the particular wrath of the sort of overseer of the orphanage. She's really made to suffer, but she's a tenacious kid. I think she's like 12 or something, and she's really, really got a lot of self-possession. So Bird's family is in a financial crisis. So Birdie has to go to her sister, ask for money. This is where she meets Meg. She starts volunteering at the orphanage. I told you this was over stuffed. Joyfully over stuffed. Please remember, Joyfully Oversted. Anyway, before long, their lives intersect. There is illicit activity going on. And this is just like this is a book that moves. There's a lot of plot. It's exciting. And it's funny.I I so rarely laugh at books. I don't know why I was picked up enough as a child, but I I don't laugh [laughter] much at books, but this was funny and lively and just like Yeah, it's it's great.

MJ Franklin: Can I tell you, I had my guard up a little bit because I felt I have a lot of complicated feelings about The Help

Gilbert Cruz: and I also got swept away, I think, because it's just so entertaining. It feels like the best TV shows feel. And I say that in a good way. It's just like episodic and interesting and it dangles all this intrigue that you want to see where it's going to go.

Joumana Khatib: Also, the word calamity is so good in a title. Calamity.

MJ Franklin: I have a book that's almost the opposite of this though. That was a large 800 page novel, 700 page novel, 600 page large novel. Um, and the one that I want to talk about next, one of my favorite books of the year is so slim, [snorts] like 120 pages. It is, you guessed it, transcription by Ben Learner.

Gilbert Cruz: Transcription is a book told in three parts. The first section is a guy going to interview his mentor. The second section is at a symposium after the mentor has died. And then the third section is a conversation with the mentor's son, who happens to be the narrator's friend. A lot is happening in a slim 120 pages. And it's a book that feels like a puzzle in a good way. Like you read it and the individual sections are entertaining on their own, but then they start to undercut each other and challenge each other and it makes you think differently about various aspects. And it's a book that if you like to dig, if you like to have your pen out and you're taking notes and you want to think and feel in a novel, this is a novel to read. MJ, you hosted a book club episode about this. Was there anything that happened during that discussion that made you understand this book, this opaque book even more?

MJ Franklin: I don't know if I even to this day still understand the book, but everyone had a different facet of the novel that they were really interested in and that they really glombmed on to. And I think that gets at why I think it's one of my favorites of the year and why I think it's a best book of the year. And that is you get the sense almost like a diamond. there's been so much pressure put on and so much stuff like just like compact it down and it it's created this little gem of a book. Um it that's really hard to do. It's hard to write long and keep people entertained. It's hard to write really brief and opaque and keep people entertained. And Ben Learner does that in this book and I think he does that with all of his books actually. But this there's something so special about this one. Yeah, it's amazlike when we discussed this in a bigger group, I was amazed at what people took away from it. It's sort of like a roar shock test almost. I don't know. I still don't know what to make of this book entirely.

MJ Franklin: What I want you to take away from it is that the book is great. Be on my side.Be on my team on this.

Joumana Khatib: Okay. Okay. I have a book that is also a swerve from transcription. This is The Keeper by Tana French. Tana French who is a sort of goddess to a lot of people.I had never read Tana French before this. And readers, I am here to tell you that you can really choose your own adventure because The Keeper is the final installment of a trilogy. And I decided I was going to just burst through that obstacle like the Kool-Aid Man. And I still had [laughter]

Gilbert Cruz: I almost did a literal spitake in the studio. [laughter]Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Joumana Khatib: So readers, you can learn from my my uh

Gilbert Cruz: experience

Joumana Khatib: there. Thank you. So this book follows Cal Hooper who is a retired Chicago cop that moves to rural Ireland, fictional village of Ardelty.He was debuted in Tana's 2020 book called The Searcher.And then soon after came The Hunter, which is the middle volume, and now we're at the Keeper. And over the progression of Cal's life in Ireland, we see him go from the outsider and trying to like interpolate this really really closed almost suspicious community,suspicious of outsiders at the very least. But by the time we get to the keeper, he has a fiance. He has friends.He's got drinking buddies.And the crime at hand is that a sort of sweet beloved local girl is found dead drowned in a river and her boyfriend is the son of this cigar chomping like bigwig. Like he's rich, he's connected, he has like designs for the town that are controversial.And soon Cal is brought in to investigate the death. And all is not as it seems. Of course not. And I think Connor French is great at writing about how rumor and insinuation and gossip all contribute to the atmosphere of a tiny town like this. And it's very gripping and engrossing and you feel like you're in the barroom with Cal and the other local gentlemen. It's fun. It's fun.

MJ Franklin: That word you mentioned, I think atmosphere is totally gets at what makes this book great. When you think of a thriller, at least when I think of a thriller, I think of action and like incident and explosions. And there are stakes and deaths that happen here, but like really how she's able to create an atmosphere, a world, a town, a community, and just have you, the reader get lost in it is tremendous. the climax such that it is arrives like a swell. I didn't see I I knew the the pressure was ratcheting up, but it like when that climactic scene comes, it it kind of hits you full force. And a lot of people talk about how Tana French is able to do both the really eloquent, engaging sentence and also have the action move. and she, you know, you're able to have have both in all of her books. I understand why people are obsessed with her.

MJ Franklin: So, I think it's time, friends. I have a book that I've been stumping for hard this year. And that book is Ken by Tari Jones.

Gilbert Cruz: You've been talking about this since January, since the end of last year. Is that possible?

MJ Franklin: Yeah. And it was also a book club, so I made readers in the building and outside of the building read it with me.

Gilbert Cruz: Putting your finger on the scale here.

MJ Franklin: I love this book. It's so good. So Ken is Tiari Jones's latest. You may remember Tori Jones from her book, An American Marriage. This is a very different type of story because it's a story about family and sisterhood. It's about these two orphan girls, Annie and Ni, and when they're babies, both of their parents abandon them for a variety of reasons. One through death. Um her mother, one's mother is killed by her father and the father runs away. And then the other from from abandonment. um her mother leaves her with another family member and flees and she doesn't know where they are. They grow up together and they have nobody except each other. Then they turn 18 and they decide we need to make our own way in life and they go on their separate paths trying to carve out their own future but then also to find the family they never had. Whether that is developing your own family and your own relationships or hunting for your mother. I don't want to say more because this book goes places, but the thing that I love about it is that for me, it is the platonic ideal of a novel. It gives you rich, immersive characters that you root for. It gives you dramatic stakes. It gives you heart. It takes you through the South. There's a historical fiction element to it cuz it's set in the ' 50s. It's so good. It's for everyone. It's great.

Joumana Khatib: I love this book. It's like actually diametrically opposed to the Calamity Club in terms of the sort of rollicking like oversted feeling and and and yet it is just as poignant, maybe more poignant because of the sort of paired back feeling of it. The ending will destroy you. Just be warned. I think people like that. So that's a good thing. And the characters are wonderful and she's just such a pleasure to read. I love this book. It also gets at that feeling of like what does it feel like? What does it mean to find your person in life? In this case, these girls find each other. Like they call themselves cradle friends. They're like sisters who found each other. It also is a wonderful book about friendship, which we've talked about books that are about family relationships. Everyone has read books that are sort of centered circle around romantic relationships. And while there is sort of a an an undercurrent of romance between these two, it really is about a lifelong friendship. And I feel, and maybe the two of you feel this way as well, that that is something that it feels like goes undercovered by fiction, just how special friendships can be in one's life. Years and years ago, I was talking to the author Emma Stra about her book Modern Lovers at the time. And that's also about like a group of friends and they have they've grown up together and now they have all these relationships. And Emma said something that I always think about which is friendship is hard to navigate because unlike something like marriage where there's a literal contract, friendship there isn't one. There's not an innate thing. There's not a a piece of paper that holds you together. You have to figure that out on your own. And I've been thinking about that quite a lot. And these girls have found something that holds them together. And Tauri Jones is so beautiful at illustrating what that is. Even as literally in the book, they're apart for so much of it, but you feel that they're together and they live together in you, the reader. All right, I am going to very, very quickly talk about truly one of my favorite books of the year. This is called This is Where the Serpent Lives by Danielle Muenna Dean. This is a series of four interconnected stories following four loosely connected characters in Pakistan. It opens with Yazid who is abandoned on the street and becomes the driver for this wealthy landowning family. Then we get to know his employer, his employer's wife, another employee. It's majestic. I I love this book. I love it so much. It's so elegant and engrossing.I'm just gonna leave it there. It's so good. And I never thought that I would care about the fates and fortunes of a cucumber farm. I do. I'm locked in. This is genuinely one of my favorite things I've read um this calendar year. Highly recommend. So that was This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniel Muenadine.[music] When we come back, we dig into the best non-fiction books of the year so far.[music][music]

Gilbert Cruz: All right, MJ and Jima. Now, we're going to talk about some of the best non-fiction of the year so far. MJ, start us off with the title that you have there.

MJ Franklin: So that is Fear and Fury by Heather Anne Thompson. Gilbert, you mentioned this in a seasonal preview and I hadn't heard of the book at the time and you were like, "Have you heard of Bernie Gats?" And I said, "I actually have not." This is if you grew up in New York in a certain time period, you know who Bernie Gats is.

Gilbert Cruz: Can you set up Bernie Gats? And I'll take away the book.

MJ Franklin: The core of the story is this thing that happened back in New York in the 8s in which a man named Bernie Gats was on the New York City subway. He was approached by a group of unarmed black teens and he pulled the gun out and shot a bunch of them. He fled. He eventually turned himself in. There was a court case that sort of tore the city in half. He became to many people in New York someone who was fighting back against all the crime that was happening in New York in the 1980s. And of course there were lots of people like these young men were not doing anything to you. this is just another sign of white privilege in the big city. She tells that story, but it also is a bigger story about the growth of a modern, as she puts it, white rage in America. And she does that by totally zooming out to start and she paints the portrait of New York in the 80s. She ties in the rising tabloid wars because that's when Rupert Murdoch bought the post and how that fed into the narratives, the idea that these papers were competing for readers and they were trying to say more and more salacious things, tell more and more salacious stories. Then she talks about Bernie Gats's past and other incidents. And then she finally gets to the scene on the train and it is harrowing. And then she goes to the courtroom and then the book becomes this courtroom drama. I kept repeating like listen to this line of what this lawyer said or listen to what happened on that train because this book is stuffed with all of these facts and tidbits that really illuminate this case. It makes you feel outraged but it also paints a great portrait of this particular era and then she connects the dots to what that means for now. It really is also just a wonderful example of how something can be so famous in its time and that time was not that long ago and yet there are many people just like you MJ who did not grow up in New York. This this is completely new to them.

MJ Franklin: And what I think makes this a great book, a best book, is the meticulousness with which Heather Anne Thompson constructs that scene, constructs that trial, constructs the environment of New York at that time. There are about 60 pages of endnotes at the end, and you'll you'll be reading and you'll see a claim or hear a quote, and you're like, "How is this real?" And then you go back to the endotes and it's all there. She in creating this book has done so much research to bring this to the page for contemporary readers. And I hope this doesn't sound like it's a dry book. I am not someone who typically thinks of myself as a non-fiction reader. I'm in fiction land all the time. But you get totally pulled in. You learn quite a lot. You feel quite a lot. and it's just done with such care and intensity and research and skill. That's what Heather and Thompson has achieved here.

Joumana Khatib: I have a book that has some things in common with fear and fury. I think the sort of immediacy of political atmosphere is one of them. But this is a memoir. This is called Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young by Zade Ays Dorne. And the author is the son of two former members of the 1960s radical group, the Weathermen, um, Bill Ays and Bernardine Dorne. And when he was born, his parents were already established radicals and and much of his childhood was spent literally on the run. Like, um, I listened to this book. He's a wonderful narrator, and I actually I really recommend it. Um because hearing his own childhood memories in his voice adds a dimension to this that like it almost takes you out of the sort of high stakes political context because he he talks about how one of his earliest memories it was almost like a game he played with his parents. How do you spot a plain clothes cop? And I can totally imagine that being framed as a game, but I also feel reading this as an adult, the life or death stakes for the kid. And it's a really complicated inheritance to say the least because I think as he is writing this book, he's able to see that his parents didn't always put his own safety or well-being over their political affiliations and sort of grappling with that. I think every child has that moment when the mythology around their parents or their family begins to crumble. This is just obviously the stakes are so much higher because your parents were on like an FBI wanted list and it took the author decades to be able to really really commit this story to paper. And I think it's a remarkable achievement. And at the risk of sounding like little Cathy Bates, our reviewer for this book was Dana Spiata, who is possibly my favorite living American writer. And she did such a good review of this book. And everybody should go read that if you're at all interested.

Gilbert Cruz: I like that. A plug within a plug.

MJ Franklin: Plug within a plug within a plug.

Gilbert Cruz: I am going to talk about another memoir. Uh, first of all, that sounds amazing and actually you I want to read that immediately. You really sold me on that. Um, this one is a just again not to be myself, but just a nice slim quick read. This is a book called Trash. It's by a man named Simone Parupar. It's originally written in French. It was translated into English by Pablo Strauss. And it is about a garbage man who lives in Montreal. He's not just any garbage man. He's like a philosopher trash man. He is someone who went to university and he got a master's and for the past two decades sort of part-time he has also worked on various garbage routes in Montreal and he tells the story of all the people he meets along the way who also do this work. He makes a case for the dignity and importance of this work. You learn a lot of things about what it's like to be kneede in trash bags in the middle of the summer. The toll that this work takes on the human body when you're working 8 to 10 hours a day just picking up heavy bags of garbage and tossing them into the back of a garbage truck. It's incredible. It's also this undercurrent of like anti- capitalism almost. He's sort of making this case that maybe we all inherently understand but never want to address that we are just a society that consumes all the time and throws it out. We consume and we dispose and we're doing that more than any civilization has ever done in human history. And it is his job to take all that stuff and take it away from you so that you never have to see it and you can feel clean and you can feel that you live in a society that works. It's a remarkable memoir.

Joumana Khatib: I have not read this and I need to because it sounds like something so up my alley. It illuminates a figure that you see every day in your life. I wonder what their life is like. I wonder what they're thinking about. I wish I had a peek. And this book gives you a peek. It sounds like from this person's own perspective, from their own eye, and then it gets philosophical. Count me in. I don't know if it's because there is an exclamation point in the title, but I do feel like this is prime for a Broadway adaptation.

Gilbert Cruz: I would watch the hell out of a Broadway show about trash. Can you imagine the dance number?

Joumana Khatib: I'm sorry. Is it a play or is it a musical?

Gilbert Cruz: No, no, no. Musical number.

MJ Franklin: What would some of the songs be called?[laughter] Uh, other than opening number, trash, exclamation points, parentheses, I love it, or something like that. What are some other numbers?

Joumana Khatib: I love it. Well, this would naturally be a bilingual affair.

MJ Franklin: La pubel.

Gilbert Cruz: I don't know what that means.

MJ Franklin: That means trash in French. Um, we would get some like Leonard Cohen deep fake to

Gilbert Cruz: Leonard Cohen from Montreal.

MJ Franklin: Very sad, deep voice, second to last number. He's singing about the loneliness of being a trash man, but also the woman that he met along his route who he has been in love with for many years,

Joumana Khatib: but he doesn't know if she's married and he hasn't really decided whether he should go through her trash or not. I love a podcast cuz come for some book recommendations. Stay for the fancasting of a trash musical.

Gilbert Cruz: I have another one. This is London Falling by Patrick Raten Keefe. Patrick Raten Keef is back. This is his latest and it is a sweeping crime story about a 19-year-old kid who was found dead on the banks of the Tempames. It turns out he had been pretending to be a Russian oligarch and hanging out with literal London gangsters. And Patrick Renkeefe is digging intohow do they meet? What were the connections? What were the rues that they were all telling each other? What makes this book spectacular though is his eye as he's unfolding this story. Story is the main thing I want to emphasize here. His storytelling is peak. It actually opens with this view of the MI6 building and then it pans down to the temps and then he goes into the history of this family and then he goes to London's crime scene and that whole history. At one point we flash to Uganda and he weaves all of this together to show how it all culminated in this really really tragic death. The family at the center is mystified. They saw their son sliding into shady business, but also he was grown at this point. He's 18. He's legally an adult. He can do what he wants. Then they can't find him. And so you get this like story of this family not sure how to save their son. You get the story of a tragic death. You get this history of crime in London. And it's all woven together in a way that feels lively and immersive. It's so good.

MJ Franklin: I mean, it's the most obvious thing in the world to say like Patrick Red and Keith did it again, but he did it again. Um, and it is all the things that you said, but it is also about trying to understand the life of someone who is now dead, who you thought you knew and who you loved and who maybe you failed to help in some way. I found it very, in the end, very moving. All right, I have a last book that I want to discuss. This is probably some of the best reportage I've encountered in a very long time. This is Days of Love and Rage by Anand Gopal. This is a book of the Syrian Revolution told through the lives of the inhabitants of one town, Menbage, in Syria. and we are introduced to the most unbelievable cast of characters. There's a romance, there's a guy who practices MMA and Brazilian jiujitsu. There's the guy that owns the cell phone store. I mean, it like the level of detail about these individuals is astonishing. I cannot even imagine how the author was able to stitch together all this information especially it it you knowI think in a lot of way a lot of Syrian families are still really scarred from the secret police you know neighbors were snitching on each other nowhere felt safe and so for an outsider even with the best fixers in the world to be able to get this level of intimate detail I think is just an incredible feat. Another thing that I really like about this book is that I mean obviously I'm I'm sensitive to this for any number of reasons, but I do think when a lot of people think about these long bloody seemingly endless and internisin civil conflicts in far away places, they're like, "Oh, that's a that's not my problem. What do I care?" But this is the kind of book that shows you how human this is. And it's the value of having really intensely character-driven narratives. And I when it became clear to me just how entwined all these seemingly discreet individuals, how entwined their lives are, I actually had to like pause the audio book and take a minute. [music] Coming up, some books that didn't make our list of the best books of the year so far, but still captured our attention and affection. [music][music] So, Jima and MJ, I think we've established how serious we are about our best books of the year so far. How intensely we discuss these books in the room, how closely we read them. Everyone should go read our full list. I think we should talk about just some books that we loved that weren't on this list.

MJ Franklin: I'm going to go first.

Gilbert Cruz: Are you going to go first?

MJ Franklin: Clear the decks. Okay. I love I love American Han by Lisa Lee.

Joumana Khatib: Can confirm.

MJ Franklin: Yeah, because MJ sits behind me and I'm just sort of like, "Hey, have you guys heard about American Han?" And everybody's like, "Yeah, from you, you freak." It's so good. This is a debut novel. This has been an amazing year for debuts.

Joumana Khatib: Agreed.

MJ Franklin: I will admit this is the first time in recent memory that a blurb has gotten me to pick up a book because Perl Everett blurbed this book and I was like, "Oh, he says it's good. It's got to be good." Turns out Lisa Lee studied with Perl when she was doing her PhD in creative literature, which is how you know she's like kind of insane because nobody gets a PhD in creative literature. The book follows a Korean-American woman named Jane. We meet her when she's in law school. She's living in San Francisco. She grew up in Napa Valley. Her brother's a cop. Uh her parents are getting divorced, but Lisa Lee has comedic timing. She has emotional insight. She's able to stage scenes in such a beautiful way. There are all sorts of contemporary issues about police brutality and anti-Asian hate. And I just I can't say enough good things about this book. I think I described myself as being Tom Cruz on Oprah's couch crazy about this book. And I can confirm that is still the case.

Joumana Khatib: He was just enthusiastic.

MJ Franklin: I am enthusiastic.

Gilbert Cruz: His love for Katie Holmes.

MJ Franklin: Yeah. I well my Katie Holmes is a debut novel called American On.

Joumana Khatib: She's metaphorically jumping on a sofa right now. I also have a debut novel and that is Lost Lambs by Maline Cash. This came out in what January and it was like the hot book of the season. I say that because I remember trying to get a physical copy around one of the early blizzards that happened in the year and I could not find it. I stopped at so many bookstores. This is a silly, zany, playful family story. We have this family, it's crumbling for all types of reasons. The parents, their marriage is falling apart. One wants to open their relationship, the other does so reluctantly. They have a lot of drama happening in the relationship. They have three daughters. One daughter is dating a vet who may be a war criminal. One daughter is being radicalized online and the other is a genius and maybe a conspiracy theorist. A lot is happening. But this book, it's so fun. Humor writing is hard. Humor writing is hard cuz you want something to be funny, but you don't want something to be overplayed. Like, you just have to strike the right tone. And Maline Cash does it. There's bits on bits on bits here. If you're looking for a good time, read Lost Lambs. And again, this is a debut, so this is an author who came out the gate swinging.

Gilbert Cruz: I love to hear about debuts. I'm going to talk about someone who has been writing for decades. I'm going to talk about David Thompson. He has written a book titled A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of movies. This is essentially a booklong essay, a piece of historical criticism by a man who has written dozens and dozens of books about movies, about movie history. He has been an evangelist for movies over his entire career. Now he's in his 80s and he's like, "Movies may be bad. Maybe it wasn't our best idea." And he teases out this argument over hundreds of pages. I don't know that I agree with him at all, but I think it is a fascinating exercise that he has undertaken here. Part of the idea is have movies turned us into a culture not only in America but around the world who says I watch The Godfather, I watch bad people do things in movies and whether I understand it or not, I start to believe that these things are things that should be attainable. Gilbert, you love film. What was reading this argument against like for you personally? I don't agree with it. I think I am able to watch There Will Be Blood and not think Daniel played view that guy's got some ideas. He made some points. However, I also think someone like David Thompson who's thought about film literally his entire life. I want to engage with the mind of someone who's thinking deeply about art. And even if you disagree with it, which I do, one of the wonderful things about criticism is seeing someone think through their argument on paper. And if you care about movies and you care about films as I do, this was a great experience. I loved it. MJ and Jima, we talked about so many books, but somehow it still feels like we didn't talk about enough. There there are many more best books of the year so far uh that you can find over at nytimes.com. We're going to be back, the three of us, in a few months with a fall preview talking about all the big novels and pieces of uh non-fiction that will be coming out in September, October, November, which is historically a sort of jacked season for the big books. So, I'm looking forward to being back here on Mike with the two of you then. MJ, thank you so much for talking best books of the year so far.

MJ Franklin: Thank you for having me.

Gilbert Cruz: Shimana,

MJ Franklin: chaos agent as always.

Joumana Khatib: I'm gonna get jacked.

Gilbert Cruz: We're back, guys. We're [music] back.

Gilbert Cruz: We're back. We're so back.The book review [music] is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Subaran. It's edited by Tracy Mumford and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original[music] music by Dan Powell and Alicia Baup. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at thebookreview@nytimes.com. [music]I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.

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