Welcome to our 2022 end-of-year holiday extravaganza! In the spirit of holiday giving, we have a present for you, which, if we’re being honest, is also a present for us: BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS. Two dozen of them, in fact!
At the end of almost all the interviews we conducted this year, we asked our guests, “What’s one book you love and why do you love it?” We held back the recordings of their answers so we could share them with you now, with our gratitude for another year of book dreaming.
Go Deeper
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, by Azar Nafisi
1,001 Arabian Nights, by Anonymous
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran
We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, by Justin Fenton
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon
Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, by Bryant Terry
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
The Inheritors, by William Golding
Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, by Erika Krouse
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, by Angie Cruz
The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, by Mark Epstein
G. Heywood Hill Ltd, Old & New Books
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, by James Suzman
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild
Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins
Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett
Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives, by Walt Odets
The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, by Felix Salten, translated by Jack Zipes
Tistou, the Boy with the Green Fingers of Peace, by Maurice Druon
The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, by Margo Jefferson
Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s, by Margaret K. Nelson
The Immortal King Rao, by Vauhini Vara
Living My Life, by Emma Goldman
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry
The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, by Jackie Higgins
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed
Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, by Florence Williams
A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis