‘The Book Review’ Podcast Turns 20

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Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, Judy Bloom, Stephen King, I could go on and on and on. Even Keith Richards came through and I was sadly not here for that one. Today, to celebrate this august occasion, we're going to look back at the last 20 years in books, literary hits, fan favorites, scandals, and Scuttlebutt. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I have the ideal duo to mark the occasion with me, Tina Jordan, who has worked in and around books for 35 years and is now deputy editor of the Book Review. Tina, welcome. Hi, Gilbert. I'm Ben Dwight Garner, longtime book critic here at The Times and appropriately for this episode, the man who came up with the idea for this very podcast in the first place. Dwight, it's so great to have you here. Great to be here, Gilbert. So let's go back 20 years to when this podcast first came up. It's 2006. G.W. Bush was president. Twitter had just launched. We did not know the joys that this platform would bring us in the ensuing decades. The iPhone had not been invented yet. Thankfully, and just as the year kicked off, the book world was consumed with a scandal. I don't know what is true and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with the smoking gun report titled The Man Who Cond Oprah and I want to know where they write. I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate. Absolutely. In the January of 2006, there was a controversy involving a book called A Million Little Pieces. This was a big deal. Do you remember this? Of course I do. You know, it had this, just coming through the door, you felt this book had a bit of electricity. It had this great cover, this hand covered with sort of like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone and they evoked drugs. It was a bright cover and you just thought, this looks like something. There was a book by James Fry. It had come out in April 2003 and in September 2005, Oprah selected it as a selection for her book club, which had existed at that point for almost 10 years. It propelled it onto the best seller list and then Tina, what happened? What happened was Oprah had him on the show in October 2005 and something must have ticked off the people at the website called The Smoking Gun. Do you guys remember this website? I remember it only because of this book. Yes. So The Smoking Gun, I believe the last week in December, published a piece called A Million Little Lies and they took the book apart. Like they had found his arrest records, you know, basically everything he said had happened, you know, the girlfriend dying, the arrest, none of it had happened. And this was a memoir in which James Fry talked about his addiction to drugs and alcohol and his attempt to rehabilitate himself by going to a clinic. Correct. And interestingly, he had tried to sell this book as a novel and double day to whom he sold it said, wait, did all this stuff happen to you? Let's publish. This is a memoir. So they did and he actually told the Times later and I quote, it was written exactly as it was published. So he didn't change a word. And unlike most memoirs at the time, which came with like a little paragraph at the beginning saying, you know, this is how I remember it. Obviously, I've had to make up quotes, blah, blah, blah. There was none of that. This phenomenon of a memoir being written and then people finding out that some of it is not true or much of it is not true was not necessarily a new thing. Something that felt new to me at the time and Dwight correct me if I'm wrong was was the public shaming that that James received on live television when he had to go on Oprah in early 2006 and sit there as Oprah sort of confronted him about this. Yeah, it was it was ugly. There was something about James Fry that was a little bit confrontational, a little bit, you know, he was he was sort of a mailer lock. He was sort of, you know, puffed up and was ready to take on the world. And then seeing him drag low by Oprah was kind of a every writer's worst nightmare of sort of your fear of being revealed. And actually, this is every memoir is worse nightmare because, you know, we all know by now that memoirs are at least a slightly a species of fiction. I mean, you don't remember everything that happened to you in these conversations and we're aware of that. But to have someone actually track down everyone who knew you and re-report your own is I don't think something in any memoirs to want to go through. But this was an egregious case. Another book from that year that turned out to be a very big deal. And I'm going to turn to your Tina to talk about this one was Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. This was a memoir that was eventually, in addition to being a bestselling book was being into a movie starring Julia Roberts. I look this up. The title of the book has commas. The title of the movie does not have any punctuation. I didn't know that. It's just Eat Pray Love. No commas. Tell us about Eat Pray Love. All right. So Elizabeth Gilbert was this glamorous New York City journalist who had come through, I think, a divorce and a rebound relationship and decided she was going to chuck it all and go find herself and figure out what made her happy. And she went on this year-long trip which took her to India and Indonesia and Italy. And then she wrote a book about it. And the book, if I were to summarize it in a few lines, would be a woman always defined by her relationships, learns how not to do that. And it was incredibly polarizing, of course, because here was this, you know, grippledged woman who could take a year off to take this trip. But I think it touched a chord with people because at its heart what the book was about was we have so much. Why are we so unhappy? Yeah. She could also really write. I mean, the book is great, you know, and it inspires you to get out. It inspired a lot of women to sort of, you know, go and try to find themselves and some didn't have the experience she did or many didn't. Right. And it reminds me, because it's been a while since I've had to think about Ypres love, was it she went to one place and sort of like did a food thing. She went to another place, did a spiritual thing and something like that. Yeah, that's roughly right. And then went to another place and met a man. Would you say, Tina, that this is a self-help book? I would say this is a self-help book for a certain kind of woman. Did it signal something at the time or going forward about the type of self-help be type book that there would be? I think you saw certainly a lot of copycats and you saw a lot of books that were about women finding happiness for themselves. Not through their jobs, not through their partners, none of that. Yeah. What is the closest you've done to an Ypres love situation? One time I left my husband and children and went to Morocco for three weeks. Wow. Really? Yes. And the Canary Islands. And when I came home, my husband had gotten another dog. Three weeks. I had had it. I was done. I was done. Good on you. We're going to jump ahead to a book or a series of books that continue to resonate in the culture all these years later. This is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The first book came out in 2008. She published a trilogy and since then two prequels have been published. The most recent being last year, Sunrise on the Reaping. It was a big success last year. So almost 20 years on from the first Hunger Games book and it's still sort of a going concern. There's a movie version of Sunrise on the Reaping coming out later this year. What do you recall about this phenomenon, when it happened and sort of what it said about? Stopping fiction, YA fiction? I think it's the moment where YA fiction started to get really, really dark. I mean, the premise of the book, let's don't forget, is about teenage kids who fight to the death in a televised show. That's what the book is about. Yeah. And it inspired the same kind of fandoms that we saw with Twilight. The first Twilight book was 2005 and with Harry Potter for that matter. Right. Harry Potter, if I'm recalling correctly, the last book, the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had come out the year before? Yes. 2007. And I look this up. So I am going to say this because this is a crazy fact, but at least according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it was the fastest selling book in its first 24 hours of all time. That seventh Harry Potter book. So that series had just finished and Hunger Games comes in, you know, a year later and it kicks off its own, I don't want to call them copycats necessarily because it's derogatory, but its own set of books that sort of followed in its wake. You had the Divergent books, which came out in 2011, the Maze Runner books, which came out in 2009 and these are essentially all trilogies or they're about dark trilogies, dark YA trilogies about kids who are in dystopian societies. Right. But more than that, what all of these books had were a lot of adult readers. They weren't just books for kids. I mean, when you look back at the sales of YA during that time, they weren't just driven by, you know, middle school and high school kids. I mean, there was a whole group of twilight fans, the moms, I forget what they called themselves. Twi-Twy moms? Twy moms. Twy moms. That's terrible. I don't know. It was whatever it was. Like, they, that was a big part of like why these books were so successful. Yeah. Dwight, what do you remember about dystopian fiction around this time? Because two years before the Hunger Games in 2006, Cormac McCarthy's The Road came out and that was this moment where this sort of literary titan dipped into genre in a way by writing this dystopian book. Right. And now, of course, you know, dystopia, dystopia is the morsel at the end of every fork in terms of every novel you pick up. Even the most, I mean, we're living in this world that writers feel like they need to respond to. And the only way they can, I'm not speaking about every writer, but so many, even our best literary writers, just feel like in order to respond to this moment, they also almost have to go beyond it, almost to imagine where we might be in 10 years or so. And Hunger Games books were so, I remember my kids being so enveloped in them. They were just obsessive. And I remember just taking them to the strand to buy them on the days when they came out, you know, and they love them so much. I'm afraid to ask because I feel like you're putting this on your kids, but did you ever have a chance to read them? No. No. Why not? I don't know why not. I'm busy. He has so many books to read. Anyway, I should, you know, it should have. I was asking out of curiosity not to shame you. I think the Harry Potter books allowed to them, but by this point, my kids were able to read by themselves. So, you know, you lose your access to what they're reading when they start grabbing their own books. What are they reading now? My son loves the movie with the new Going to Mars movie. Oh, Project Hail Mary. He loves that writer. Andy Weir. Andy Weir. Yeah. And I need to read Andy Weir because my son keeps telling me how great those novels are. Dwight, I will tell you that Andy Weir was recently a guest on the podcast. So, I think you should do me a solid go back and listen to that episode. I'm happy to take any feedback you have. I shall. Okay. Tina, I'm going to go back to you just because you are the expert on this next topic, which is Nordic Noir, you know, sort of Scandi thrillers. Right. You know, we're talking here primarily about the Girl with the Dragon tattoo, which came out in 2008. It crystallized or popularized for many a genre that had been around for a very long time before this, but this was sort of like this moment when it exploded, at least in America. Right. You had seen Nordic Noir here before Henning Menkel, so on, but this was the huge novel. I think it had come out in Sweden three years before. It's about a disaffected journalist who hires a surly young hacker to help him solve the mystery of the disappearance of a young girl. And there was something about both of those characters that just grabbed American audiences. And those books were huge, but they also like opened these floodgates and American publishers could not pick up Norwegian and Danish and Swedish thriller writers fast enough. It was actually to the point where there was a shortage of translators. Is that so? It's true. Like if you can translate Norwegian thrillers, man, you earn a lot of money because there just weren't enough people to do it. To your recollection, what were some of those big authors that American audiences got to know after? I'm thinking of like Yo Nesbo. Yo Nesbo is probably the big one to mention. Henning Menkel became huge after. Like he's sold, I think, in small numbers. Right. And his series, which is one of his series, which is focused around a gentleman named Wallander, had been around for a while before the Dragon Tattoo, but it was something people started to pick up more after. What these books share is like an incredibly dark worldview. I mean, there's no redemption in most of these books. I mean, the crime gets solved, but horrible things happen. It is the most ironic thing because of course, I'm sure you both know every year the Nordic and Scandinavian countries are so high on the list of the happiest nations in the world. I don't know how that can be. Like you pick up one of these books. Like you pick up a Yo Nesbo and you're reading about Oslo and you're like, is this the Oslo I visited? Maybe this is why they're happy. You know, it's like the reason people watch horror movies to expunge the stuff. I was just going to say that's what it is. You're happy and you need to find a place for your sort of your dark impulses. Let's talk a little bit more about the Scandinavians. We should go to 2009, which is when in America, a book named My Struggle, or the first volume in a multi-book series by Carl Ovee Kanowskiard came out. Oh, God. He came out of nowhere, Kanowskiard. These books are set in Oslo. It's a series of novels. Basically, they're what we now call auto fiction. I mean, they're mostly about a character who is very much like him. And what is so powerful about them is just he's sort of unflinching about his own life. It's sort of the books are kind of simply written, although they're powerfully written. He has a strong voice, but it's like watching a man lay bricks and suddenly realize he's built the pyramids. You know, it's just this slow accumulation and you only realize how grand this stuff is once you get a bit of distance and view on it. The first two books, but it's like for this father and his childhood and sort of growing up, I think, are the best two in the series. And if you want to taste these books, those are the books to read. I even think book two is the great one. Can you, because I want to ask you a little bit more about this movement or this subgenre, how do we define the auto fiction or how do we understand it? I mean, we've reinvigorated. This is a new term, but it's an old thing. I mean, you know, Jane Eyre is auto fiction. You know, David Copperfield, Joyce, you know, Portovern artist is auto fiction. But we've come up with this new term for it and a flood of young writers have sort of reinvested this form with new energy, you know, a lot of them. I mean, I mean, not necessarily a youngish writer, but but Elena Ferrante's novels are often viewed through this lens. They're autobiographical to a degree, but not quite the way others are. We're talking here about people like Rachel Kusk in her outline trilogy. Sheila Heddy, who wrote a book on how should a person be? Teju Cole's novels about Nigerian immigrants and his own travels in Nigeria. And, you know, in a way, and Ben Lerner, his novel 10.04 and books like this. And I think Sheila Heddy's title, How Should a Person Be is such a it's almost the best book title of all time in my in my in my book, because that's what novels seek to find out, you know, in these. And by writing about themselves, they're investigating themselves to find out, you know, sort of how a person feels about being in the world. And yet I also, you know, I love these novels and I understand why why people sometimes say to me they hate them because as John Optiq once said, who wants to read another book about a writer? And but so I get both sides of this, but I'm a huge fan of these writers and what they're doing. Can I ask a question about Knausgard specifically? Yeah. If those books had been written by a woman, do you think they would have had the same impact? That is so hard to say. But I don't see why not. What do you think? I don't know. I feel like if a woman had been writing about changing diapers and cooking dinner and I don't know. I don't know. There's just something. It's the alchemy of the voice. And I think, you know, anyone running about there, I mean, I think it was Barbara Pym who said, you know, the novel she wants to read or just about a woman doing the dishes. Like that's the whole thing and what's going through her head. And these are, in a way, those kind of novels, you know, just investigating his own psyche. A lot happens in them, but it's all very minor things. There'll be a few pages about going to the bathroom. You know, I mean, it's just like, it's so good at just, you know, staring at things in a granular way. But, you know, he was, he was, he did go a long way. He put his face on these books, you know, he's a handsome man. And, you know, they were selling some sex, you know, especially in Oslo where he was a sex symbol. And, but yeah, it's a good question. I think it would be just successful, but it's a good thing to think about. Every photo I see of him just like, tousled hair, smoky a cigarette, like a coffee cup off in the corner piles of books. Can I, can I, this is a, this is possibly the place to say one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I was at a literary festival in Oslo and, and, and Knausgarb was down the way at a, you know, four or five seats away. And I picked up a cigarette because he was smoking and he said, hey, and he threw me his lighter and I missed it. That, that's the most emasculating thing I've ever heard Dwight. I'm so sorry. I'll never forget it. You mentioned Elena Ferrante. I want to stay a beat on this because what eventually came to be known as Ferrante Fever became such a major thing at least in literary fiction circles. The first book, My Brilliant Friend, was published here, translated and published here in 2011. There are four books that are now called the Neapolitan novels. The fourth book was published in 2015. It's called The Story of the Lost Child. This is a book that are 500, you know, authors and panelists called the best book of the 21st century so far. What, what do you remember about this, this moment and why these books, Tina, were so, so very popular? I remember women passing them around the same way we passed around, you know, are you there? God, it's me, Margaret, when we were, when we were in fifth grade. That's so good. It's so true. I remember it too with my wife and her friends. Yeah, we were all like, this is it, like, female rage. And what was it that, it's a story over these four books of two friends. Of two friends. In post-war Italy when the books start. Right, in post-war Italy two very different friends and fierce friendship that waxes and wanes over the years. And it, the books just capture all the messy, difficult, hard parts of being a woman. But she does not flinch. There also, I have to imagine, was a bit of a juice behind these books because of, of, of the mystery behind who the author is. Right. Do, do we know? Do we know, Tina? You know, there's been a... We kind of know. Do we know though? So Elena Ferrante is a name of an author whose true identity has never been officially confirmed. There have been lots of theories. There, you know, we've, we ran a story a few years ago about all the theories about who Elena Ferrante actually is. But at the time at least, you know, I don't know that anyone knew. And, and there was, there was this fun in like, who is this person? Right, right. It's, it's such a hard trick to pull off in the modern age. I mean, only Pinchin, I think, has, has done it in the way that she's done it. I mean, it just, and there are so many new ways of tracking a writer's DNA from, from his or her prose. And it's amazing that this mystery hasn't been fully cracked. Pinchon. Did you, did you know this? It was Pinchon. You say Pinchon? No, I don't think I say, I think that is the way to say it. Oh, I'm not going to say it to him if I ever meet him. It's Pinchin. All right. So, I can't, I can't learn a new way to say Pinchin at this age. Anyway. Fair enough. Dwight, a few years ago, the book review gathered as a reference 500 authors and like to vote on the best books of the 21st century. But in 2006, the book review looked back at the previous 25 years in great American fiction. And they came up with a list. And the only person who published a book that is still near the top of that list is Don Delillo, because all the other authors, Tony Morrison, whose beloved was at the top, Phillip Roth, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, they are all gone. Yeah. You know, it's funny, we've sort of found ourselves, I mean, you know, one of the salient points about the last 20 years is that we've lost this sort of post-war generation. I mean, Saul Bellow died in 2005, Norton Mailer 2007, John Updike 2009, Phillip Roth 2018, Tony Morrison 2019, Martin Amos 2023. These were sort of the figures that filled the public skies. I mean, you know, they were what American fiction was to a large degree during this period. And to sort of have them all vanish in this period, it's been interesting to watch who is going to kind of replace them. And in our culture, we may never replace them. You know, our culture has become so bifurcated, just the same way music has, that we'll never agree on things the way we agreed about these writers. You know, for whether that was good or bad, there was sort of a mass consensus that doesn't exist anymore. And anyway, but it's, you know, we're seeing a new generation come up now. We're still the Franzons and the Zadie Smiths came up behind these writers. And now there's a new generation, but no one has quite, I think, filled their shoes. Yeah. Tina, we're going to talk about one of your favorite topics, historical fiction. That is one of my favorite topics. In 2009, there was a book published called? Wolf Hall. What a book. I know, what a book. So this is the first of Hillary Mantell's trilogy of books about Thomas Cromwell, the real life historical advisor to Henry VIII. The other books are Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. And these books were a-plamed and they were popular. And historical fiction as a genre, again, has been around forever. But this was sort of a moment when so much energy coalesced around these books. And then they exploded, I feel like, to where historical fiction is one of the more popular genres in fiction. I agree. And at the point where when Wolf Hall came out, historical fiction was sort of in decline. There was not nearly the same amount being published. It didn't. It wasn't selling. And then here came these beautifully written and researched books that immersed you in Tudor England in a story where, hey, you knew what the outcome was going to be, but you were still completely riveted. And it, that and then-so Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, I think both of those won the Booker. Is that right? I think so. I think that's right. And historical fiction just exploded. I actually went and did a quick look at recent Pulitzers and 12 of the last 15 Pulitzers for historical fiction have gone to historical fiction, which is astonishing to me. Let's move to 2010. Just to take you back, remind you what was happening in the world then. Many of us were on Facebook still. The iPad had just come out. Spotify was in its very earliest days. And that year, two great books came out, two memoirs by Rockstars. Life, which was a Keith Richards memoir and Just Kids by Patty Smith. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, our ideas about the Rock memoir have really changed in the past 20 years. I mean, these books used to be mass market quickies. And I miss, we pause for a moment to mourn the loss of mass market books, but there were little thin books you'd put in your pocket. And they were about, I don't know, they're about Pink Floyd or something, and you would carry it around. But they were quickies and there's something to be said for quickies. Sometimes a dashed off book is kind of what you want to read about something. I want to read 400 pages. But books like Keith Richards, books like Bob Dylan's memoir, Patty Smith's memoir, Elvis Costello wrote a great one. Lucinda Williams is pretty good. Gil Scott Huron, did I say Springsteen already? His book is so well written. Born to Run. Yeah, Born to Run. I mean, I was just floored by it. And I don't think he had a ghost writer. I was sorry to learn that Lucinda did have one because I think she's such a great lyricist. And Lucinda, you could have written that yourself. What had been better? Anyway, I just think we've suddenly come to take this genre much more seriously. We expect more from these writers who are writing about their careers. But I think the interesting thing is and why we like them so much is they're much more unvarnished and franker. Like Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, they don't care about burning bridges. I mean, any actor who writes a memoir, I don't care how old they are, it's still going to be carefully couched, right? Like these rock memoirs are pretty, they're pretty blunt. And there is something about the fact that musicians are often songwriters. They're often writers in their own, in their own right as opposed to actors or what have you. And so maybe it's more likely that someone who writes songs, someone who's creative in that way will be more likely to write a book that feels true, that has good writing or something. No, I think it's definitely true. We're all, you know, it's slightly outside the scope of this 20 year period, but you referenced Bob Dylan's memoirs came out in 2004, Chronicles Volume 1. We're all waiting for Volume 2. It'll be the biggest joke and totally appropriate for Bob Dylan if he titled it Volume 1 with no intention of ever writing a Volume 2. I don't think we're going to see that book. I don't see it coming either. What a weird... He's still out there doing it, but it doesn't, I don't know, it's, you know... He is, he is the best and he's so weird and he's the best. We're going to take a break and when we come back, we are going to pick up with another turning point, one of the literary classics of these past 20 years, 50 Shades of Grey. We'll be right back. Next time you press play on your favorite podcast, why not take it for a relaxing day? For more on the next Richie Brothers auction on the 13th and 14th of May now, head on over to auction.co.uk Not gate, for walkies with your best friend. We're the charity that cares for 2,000 miles of canals and rivers. With your support, we'll do everything we can to protect them for the future. Find out how you can help protect the canals you love at canalrivertrust.org.uk Okay, Tina. 50 Shades of Grey by EL James came out in 2011. It was a book that started as Twilight fan fiction. It did. We talked about Twilight, the sort of four book series of vampire romance novels. And EL James ended up writing a trilogy of books, 50 Shades of Grey, 50 Shades Darker, and 50 Shades Free. Why were these books so popular? These books were so popular because they were great smut. Can I just say that on the air? Yeah, so what are they actually about? They're about a kink relationship between an older man and a younger woman. Three books, it is a little over long. There is sex on almost every single page. That is what you read it for. EL James can write sex. The rise of these books and the success sort of coincided with the Kindle. 50 Shades of Grey was the best-selling book of the decade, alright? And the Kindle came out in 2007, so it had been around for a few years. It had been around, okay? But so here was a book where maybe you didn't want people to, you know, see you reading it on the subway, right? Like, you could be reading these books and no one would know. Something like the almost all of the first 250,000 copies sold were digital copies, which was just unheard of at that time. We, at the time in 2012, we had a story by then publishing reporter Julie Bosman, and it sort of detailed the rise of these books and how the e-book sales, as you say, were really the thing that helped it. It was initially published by a small Australian indie press, print copies, word short supply, and so it was those e-book sales that really propelled it to prominence and led to it being picked up by a major publisher for a seven-figure deal. Knopf, no less. Sunny Meta bought it. Smart guy. Smart guy, right? But also, like, these books sort of, they really legitimized the romance novel part of the business. And don't forget that romance novels, even though they were a billion-dollar part of book publishing, and probably subsidized, you know, much of the rest of the business, they'd always sort of been looked down on. And boy, after these books, all of that changed. I've never read these. I'm sorry to admit. Should I start tonight? I think you can give them a skip. You sure? I don't have anything else to read. I'll find something better. Okay. In 2012, there was a giant thriller that came out, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. This was another massive hit, something that started its own little subgenre, made into a great, I thought, movie, starred Ben Affleck. And it kicked off this idea that had been in mysteries and thrillers, for as long as mysteries and thrillers have been around, of the untrustworthy female narrator. What is this book about, and why was it such a big deal? So the book is about a marriage gone bad, and as the book opens, you... the wife is missing, and you suspect something has happened to her. And you hear the story of the marriage in alternating chapters. The thing is, it's not just one untrustworthy narrator here, it's two. It's the husband and the wife. And you're right when you say that the untrustworthy narrator had been around, but often the untrustworthy narrator was like somebody who was just... wasn't setting out to deceive, they just sort of didn't know what was going on. Like, these two characters want to manipulate you, and it was pretty intoxicating. Why was this such a big hit? Because it was really well written. It is a really well written book. I was surprised when it did not end up on our list of the top 100 books of the 21st century. I was stunned. It's smart, it's well written, it's like nothing you've ever read before. The twist is genuinely shocking. So many novels came in the wake of this book with the word girl in it, which of course is like one of the most common words in the English language, but this idea of dark thrillers with potentially untrustworthy narrators in which the title had the word girl in it. Yeah. They're girls on trains, they're girls in windows. They're all over the place. They're all over the place. Final girls, missing girls, luckiest girl alive. Girl with a pearly ring. That's before. I want to use this time to say something that I think many people believe, which is that she needs to publish another book. She does. It's been 14 years. Obviously, Gillian Flynn doesn't need to do anything she doesn't want to. She certainly doesn't need to listen to me, but I have enjoyed all of her books, and I am sort of sad that it has taken so long, and we still haven't seen a new one. She's been working in TV and movies. She wrote the screenplay for GOM girl and co-wrote the screenplay for a movie called Widows, which is a great movie that is totally under scene, but come back. Come back, Gillian. I know you have your own publishing in print. I know you're listening to this right now. Please come back and write a book. Write your own book. We miss you. This is why writers, I mean, it's important with a big success, I think, for this or many writers. So, publish another book quickly because the anticipation starts building, and then if you wait too long, it's become this thing, this enormous weight to equal the previous thing. I totally get that. If I were to put myself in her shoes the longer time goes by, the more anticipation there is. It's already been almost a decade and a half. It's too much. Listen, I think she's a great writer. Just put it out there. Dwight, speaking of great writers, 2015, a book came out that you, when you worked on a project at the book review about the funniest book since Catch-22, put on the list. This is a book called The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Paul Beatty. Yeah, it's sort of, you know, it's set in LA. It's just this wild, scabrous satire of black life in LA. And you feel a direct connection between someone like Richard Pryor in this novel. I mean, he's aiming for the stars. He's pinwheeling. This is Money Python meets Richard Pryor. And it's been a while since I'd read a book quite like that in terms of its topicality dealing with situations in LA. And it also has this, it bends into weird places. I mean, it's, there are weird scenes in it and, you know, horses galloping through the streets and things that don't always make sense, but yet they make narrative sense to this book. And talk about writers who haven't published a book for a while. I mean, we haven't seen another book from him since this book came out. And I miss his voice. It's funny. These sort of, we've had so many great, great books by black writers this decade. This is maybe the funniest one, you know, which is, and Colson Whitehead can be very funny as well, by the way, I'm sure we've talked about him enough in this, in this, but yeah. And also, you know, Paul Beatty edited this anthology of black humor, which is one of the best anthologies that I think anyone's ever put together, sort of historically, you know, and it just, it sort of recasts African American experience in this country. And I just, I just think he, he's all that. Yeah. It was also interesting because he was the first American to win, what I would argue is, is one of the biggest, if not the biggest prize in English language publishing right now, which is the Booker. The Booker. There was a moment for most of his existence, the Booker Prize was something that you had to be an author who was a citizen of England or the British Commonwealth or Ireland or several other places. It was never open to Americans. In 2016, the Sellout won the Booker Prize. George Saunders won the Booker Prize the following year for Lincoln in the Bardo, and several writers have, have won since. It was a big deal at the time. I feel like the fact that the Booker has assumed its preeminent position in sort of the literary publishing award firmament. In some part goes back to this because once you open it to any book in the English language, you open the audience of people who care about the Booker Prize and the way that they do now. I agree with that. At the same time, I am sympathetic to those people who wish it had remained a UK phenomenon only because I remember, you know, when it would often introduce you to writers who'd never heard of before, which was part of its draw. And, and I guess that the heyday of the book was back before the internet. And so we really knew less about a lot of these writers than we sort of introduced to us by the Booker Prize. And now it's, you know, it sort of competes with the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It's like one of the, you know, three. But yeah, I mean, Bady deserved it. I want to linger on on literary prizes for a moment because something happened in the period of time that we're talking about here, the 20 years of the existence of this podcast that I argue was crazy, which was for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzers did not award a Pulitzer for fiction. This happened in 2012. I believe two of the finalists were Trained Dreams by Dennis Johnson and Swamplandia. Yeah. The third one was The Pale King by David Foster Wise. And I think it was one of, it made people understand like what happens at the Pulitzers, which is you have a fiction committee that recommends a winner to the Pulitzer board and they in turn can say, yeah, or nay. Yeah. And so they didn't think any of those books. It is so, it's so bizarre to me to assign a task to a jury and say, you have to read a ton of books. Those books are brought to the board. Certainly very few people on that board read more fiction than anyone on the jury whose job it was specifically to read fiction and they can take a vote. And if they don't reach a majority, there's no Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Right. It's it is absolutely wild. Listen, in 1977, the previous time this happened, that was the year of Gravity's rainbow. People were apoplectic. Well, we get things wrong all the time. One time or two times in which we did not get something wrong, Dwight, to go back to an author that you talked about was when the Pulitzer board awarded Colson Whitehead twice the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2017 for the Underground Railroad and in 2020 for the Nickel Boys, making him one of only a handful of authors who has received the Pulitzer twice for fiction. The others being John Updike and Willem Faulkner and our favorite, Booth Tarkington. Yes, Booth Tarkington. Don't forget him. Colson Whitehead is amazing. Yeah, Colson. I mean, I still remember the days when he was just, he was the TV critic of the Village Voice, you know, and you felt in his critical prose that you're dealing with a major, major writer already. And I just remember that. And when he started writing fiction, it came out of the gate and you just sort of knew this was a special voice. God, some people just have it. 2018, Tina. Yes. Where the Crawl Dads Sing by Delia Owens. Right. This was a book that Reese Witherspoon's book club sort of propelled into public view. Celebrity book clubs, you know, became, were, and still in some ways, drive the publishing industry. Oprah started in 1996, but then you had all these other people come in. You had all these other people come in. Reese was definitely the biggest. I believe she started the year before where the Crawl Dads sings, which seemed an unlikely pick for her. This novel about a young girl basically growing up in the swamps of North Carolina. Yeah. And indeed, she wasn't the sole reason that this book became as big as it did, but she's certainly what got it started. And, you know, soon you had Read with Jenna. You had all these other smaller celebrity book clubs. You had President Obama's reading list. That's a celebrity book club. That is a celebrity book club. I mean, he, well, just to touch briefly on smaller lists, but I feel like there's a younger generation who is paying attention to Dua Lipa's book club, Service 95 and Kaye Gerber's book club, Library Science. Emma Roberts has Bellatrist. You know, you have these sort of younger, largely female stars who are making books part of their brand as well. I agree. And very hipster books, can I just say? Is that a judgment? Are you saying that? I'm just like, just go and look at the books they pick and you'll see what I mean. President Obama is not a hipster book guy. You know, when he started his summer reading list in 2009, it was a huge deal. And then he left office and he started releasing year-end lists for books and movies and music, really, really horning in on our territory here. Just, you know, shots fired this way. Why was that a big deal when he started putting out his lists? You know, it was so clear that he was actually reading these books, right? Was it? I think it was. You know, he... I wonder, but I bet he's... More often than not. I bet he's turned most of the pages. Okay. Well, one of the great things about Obama's list is sort of took you back. We like to think that our president swims in the same cultural waters that people do, you know, and that, you know, he reads books, he pays attention to music. It's just a sign of a curious mind. And it takes you back to sort of JFK, you know, in that you're being interested in culture. I do have a quibble, though, with his lists. I don't love them for this reason. They feel very focused group to me. There's something for everyone. They don't feel like a real person's reading this to me. I mean, people read idiosyncratically, and I'm sure he does, too. And this list feels a bit like, let's find, you know, something for every person on your Christmas list. Yeah. So that's my slight drawback. I don't find any surprises on there. I think you're right. And I think it's probably, you know, he's the former president. Like, he can't be as sloppy as the rest of us. Or as, you know, there are lots of people who are like single issue readers. I only read big histories. I only read thrillers. And then there are other people who are sloppy as hell, and they're just sort of all over the place. It's totally unpredictable. I think he needs to fall somewhere, somewhere in the middle. I hope that when he writes his memoirs, when he's aged, he'll write about the books he really read during this period. I'm not saying he didn't read these at all, but I bet he read a lot of books that don't make these lists. And that was more true to his actual reading. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great over and over again. On a Kindle. Tina, we're going to jump ahead to 2020 when the book American Dirt was published. Oh boy. This was, this was, you don't talk about controversies. This was a book that was published in January 2020. It's by Janine Cummins. And it's a book about a mother and son, this fiction trying to get out of Mexico and head to the U.S. in order to escape drug cartel violence. When it came out, it was a big deal. The publisher had put so much energy behind it. It had a million blurbs. And then it started to get some scathing opinions, I would say. It did. Yeah. From one reviewer in particular who accused the author of perpetuating racist stereotypes. Yes. And there was an outcry. There was an outcry. There was also, you know, there was an accusation that the author had overstated her Hispanic heritage. There are also these photos that came to light from a pre-publishing party, if you recall. Yes. In which some of the centerpieces were, should have been rethought perhaps. I believe there was barbed wire involved in some of the centerpieces. Yes. So there, just a lot of stuff happened at the same time. And all of a sudden, the question about is this book too problematic? Is this person the right person to write about, you know, Hispanic life, et cetera? Right. It didn't help that she referred to her husband as an undocumented immigrant. In the context it sounded like he was from Mexico, but in fact he was from Ireland. I'm sorry. I don't mean to laugh, but... It also doesn't help that she said, I think in an interview, but possibly in the, the professor, the acknowledgments that somewhat, maybe somebody browner than she should have written this book. Yeah. That also did. But I want to be very clear that it was the publisher who bore the brunt of this and not her. Right. Like the, those, the tone deaf marketing, you know, the barbed wire party decorations. Like it led to this big discussion of how publishing signs up books, right? You have this overwhelmingly white industry, and it is overwhelmingly white even today. They're the ones buying these books. And the way it went was, you know, maybe they're not looking hard enough for other people to tell these stories. And that's what this really became. It also coincided with, to use an overused phrase, but I cannot think of an alternative one at the moment, the racial reckoning that occurred in the wake of George Floyd's death in, in May of that year of 2020. And the conversation started in the world of books, in the world of publishing. And in many of the, you know, spheres of popular culture across this country about who's in charge, who are the gatekeepers and who can write whose story. If you are a person who primarily identifies as white, can you write a story of a Mexican family, for example, in the case of this book? Dwight, you want to talk about some good books. And you're using the publication of 2021's Crying in H Mart, a book by Michelle Zonner, who's a musician who records under the name Japanese Breakfast. You know, this was a memoir that sort of mixes food with her personal life and her story of her family. This is something that it feels like a lot of writers did in this 20 year period. I'm thinking of a book by the chef Gabriel Hamilton, which is a book about food, but it's also a book about growing up, you know, in Pennsylvania in the 70s or whatever it was. Right. That was Blood, Bones and Butter. And, you know, there was this explosion of food memoirs during this period. It began with, you know, Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain entering the scene early in the 2000s and books like Bill Buford, Dirt and Heat, I believe, were his books. And you know, Michelle Zonner, I mean, who knew that this, you know, this woman, best known as a musician, writes this book and it's really good. And she had this built-in audience which came to it, but that's not why the book sustained its popularity. It's become a cultural touchstone. I mean, it reflected, you know, American appetites, you know, the way we've expanded what American food means over the last 20 years in a way that's just been extraordinary to see. And her book captured that. And, you know, Gabriel Hamilton, I mean, not every chef has a story to tell, but she really did growing up in this food family, in kind of difficult family at times. And Bill Buford's Heat, his books work because he's just this master investigator, you know, he just dives deep into these situations, traveling to France and, you know, working for, you know, great restaurants and he's just a good observer, you know, when he takes you into these places and makes you realize why these things, you know, in a way, food doesn't matter. But were it to matter, he tells you why. If you want to care about the stuff, he will tell you why this stuff might matter to your life and why food might be a gateway into aesthetics in general, you know, to reading, to art, to literature. And that's why they're so good. He's a man after your own heart. I would say so. Yeah. I am going to bring this conversation to a close by asking you, Tina, to talk about the biggest thing in books over the past several years, I would say, which is so multiple things related. It's the rise of romance fiction, the rise of Bookstagram, the rise of Booktok as a platform by which people make recommendations to each other. And then the rise of Romanticy, which is this portmanteau word that combines romance and fantasy. All of these things are intertwined with one another and they have driven the book industry over the past several years to an extent that nothing else has. Right. So, TikTok, I believe, started in 2017. The first Booktok hashtag is like two years later, but during the pandemic is when it really exploded. And if you go back and watch, especially some of these early, you know, Booktok videos, they're very emotional. They're like, people fling books across the room. That became the cliche. That became the cliche. Right. And the first hits that came out of Booktok were actually old books, Song of Achilles from 2011. We were Liars by E. Lockhart. They weren't new books. And so publishers were perplexed by demand and didn't understand where this was coming from. Like, The Times ran a story on Song of Achilles and the publisher and the author were like, we didn't know what was going on. We didn't know where this demand was coming from, but they wised up really fast. And booksellers did too. You walk into any, not just a Barnes & Noble, but in any independent bookstore and you would see a table of like the big recommended Booktok books right there up front. And so as far as Romanticy goes, like one of the first writers who was championed was Sarah J. Moss. Right. And then the author of the Acatar series, if I'm saying the abbreviation, a Court of Thorns and Roses. A Court of Thorns and Roses, right? That's what I call it. So both her and Rebecca Yaros, the fourth wing, like Booktok got behind those in a big way and pretty much, I don't know how much time you spent looking at the New York Times bestseller list, Gilbert, but there was a period. It's what I do every night before bed. Yeah. There was a period of time where like half the books on there were Romanticy. Does it feel like that moment has peaked? Are we cresting a little? We're cresting. Romanticy sales are dropping. Publishers are scrambling frantically to figure out what will be the next Romanticy. Yeah. Tina, what will be the next Romanticy? No idea. Seriously. You can make a lot of money if you... Yeah. Let's get this on Polly Market. After the break, we'll find out just how well Dwight and Tina have remembered the past 20 years in books with a super fun and I assure you not at all contentious quiz. Oh, big yacht, the Lexus bragging about money. Those are just props. That's not the engine. That's not the emotion that my music is running on. That is, of course, Jay-Z. I'm John Caramanica. One of the critics behind the New York Times is 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me, like a creative writing prompt or something. These are not ordinary conversations. These creative superstars are sharing parts of their process in ways that you rarely have access to. On top of the mad task of picking only 30 people, we also went out and got some music world heavyweights to weigh in. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project at nytimes.com slash 30 Greatest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our picks. I bet you won't. Tina Dwight, if there's one thing you know about me, I said I love books. If there's another thing you know about me, I said I love books and games. And if there's a third thing you know about me, I said I love books and games and causing my wonderful colleagues slight embarrassment. So we're going to wrap up this banner anniversary episode of the podcast by playing a little game. This game is going to be in four rounds. Because this is a book review podcast, we're going to call them four chapters. I'm going to explain the rules of each chapter as we go in. Please wait until I finish reading the entire clue before buzzing in. Tina, are you ready? I'm ready. Dwight, are you ready? I am ready. Excellent. Hands on buzzers. Let's play. Chapter one, which is called Thinking Fast and Slow. Every year, as you both know, the book review staff meets to think both fast and slow, argue, cry, and laugh about our favorite books of the year. Ultimately, we arrive at our list of the 10 best books of the year. I imagine the two of you might remember some of these meetings with some fondness and maybe with whatever the opposite of fondness is. I'm hoping mostly you remember the list because that's what this round is about. I'm going to give you three books that all appeared on our 10 best list of that year. You're going to name the year. Hands on buzzers. First question, The Looming Tower by Laurence Wright, The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel. What year? Dwight. 2008. That is incorrect. Tina. 2015. That is also incorrect. These are from 2006, which is the very first year of the Book Review podcast. Do I get points for being closer? You get points for being right. So let's try to be right. Next question, Freedom by Jonathan Fransen, Room by Emma Donahue, and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Tina. 2010. 2010. Correct. Nice. Nice. You look like your guest, but you got it right. All right. All right. The Great Believers by Rebecca McKay, There There by Tommy Orange, and Educated by Tara Westover. Tina. 2018. That is correct, and you should know because that was your first year on the Book Review. That's the only reason I know. Well done. Trust by Hernand Diaz, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and Stay True by Hwasu Dwight. 2024. Close. Tina. 2025. 2022. You know, can I say something? People have talked about how decades you've stepped feels, you know, the 80s felt like something, the 90s felt like something, and somehow the years, these past 20 years, it's hard sometimes to... I don't know if you guys feel the same way. If you want to blame COVID for your performance in this round, I will accept. I just remembered I had long COVID. All right. Last grouping of books in this chapter, here we go. Angel Down by Daniel Krauss, The Director by Daniel Helman, and Mother Mary Comes to Me by Aaron Dottie Roy. Tina. 2025. 2025. That is correct. If neither of you have gotten that right, I would have had to throw you both out on this booth. That is the end of chapter one. Let us flip the page to chapter two, which is called Salvage the Bones. This is pretty straightforward. Answer these questions about major literary events from the last 20 years. Among the mid-century books giving a second life by enthusiastic book reviewers on TikTok and Instagram is what 1965 John Williams novel about an English professor at the University of Missouri? Dwight. Stoner. Stoner. That is correct. Well done. Next question. Among the writers whose work has appeared on multiple Obama reading lists over the last 17 years is what author of, quote, Southern Noir crime fiction whose novels appeared on Obama's summer reading lists in 2022, 2023, and 2025? Tina. SA Cosby. SA Cosby. That is correct. Next question. Over the past 20 years, the Book Review podcast has featured interviews with a ton of major authors, sometimes more than one per episode. One notable 2009 episode of the podcast predates me, featured a conversation with Stephen King, as well as an interview with what tennis legend about his memoir titled Open? Dwight. Andre Agassiz. That is correct. That's a good book. All right. We're doing great here. Next question. Romance and YA novelist Colleen Hoover has become one of the bestselling authors of recent years. In 2022, her novels reportedly sold more copies than what perennially bestselling religious text? Tina. The Bible. The Bible. Heard of it? Next question. Dad Brown's The Da Vinci Code famously spent 136 weeks on top of the New York Times bestseller list. That's our list. Dad Brown has published four more novels centered on adventuring symbologist Robert Langdon. All four of them went to number one on our list. Name one of them. No Brown heads. No. In the house. Those novels are The Lost Symbol, Inferno, Origin, and The Secret of Secrets. That is the end of chapter two. I don't like those books. That is not your main to the question of whether or not you remember their titles. We're going to move to chapter three, which is called Say Nothing. Audio books have become an increasingly popular way for readers to experience books. I'm going to play you a clip of a famous person reading an audio book. You get one point if you can name the famous person reading and you get another point if you can name the book that they are reading. Here's a hint. This is the one place in this episode where we are going to deal with some books that are not necessarily from the last 20 years. Let us begin. Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of our town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the star-spangled banner. What spoke to us made us feel special and seen. Do either of you know the person reading or the name of the book being read? I thought for a second it's not like Meryl Streep, but she has not done this and it's not her. Dwight, you should have buzzed in because it was Meryl Streep. Oh, no way. I always thought it. Meryl Streep, reading Tom Lake by Anne Patchett, which only came out a few years ago. So you were definitely on the right track there. Okay, we're going to go to our next pairing of reader and book. When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull gray Tuesday, our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Anyone? Yep. Well, I mean, it's Harry Potter. Do you have to name the individual book, individual Potter title? No. No. Yes. Harry Potter. Yes. I'll name it. And the narrator is so famous and I know it and my kids know it and my wife knows it. I can't remember his name. I believe this is the first book, which is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, or if you live in the United Kingdom, Harry Potter and the Flosser's Stone. And the... Jim? Jim? Audio book narrator is... Jim Somebody. Okay, it doesn't count. The audio book narrator is Jim Dale. Jim Dale. I will leave it to our scores to figure out how to apportion points there while we move on to our next clue. In Santholmingo, the land he loved best, what Oscar at the end would call the ground zero of the New World, the Admiral's very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large. White. Well, Junodia is... That's his novel. The Oscar wow? What's the full title? The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wow. Yes. Who is really a... I don't know. It is a Lidmanuel Miranda is reading that. Tina, are you tanking this? Put your finger on your spacebar. You got to be in it to win it. Okay, fine. All right. Next clue. While Tom was eating a supper and stealing sugar as opportunity offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile and very deep, for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Dwight. Nick Offerman is reading. Correct. It's Twain. It's... Oh, Tom Sawyer. It is the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Very good. Let us finish off this highly successful quiz with chapter four, which is titled The Line of Beauty. Since we have started recording the Book Review podcast, 20 novels have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As we discussed, no award was given in 2012, but two books won in 2023. In this round, I'm going to give you the first line of a novel that has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction since 2006, and you are going to tell me the title of said novel. Tita is audibly excited. Okay. Book number one. When he woke in the woods in the dark in the cold of the night, he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Dwight. The Road. The Road. Correct. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Next book. The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no. Dwight. The Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad by Coulson Whitehead. Correct. Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise. His was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. Benjamin Rask? Okay. That is Trust by Hernan Diaz. Oh, yeah. Okay. Next, first line. First, I got myself born. Is it Jeffrey Eugenides? The Good Guest, but it's not Jeffrey Eugenides. Also that's an author, not the name of the book. True. This is Demon Copperhead, which is the book that won the Pulitzer alongside Trust. Got it. Okay. Next clue. Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. Tina. James. James by Percival Everett. That is correct. You guys look so excited to have done this. We both did better than I would. Unfortunately, we have to have a winner and someone who's not the winner. Our producers are telling me that Dwight Garner. This means two extra weeks of vacation, right? Dwight Garner. You have won the Book of You podcast 20th anniversary episode quiz. Rarely has a winner felt more like a loser. Let's do it again in 20 years. I don't have anything for you. I want to buy you a cocktail somewhere. Dwight, Tina, thank you so much for coming on. And looking back at the past 20 years and publishing the past 20 years in the Book of You podcast, I had such a good time, Tina. Thank you so much. I had a great time except for the quiz. Dwight, thank you so much. This was fun. The Book of You is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl with help this week from Quizmaster, Alex Barron. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Traditional music by Dan Powell and Alicia by E2. Special thanks to Dalia Haddad. We always want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at thebookreviewatnytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening. 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