My staff was like, books? No, no, they love books. No, they love books. I'm teasing. But I get to do whatever I want, so it's great. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. This is the last episode of the year, and we know that everyone is running out of time in their holiday shopping list. You might expect me to come out with a tech wish list.
But I'm going analog this year, books. I used to read a ton when I was younger. And then I stopped because I got onto the internet. And I've been, you know, it's the black hole of information. And so you're always going to the next thing. But I have started reading.
reading books in book form, although I do read on my screen a lot, too. I'm not one of those people who is against either way. I also listen to a lot of books. It depends on the author. I'm right now listening to Rachel Maddow's prequel, for example. I'm reading Daniel Mason's books. I love Northwoods, and now I'm going down the Daniel Mason rabbit hole. And so I think it's really important to think and talk about books. And, of course, they've been in the news a lot because of book-based books.
Bannings and about whether how the book industry is doing actually surprisingly better than people thought it would. So we'll we'll see about that. But I thought it was important to bring in two of my favorite critics besides my wife, Amanda, Becca Rothfeld from the Washington. in post. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant reviewer. And Dwight Garner.
Equally brilliant from the New York Times. They're great writers in their own right. Dwight is the author of the Upstairs Delicatessen on eating, reading, reading about eating, and eating while reading. What's Not to Like, which came out in 2023. Becca's debut book, All Things Are Too Small Essays in Praise of Excess, was published earlier this year. This is my book I'm going to read over the holidays. So I'm excited to talk about the good and the bad and the ugly.
with them and a little bit about how the publishing industry is doing. Plus, we might get some good book recommendations ahead of the holidays. By the way, they disagree about a lot of things, and that's great, too. So a little present from us to you. How much money do you make?
My name is Vivian Tu, better known as your rich BFF and your favorite Wall Street girly. My podcast, Net Worth and Chill, is back and better than ever for season two. We've got finance experts and your favorite celebs answering all those taboo money questions you've been too afraid or too embarrassed. At Criminal, we've made it a tradition every December to dedicate an episode entirely to animals. who we're really going for.
Random pig just came up and started following me. A pig, you said? Yes. I'm Phoebe Judge. Listen to this story and more on Criminal wherever you get your podcasts. Support for On With Care Swisher comes from Elf Beauty. Get ready to start with feeling good and else new album can help you find the spark. Get ready with music. The album is a collection of inspiring songs from emerging global artists that brings together beauty and music in a unique way.
The album comes from Elf Beauty's new entertainment arm, Elf Made. Every eye, lip and face has a unique story to tell and it becomes even richer with a soundtrack. You can enjoy Get Ready With Music the album on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart, YouTube and TikTok. Dwight and Becca, thanks for being on ON. Thanks for having us. Thank you.
We're going to talk about this thing called books. You heard of them? I don't know. Most of the population has not. I know, exactly. I think it's the best technology ever. Not just analog books, but books in general. Think of two technologies I think work really well. The egg.
The egg is a perfect vehicle for delivery of egg and the book. It's a technology and people don't think of it that way, but I do. Actually, I want to start. How do you guys read now? I do read on my phone. I read everything on my iPhone. I'm just curious just to get the tech stuff out of the way. Dwight, why don't you go first? Yeah, you know, I read a lot on my phone. I read all my magazines there and newspapers and book review sections and social media where I find a lot of this stuff.
When it comes to... Books, I read print. I think the reasons why that I'm a big marker upper and I love to underline things and write notes to myself. And, you know, when you're in high school, you write symbolism in the corner. Well, I don't write that anymore, but I make notes of things that I love, you know.
I go back through my books and I write some of the stuff that I love down in a commonplace book that I keep. But that's another topic. I will note, right behind both Dwight and Becca are huge amounts of books. Me, it's just a view of my apartment. Becca, what about you? How do you read?
I mean, I try my hardest to read as little on screens as possible because I find it just changes the quality of my attention. I never read a book on a screen. Like I tried to bring a Kindle with me when I was hiking the Tour de Mont Blanc because it's like a 10-day hike and I just couldn't do it. So I had to.
haul books around with me. Magazines, I do subscribe, and I try to read things in print when I can, but I read sometimes on my computer, generally. My phone screen is a little small for me. And why do you do that? You suddenly go over to... I don't know, threads or blue sky or what? What does it do to your attention span? Is it just ruin it?
Well, I'm also a big annotator of books. And so I find that the kind of physical action of writing or underlining helps me remember things better. But also, I think that when I'm on a screen, the knowledge that there could always be some kind of interruption or that I always could go.
off and do something else makes it impossible. It's irresistible. Yeah. It's irresistible kind of thing to see, especially with news. News is the addiction machine with that. But we're taping this on December 12th, and our listeners are hearing on December 23rd, which means... They might be on their way to the bookstore for Last Minute Holidays. They might be buying it elsewhere, or Audible, or Listening. As book reviewers, do you still...
Give books as presents during the holidays. And I'd love to know what each of you are gifting right now, if you pick one book. You know, I've given up trying to give books as presents only because people know I get them for free. Oh, right.
It doesn't have much of a gift. It feels like I'm re-gifting. It feels like I'm giving them the chocolate-covered peanuts that someone else gave to me. So even though my family loves them and I love them, I can't get away with it anymore. What book would you give? From this year or just in general? Anytime.
Well, I don't know. This year, clearly, the novel is Percival Everett's novel, James. I mean, that's just, I think, the defining book of the year. We'll get to that in a second. My kids have read it already. I will sometimes, frankly, buy them an old book, a first edition or something. I'm not the biggest first edition reader and keeper.
because I mess up my books by underlining them, but my children do like them, and a special book and a nice edition is a really nice thing to give. Nice to give. What about you, Becca? I do not really give books as presents because most of my friends are pretty serious readers, and so they'll be in the midst of some reading project. They don't really need me to give them a book because they're like, I'm sorry, I'm reading everything that Henry James ever wrote. I don't have time for this book.
that you've given me. I will if I know that some person, if I'm very familiar with someone's taste, then I'll sometimes give them a book. So my husband, I'll sometimes give him a book because I'm quite familiar with his taste. I will probably get him a copy of Paradise Lost because we will probably read that aloud.
together every day in the new year. That's our plan. That will be my present. You'll read it aloud together? Yeah, I think that this is going to be our next reading project every night. We're going to read a little bit of Paradise Lost aloud. Do you do that with other books?
We have in the past, sometimes with like dialogue type things, Plato's dialogue, bits of Shakespeare, but we've fallen out of it. So we're going to try to get back into it. Get back a little togetherness. With Paradise Lost, yeah. Oddly romantic and lovely, actually. Another perfect analog technology, the voice.
Well, AI will be able to do that for you. So I want to talk about the books you love, the books you hated, and the books you disagree on this year. You might agree, actually. Dwight, you wrote a review of your year in books, and you noted the year's best books. Let's talk about books that did that. Dwight, we'll start with you. Your top three this year and why you love them.
Well, I mentioned James already. I mean, one of the great books, I think, that came out earlier this year was Salman Rushdie's memoir about being attacked on stage by an Islamic militant in 2022. And the reason that I sort of led my year in... piece with this book, is that Rushdie considers his quarrel with militant Islam, and it's with him, as being a quarrel over those with a sense of humor and those without one. And I loved the wit in Rushdie's book.
that as he's being attacked on stage, he's also thinking, oh my God, my Ralph Lauren suit, you know? And his book is filled with observations like that. And I think humor helped keep us sane in no small part this year. And Rushdie's... book sort of set the tone of the year for me. Okay. All right. And that's one, two, James, Rushdie, and...
Okay, Rushdie's book is called Knife. I think my third favorite was probably Rachel Kushner's novel, Creation Lake. This is about a female spy for hire in rural France. That's probably my third A. My third B is Sally Rooney's new novel, Intermezzo, which just is a...
I'm going to ask you about that in a second. So we'll get to that in one second. So Becca, what about you? I will just register a point of disagreement. I did not like Knife. So we can discuss that later. Another book we disagree about that was...
Probably my favorite book of the year was Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I love Garth Greenwell. It's possibly because I had many medical ordeals myself this year. I recovered from thyroid cancer. But I thought that that book was a really great exploration of kind of the dull. of undergoing medical procedures.
There's a novel by a novelist named Mark Haber called Lesser Ruins that I think is an absolutely fabulous book. It's kind of a throwback to an older mode of writing. Really long sentences, really meditative. It's kind of a comic. examination of a man who's trying for years and years to write an essay and he just can't get it done, kind of as a means of distracting himself from existential despair or some such. And then I love the book The Rebels Clinic by Adam Schatz.
is a biography of uh the philosopher and activist france banan i thought that was a really uh engrossing book and a really good example of what public intellectualism can do. It's not condescending to its readers at all. It's really intelligent, but it's also really accessible, and it's a really gripping read. So those are probably my three favorite books that came out this year. All right. We're going to get to books.
you don't like, too, in a second. But Dwight, actually, let me go through these very quickly before we get to talk about Sally Rooney's book. I'm going to do this lightning round. You should just name a book. Most overrated. Becca and then... Oh, Dwight and then Weka.
Oh, look at you. Okay, Dwight and then Becca, and the next one will be Becca. I'm going to go with Garth Greenwell that Becca really loves. So we disagree. It's fun to disagree. You know, one of the salient points about modern American culture is that book criticism is a dying art. Newspapers used to have... Every newspaper had book critics. Time and Newsweek mattered. All these alternative weeklies mattered. Now there's so few of us. And I love it that I often read Becca and find her.
Completely disagree with me and vice versa, and it's good for the culture. All right, so you think that one, and overrated because, why? Oh, it's just no humor whatsoever. It's prosaic. It's dull. The observations are not smart. It's just not well written. All right. Becca disagrees. Becca?
I mean, I'm tempted to say Knife, which I kind of do think, I mean, it got a lot of good attention. It's nominated for a National Book Award, which I really think it didn't deserve. I guess for the sort of similar reasons. Like, I kind of think...
How can I put this in a way that is sensitive? I mean, it's terrible to be stabbed. That must be really terrible. But not every terrible experience that you have merits a memoir unless you have something kind of additional to say about it. And I did not think that this book had much to say.
He couldn't resist, could he? Fair enough. I'm back on this one, Dwight. I will give your opinion. It's this much credence. I do think that Rushdie's previous memoir, Joseph Anton, is a far better book than this one. But for what it was, I love this one. Okay, all right.
I was also going to say that Splinters by Leslie Jameson, I think similarly, is a memoir in which someone is trying to work through their own personal experience but may not have much to say that is of much interest to others. That book, I think, was also overrated. All right. Book that changed your mind? Book that changed my mind. Book that changed my mind. Maybe When the Clock Broke by John Gans a little bit.
In the sense that I kind of thought that the Trump phenomenon was unprecedented in American politics, but that really is just because I didn't have a great memory of the political turmoil in the early 90s because I was— three years old at that time. But so John Gantz, I mean, I think he's close to the same age as I am, but he does a really good job of examining kind of antecedents. What about you?
Well, the bibliography this year that Verso printed is a biography of the radical journalist Claude Coburn, written by one of his sons, Patrick Coburn. And it's sort of... took us back to the period in the 40s and 50s and early 60s when Coburn was working. And it sort of corrected a lot of errors in the journalism of that period. And it showed the way he...
almost launched a certain kind of investigative and opinion type of journalism. And I didn't realize what an important player Coburn was in terms of influencing people like Orwell. I didn't realize how sort of fundamental he was. So that was one for me.
Great. All right. Book you didn't think you'd like but did. Becca? I have to think about this a little and look at my old reviews. I can think of one that I thought I would like that I didn't like. Oh, okay. A book I didn't think that I would like. All right. Give the one you thought you'd like and didn't. I did not love Sheila Hetty's book.
The Alphabetical Diaries. I generally love Sheila Hetty. I think she's one of the best novelists working today. This book was a nonfiction, a kind of experimental nonfiction book in which she took all of the sentences from her diaries and alphabetized them and then organized them in chapters.
by way of letter. So chapter A is all the sentences that begin with A. And I just thought that it was a bit gimmicky. And she kind of edited her voice out of it. It was a mechanical means of organizing the book. But you would have great hopes. You had great hopes. I did have great hopes. Well, that was my favorite gimmick of the year, Sheila Hattie's gimmick, because I loved the way it made you focus on her sentences. And it made me wish...
in fact, that I could have other books done for me in a similar way. Like, one of my favorite books is Moby Dick, let's just say. And it is. But I would love to have a version of Moby Dick that printed the sentences in the way that Sheila Hetty organizes hers, which is sort of alphabetical order. And then it sort of takes you into the gut. of what, I don't know, what the...
concerns were to Melville. And I felt it was an interesting way of, it's almost a book that read like poetry. And I would like to read Deconstructed Moby Dick. So I love that book. Well, AI can do that for you also, FYI. That's a good point. In seconds. Your question was, though? Books you didn't think you'd like but did? You know, I didn't think I would love a Sheila Hetty. Because I knew it was sort of a big...
public-facing, populist sort of novel, and it just completely won me over. It was just like a big bowl of carbs, but in the best possible way, buttery carbs. All right. Okay. All right, then. Dwight, you mentioned Sally Rooney's latest intermezzo in your review.
You said that publishing a smart young crowd called it overlong and undercooked. It seemed that there was a generational dispute going on here. Do you think that's the case? And when you're deciding which books to review, what to leave and what to leave to someone else is having a dissenting opinion. the reason to take it on.
Yeah, you know, sometimes. I mean, there's no reason, for example, to review a first novel that's not very good. No one's heard of it. Why review something no one's going to hear of anyway and say something negative about it? So the only time to leap in, let's say, for a first novel is if there's a lot of buzz already and then there's maybe a chance for you to say something. In this case...
Sally Rooney has been around for a while, and she's been not only a critical favorite, but has sold really well across the world. I don't know. I heard from all the cool kids that I know. A lot of them at the New York Times Book Review. A lot of them, my daughter works in publishing. And, you know, the early sense was this book was a step back for her. And I picked it up thinking I might feel similarly. Instead, I was...
I dropped into it. It was like a dream I was having from the first pages. And, you know, I can't wait to read it again. Oh, OK. All right. Is there a generational divide here or just you just like I liked it. I don't care what you say. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it is a generational divide. I mean, since I published my review, which was quite yay saying, I've heard probably 70 percent of people agreeing with me.
30% in my inbox saying you're a loser. We all get that. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I bet. I bet. We'll be back in a minute. Why do so many of us get happiness wrong? And how can we start to get it right? I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time, right? Often very high arousal positive emotion, but that's not really what we're talking about.
I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, Dr. Laurie Santos joins me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss the science behind happiness. We explore job crafting, the parenting paradox, the arrival fallacy, and why acts of kindness might be the simplest path to fulfillment. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
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So it was an election year, of course, and I've read a lot of political books this year, memoirs, historical reviews, essays, talked to a lot of journalists, historians, politicians. A big theme for all of them was the state of democracy and the perils facing freedom, historical president. resonate in your ears, or are there other themes each of you were seeing? I will disclose. I wrote a memoir, and I don't care what you think of it, but I was right about these assholes. So, as it's turned out.
Tell me what the themes you were seeing this year. Politics sort of seems to have dominated everything. Becca, you start. I think that there are a bunch of books about divorce, both fiction and nonfiction. Lots of memoirs by people about their divorce, for example, the Jameson book, Splinters, but also lots of novels about divorce and the dissolution of marriages, like Liars, the Sarah Manguse.
novel. I think there are also a lot of books about children, whether to have children, how to think about a decision about whether to have children. There's a book called What Are Children For?, written by some people who co-edit a literary magazine with me called The Point, which I highly recommend, both the book and the magazine, of course, which is kind of about how to think about whether or not to have children. Interesting. Dwight? Well, it's funny, Kara.
I kind of stayed away from politics this year. You did. I think it was just instinctual. I couldn't take any more of it. And my wonderful colleague, Jennifer Zelai, is our nonfiction critic at the Times. Great, by the way. Yeah, she's amazing. And so I kind of stuck to my... lane this year. I interviewed a lot of fiction, a lot of biography and memoir and books about music and art. But I felt...
You know, I think just because of the year we had, there was so much angst and turmoil and loneliness and trepidation. And you felt these themes coming out of the fiction you read, regardless of whether they were especially there or not, they really resonated this year with me and I think a lot of readers. And you write a book like, for example, there's a wonderful Mexican novelist named Alvaro Enrique, who published a novelist here called You Dreamed of Empires, which is this...
great speckled bird of a novel, kind of hallucinatory, about the Spanish conquistador Cortez arriving in Mexico City in 1519. And you feel it's a Trump-like moment. It's the barbarians at the gate. And to read this novelist... pull this collision of cultures apart really resonated with what was happening in the culture to me. So you were trying to avoid what was actually happening. I think I did. I'm sorry to say. Don't be sorry. I get it. I get it. I get it.
Speaking of memoirs and biographies, there are a couple of pans on your list. Dwight, you dissed biographies about Carson McCullers and Randy Newman. The titles were The Sad, Happy Life of Carson McCullers. And Randy Newman is great. He deserved a better biography than this. That's quite a title. Talk a little bit about, and Becca, you mentioned Leslie Jameson's memoir, Splinters. Your title is Leslie Jameson's Splinters is a Divorce Memoir as a Therapy Session.
What merits giving something a bad critique in your opinion, Dwight? Well, you know, I like to feel that I'm talking to the reader like I'm talking to a friend. You know, one of the things when I was young that I hated, hate it's too strong a word, that I disliked about journalists that I met is that by talking to them.
you would learn more about their story and what they felt in five minutes than you would learn from a year of reading them. And so I decided early on, and I hope I've lived up to it, to sort of try to say what I think pretty Pretty straightforwardly. And to do the reader the benefit of treating them as if they're an intimate of mine, a close friend. And I'm telling you how I feel about this book. And you may disagree with me like crazy.
But that's what I'm after. So if I'm reading something that's not working for me, you just start looking for the reasons why it's not working. You have this feeling that this is not working. And then the hard part is to explain why it's not working. Because everyone has an opinion. Uncle Felix, your Uncle Frank, your aunt, whomever has an opinion about everything, doesn't mean they can...
describe and take apart the aspects of it and describe why they have this opinion. And that's what being a critic is. It's not just delivering an opinion. I know you know that, but readers often just think that criticism means lowering the boom, and it's not that at all. Right, right. Well, someone, Becca, who's good at lowering the... boom, and I've seen you do it beautifully so many times. How do you feel? What merits doing that, in your opinion, especially in this area?
I mean, I think one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, is this book bad in an important way? If a book is just bad, but it's not representative of any important cultural tendency or it's not written by somebody who is a big deal, there's no reason to. single it out and beat it up in a national newspaper. So I try to make sure that if I'm going to write a negative review, it's going to say something broader about cultural tendencies.
Unless it's by somebody exceptionally famous. But even then, you know, even when I reviewed, for example, Josh Hawley's book about manhood or Jordan Peterson's book, there's no point in doing that. There's no point in reviewing a book that's obviously going to be terrible unless it's kind of...
record of cultural pathologies. And so that is kind of what I look out for in books that I'm going to have. So the bigger situation. Well, let's take on actually Knife. So speaking of that, someone who's well-known, this memoir, you disagree.
What do you think when you read a review that's so different from your own? Do you ever second guess your opinion? Just so for people to know, Becca called knife, meandering and frequently trite and surprisingly boring. Dwight, you said it reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us.
of the things worth fighting for. Quite different. Becca, you go first. Do you ever second guess when you review his review or anybody else's who disagrees with you? I think... it probably depends on how uh strong my reaction was to the book in general um although i broadly i would say that yes i do um if the person adusa has compelling reasons for me to change my mind i will return to things and look at them again i think i'm more inclined
to do that if it's a work of art than if it's a nonfiction book. Nonfiction books can be works of art. I don't know that I think Knife rises to that status in my view. But there's other works of art where when I've read somebody's review of them, I've changed my mind.
Movie Demon Lover, for example, is a movie that I found very abrasive initially. There's a great film critic named Nick Pinkerton. I read his positive evaluation. I went back. I watched it again. It didn't change my kind of affective reaction, but I could see the arguments for thinking that it was a good movie. Right. That happens. a lot. I'm like, I can see the point. What about you, Dwight? Well, my favorite thing is to read an attack on something I love.
Because it pushes back against you. It makes you think. Like when Stanley Crouch, the jazz critic wrote that famous takedown of Miles Davis. I love Miles Davis. I'm thinking, okay, I want to test myself against Stanley Crouch about Miles Davis. So I love a good takedown. I love a takedown that's completely opposite of my take. It's my favorite thing to read. But I do have second thoughts. It's funny. I met a writer recently who said he uses AI in this way.
He puts his argument into AI and says, push back against me. Tell me why I'm wrong. I've never done that. But I like the idea that writers could test their theses against something like that. I prefer to test it against a real person. But I found an interesting use of AI. So you learned something from it. Have you changed your mind? Like, have you gone, oh, I was wrong about that?
Oh, maybe. But, you know, in the world of reviewing books, one is coming right after another. And it's rare you have time, except maybe this time at the end of the year, to think, yes, I might have been wrong about that. And, you know, you guys are like convincing me. Maybe I overdid the Rushdie. But at the moment, I really read it like...
You know, it was what I wanted to read, and I read it in one or two sittings, and I tried to impart. The great movie critic for The New Yorker, who just retired, what was his name? Anthony Lane. Anthony Lane, thank you, said that reviews, he's talking about movie reviews, but he said they should wreak...
of the box office. They should reek of popcorn. He felt that your review should be written in the moment when you've just seen the movie and you're reacting to it. I try to go after that a little bit. Right. Well, obviously, Rushy is one of those you can't ignore. The event was horrific, and he's so famous, especially for the writing community environment we're in. But how do situational specifics like that factor?
for you when you're writing a review. The writing, the narrative, the language, it's hard to separate the writer, the experience of describing, especially in such a memoir or anything else, for example. What is your top thing that you focus on? Becca, you first, and then Dwight.
I mean, again, I think it really depends. I mean, I think that there are some people who are interesting primarily because of their popularity, their persona. Another good example, I just wrote this review of Jordan Peterson. I mean, I don't think that he's particularly interesting as a thinker or as a prose stylist. I mean, he's a...
he's not great in either guise. I think that what's interesting about him is that he's cultivated this persona. He performs intellectualism in a very conspicuous way that appeals to a lot of people. So that seems like the most important thing to investigate.
If you're writing about a writer who is much more private, for example, the writer Benjamin Labatute, who refuses to be profiled. There's a great profile of him called Benjamin Labatute Refuses to be Profiled or some such thing by Adam Dalva. He doesn't cultivate a persona, except on the page. And so it's the personality that comes through the writing that I focus on in that case. Dwight? Well, I forgot who said it, but someone said that the primary object of literature is to be delighted.
And I want to be delighted. And delight means many different things. Tolstoy can delight as well as a comic novel. And so I... want to be delighted on some level. I want to have a reason to turn the page. There are all kinds of reasons, and humor is not the only one by far. But I just find that I'm interested in a book where I'm not, and if I'm still not interested after 30 or 40 pages, I begin to think that maybe...
this is not for me. I have a test for a movie is my texting. If I start texting, it's like a three-text movie. I'm like, hmm, not good. It's my little thing. So, Dwight, you kind of addressed this dilemma in one of your... negative views this year, Garth Greenwell's novel, Small Rain. You write, it gives me no pleasure to find so little pulse in Small Rain. I'm a Greenwell fan. Can a misfire be a blessing in disguise? Talk about...
why it was hard to hate it. Because I don't think either of you wants to. I mean, people have this idea of reviewers, they just want to go at people. I don't think you do. You had several back in this year that I could feel your pain in saying. with the truth, which I think you were completely correct on several of them. But talk about that first, Dwight, because Becca, you love Small Rain. So first Dwight and then Becca.
Well, people always look for, when a critic gives a negative review, well, two things happen. One, readers love a negative review because our literary world has gotten quite happy. The reviews have gotten sort of mushier and more positive. And so when a reader, I think, reads a negative review, they... They tend to think something like, well, at least I can cross this one off my list. And it speaks to the sense they have of reading all these positive reviews.
buying the books and not liking them and wondering if they're insane. So I get a lot of mail when I write a negative piece. But there's no glee in it, especially with someone like Garth Greenwell, whom I really admire. His first two books are both brilliant. And it didn't work for me, and it did for Becca. I think Mencken called criticism...
prejudice made plausible, meaning you have this prejudice, you know, you don't like it, then you've got to make it plausible the reasons you didn't like it. And for me, I think I've spoken to some of them already, but reading, hearing Becca and reading her on it makes me want to read it again sometime. Right. Let me, one line you had. Each page is a tall palisade. One must climb slowly with little hope of a place for eyes or wits to rest. That kind of says it all.
Talk about this. Long sentences were attractive to you. Yeah, I love long sentences. I mean, one of the books that I recommended, I mean, it depends on the quality of the sentences, of course. There are bad long sentences and good long sentences, but as a general matter. I guess I have a prejudice kind of in favor of length because there are so many short things in our culture. It feels like attention is so fragmented that there's something soothing and restorative in.
In finding a work of art that challenges you to expand your attention span, I thought that that book was very sort of meditative, hypnotic is how I would describe it. I felt like I was in kind of a trance when I was reading it. And the fact that there was not a lot of event, it's not a book that's written.
rich in event did not bother me because the kind of sensibility itself seemed like an event to me. Right. Interesting. So, Becca, you came out with your first book this year, All Things Are Too Small, Essays in Praise of Excess. It's listed...
in a few of the best books of the year list. Congratulations on that. Dwight, your book, The Upstairs Delicatessen on Eating, Reading, and Reading About Eating and Eating Well. Reading came out in 2023. I love this book. It's great. Bec, I'm about to read your book. I read everything you write, actually.
actually, was reviewed in the Times. How has being on the receiving end of reviews changed or sharpened your pen, if at all? Talk a little bit about being flipped around, first you, Becca, and then Dwight. I mean, it was terrifying, but it went pretty well. I mean, I might say something different if the book had been universally panned, but it wasn't. There's been a couple of negative reviews that were all thoughtful, but there were enough positive reviews that I wasn't devastated by.
negative reviews or anything. I mean, I kind of think that it actually made me feel less bad about writing negative reviews of people's books because I realized that it's...
completely possible to keep it in perspective. It's not life-ruining. I mean, I think that one is kind of self-aggrandizing as a critic. You're writing your takedown and you think, well, this is going to take Sally Rooney out of the game. No one's going to read her anymore because I hate her. And of course that doesn't happen. I mean, she's...
continues to be the most successful millennial novelist and it's totally fine for her so in some way I'm like well people emerge unscathed you know someone wrote a negative review of me yesterday I read it and I was like all right I'm fine yeah so
It helps you put things in perspective, including your own role. What about you, Dwight? You have a book that's hard to hate, but go ahead. Well, thank you. I was waiting to be tossed up in the air and caught on, you know, impaled on the way down by many critics. And it turns out that...
I don't think I got a negative review. I think my book, I mean, I have not seen one. So I don't know how I escaped running the gauntlet. Because it's corned beef, Dwight. I mean, come on. I feel very lucky. I have a pretty thick hide at this point because, you know.
critic for a long time. And, you know, I read Twitter too often. I mean, I don't go there, but I'll go there maybe once a week and then I'll see, you know, things people said about me. And so, you know, I can take it, but I feel like I lucked out.
Don't know what I did right. Yeah, stop going back to Twitter, I'm just telling you. I don't go there because, you know, the Nazi porn bar doesn't like Kara Swisher these days. But I want to talk about the connection with your views and the market. You just mentioned that. Like, you're not going to kill off Sally Rooney anytime soon.
personal Everett's James, a reimagining of Mark Twain's Huck Finn. I love this book, too. It's been a critic's favorite. I can see why it won the National Book Award. It's shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it has been on the bestseller list for 23 weeks, which is really astonishing.
view, you suggested James should be sold together with Huck Finn, which was also a classic. Talk about the novel and why you think it was able to straddle both literary success and commercial success. Do you see a connection between reviews and... Is it a fluke? Not many do that, exactly. Well, to take your second question first, I don't see much connection between reviews and bestsellers for the most part. I mean, the things I see on the bestseller list, I don't even...
I don't recognize them most of the time. And often they're sort of formulaic and they remind you sort of of why, you know, the Times food critic doesn't review Olive Garden. I mean, no knock against Olive Garden, but you sort of know what you're going to get when you go there. And many of the books, like by James Patterson, or whomever are familiar products and they end up there. The first part of your question was, remind me.
When you think about this book sort of straddling both things, why he was able to straddle both literary success and commercial success, that doesn't happen all the time anymore. It doesn't. It doesn't. And, you know, the literary world loves these books that I've had.
feet in both places, like a Donna Tartt novel or a Sally Rooney novel, that a committed literary person is not embarrassed to carry around, and yet the people who aren't big readers love it as well. And those books don't come around often enough. In the case of Percival Everett, he's been doing this for a long time. critics have known who he is and have loved the wit of his earlier novels and they can see the ways in which this novel
follows in the footsteps of some of his earlier stuff, the way he riffs on objects in the culture and other characters, the way he wrote the book about Sidney Poitier and kind of made fun of Poitier's image. And here he comes taking on... you know, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And as I wrote in my review...
Everett has always been smart and funny as fuck, but in this book, he's putting his heart out there. You really feel, in a way that I haven't felt really before in his work, a certain level of... Bedrock humanity, bedrock sympathy, bedrock emotion that sometimes he's kept somewhat at bay. In this book, he let it hang out without losing the stuff that made him singular in the first place. Yeah. Also. So, Becca, when you think of popular, right? Random House.
came out with a reading group guide. James became a book club book for sure. What happens when that happens from your perspective? Is that a negative or a positive thing? I mean, I think it's a mixed blessing. I mean, something scandalous that happened was when Jonathan Franzen's book, The Corrections, was selected for Oprah's Book Club. He famously, notoriously...
said that he didn't want that to be the case. I think kind of implying that Oprah's book club was middle brow. And when I told my parents-in-law that I might do the same, they were absolutely scared. scandalized. I think now that I'm actually trying to sell a book, I would reconsider. Raise your spoon. Where are you? Go ahead. I want people to read my book. I mean, I think...
I think on the one hand, it makes sense to kind of have some defeasible skepticism about extremely popular products because a lot of the things that are really popular products in the culture today are not very high quality. Marvel movies being the kind of easiest boilerplate. example. But of course, you shouldn't dismiss something just because it's popular either. So, I mean, I think that it can...
It adds a level of skepticism, I suppose, when something is on the bestseller list, but then I'm going to interrogate the object and see if I like it. Like John Ganz's book, it hasn't been on the bestseller list for many weeks. I think it was only on there for one week, but I think that that's one of the best books of the year, probably top five. nonfiction books of the year. We'll be back in a minute.
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This week on The Assignment, with me, Audie Cornish. The arrest of Luigi Mangione escalated the discourse to celebratory rage, coming from just about every corner of the internet over the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. Now some are calling the reactions gross, even dangerous. So how does the internet's reaction to this brazen murder reflect a wider cultural phenomenon? Where else can we see this fury? And what does the online response mean for our lives offline?
Listen to The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish, streaming now on your favorite podcast app. So very quickly, there doesn't seem to be a consensus. I referenced it earlier. If we're in a good time for books or not, some opinion writers say that men, especially young men, are no longer reading or writing books. Some say that young people in general, even elite college kids, aren't reading books anymore. It's just a story about that, that they can't.
There was a viral post earlier this year on Substack and how books don't sell anymore. But the stats, they're good actually. 800 million books were sold last year. It's up. It's up the comparative. Do you think it's a good time for the book industry or for – writers or are they on the brink? And how does that play in your thoughts of literary criticism? Becca, you start.
I go back and forth on this. My analysis is completely vibes-based. I think that if I were to look at the numbers, I might have kind of a different view. I think it's easy to look at our culture and many symptoms of anti-intellectualism. You know, you have crypto billionaires bragging about having never read a book. You have Elon Musk listening to the Odyssey at 1.25 speed on audiobook, which is absolutely the wrong way to engage with the Odyssey. I mean, you have people peddling misinformation.
I'm sure he made that up. Go ahead. He probably didn't actually even listen to it. So that kind of thing makes one feel pessimistic. On the other hand, I kind of just have a fundamental unshakable faith in the reading public and in humanity's need for literary and philosophy. philosophical engagement. And so I think that
Great books will always find their readers. That's kind of my fundamental belief. And I think that you have to believe that in order to engage in any kind of public intellectual activity. So that is what I believe at my core. What about you, Dwight? You know, I'm pretty optimistic. I know that we're in.
attention deficit span world. But I hear them. I hear them right now. Thousands of writers at their desks. I hear them. And I know that they're trying to express things. And some of them, the next Ralph Ellison, the next Sadie Smith, that person is out there. And I can't wait. read what they're going to say about this period. And yeah, I just tend to know that the novel has lost a lot of its...
centrality to our culture. Right. And that it moves things like a Norman man, whoever. Yeah. And it used to be where you went to get news about the culture, right? It brought news before there was the internet, before there was Netflix. That's where you went to learn about how, what the people ate and how they slept together.
What marriages were like? You went for cultural information, in part. And that's long gone. And yet, you know, writing a good novel, there are a few things in this world that could put you more in the center of the culture. Absolutely. That's more prestigious to do. And prestigious not in a bullshit way, but in a legitimate way. it's a hard thing to do and it matters more than almost anything that humans do in terms of describing what our lives are like. And I don't think that's going away.
Okay. So meanwhile, there are books that come back on the bestseller list for other reasons, like now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance's 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Becca, you reviewed the book again in July after Vance was tapped by Trump. This is a book that got pretty good reviews back in the day.
You had kind of a meta review. And then for Dwight, the New York Times gave it a good review back in the day, but that wasn't you, Dwight. In 2019, you called an anthology of Appalachian writing, responding to Vance's book, quote, a volley of intellectual bucks. from high up alongside the hollow. I guess you get a lot of views to get political commentary, but talk about this book. Does the current political environment change in how you think of your roles?
critics within the framework of the mainstream media? And how political do you want or not want to get? Becca, you start. I mean, I think... that when you are evaluating nonfiction political books it's pretty impossible not to get political in some sense because you're evaluating whether you think the
The claims made in the books are true. So, you know, for example, when J.D. Vance says in Hillbilly Elegy that he actually thinks that predatory loans are good for poor people, I don't think that that's true. That's, I suppose, both a factual and a political evaluation. And so it's impossible to fail to engage with a book like that politically. Go ahead, Dwight.
Well, I actually admired Vance's book when I first read it because he's a sharp observer of light. I grew up in West Virginia. You know, I felt like I knew his people. I don't agree with his politics. And yet there's no way to walk through. Well, before or after. they change, but go ahead. True, this is true. Even before, I mean, I will dissent about the quality of that book when you finish. Okay, go ahead.
Go ahead. Yeah, but no, but if you read a critic over time, I mean, you know my politics if you've read me. I mean, I'm a person of the left, I would say, and yet there's nothing I love more. This goes back to our loving disagreement. There's nothing I love more than a great book from a conservative, you know, and I wish there were more. really hyper-literate cultural conservatives to argue with out there because there aren't a ton of them. You're not hot on Sean Hannity?
I'm talking about people who can write, who have a hinterland, who even read a book, you know. Give me a name of a conservative book you liked. I'm just curious. What's a recent one? Well, they're older. You're right. They're older. I mean, the older literary critics, I mean, you're Irving Crystals and you're... Bill Safa or whatever, yeah.
Yeah, Bill Safire. Anyway, the memoir from Joseph Epstein came out this year. He's a conservative writer for the Wall Street Journal. And I really wanted to like it. I wanted to hear a smart conservative voice. And he's just...
You know, it just didn't work for me at all on sentence to sentence level. Yeah, I had the same experience. I was out looking for smart conservative books. And so I reviewed a book by, I believe her name was Christine Rosen, called The Extinction of Experience. I mean, one strain of conservatism.
highly sympathetic to is the idea that various technologies are kind of detaching us from sensory pleasures. But I tried really hard to like the book. I kind of agree with its motivating thesis, and I just didn't think it was well done. So I had to give it a bad review, too.
open to smart conservatives. I think that we're not really in an era. The National Review used to be great. There used to be great criticism in it. They used to publish Guy Davenport. It's just not really like that anymore. It's become extremely partisan. There's a lot of...
They accuse us of being overly politicized, but it seems like a lot of the arts criticism is really just kind of anti-wokeness screeds. Well, they're writing a certain formula, those books, and they do really well. I mean, same thing with podcasts. It's the same thing. It's fascinating to watch. You were going to do a quick insult of hillbillyology. Oh, I mean, I...
I did not read the book when it came out, but upon rereading it, so perhaps my view of it is intellectually tainted by what's happened since. But, I mean, I think that it is... in many ways, a pretty bad book. Like, I think it is effectively folksy. I think that he's kind of performing his folksiness for the benefits of an elite coastal audience. He's really playing the role of Appalachian spokesperson. To me, it seems...
kind of like a nakedly calculating way to get onto the talk show circuit, which he succeeded in doing. And I thought that the actual political observations in the book were kind of just boilerplates, Reaganomics-type claims about how people should pull themselves up by their boots. And really the problems in Appalachia are cultural. People should be working harder and they should take responsibility for themselves.
I think that really the book's popularity was just a function of it coming out at exactly the right time. It was. Desperate for somebody to explain Trump to them, someone who was respectable enough that they could feel okay listening to that person. Yeah, I would agree. I went back and read it and I thought, how did I like this at the time?
And I did. You know what I mean? Like, I remember being moved by it. And then I thought I just got played. That's what I felt like. So books themselves obviously have become political. According to PEN America, there were more than... 10,000 instances of book bans in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. One of the most commonly banned books, 44% feature people and characters of color and 39% of LGBTQ characters. There's a situation right now out in Virginia.
very close to Washington, D.C., where most of the population didn't want these bans and this small group of tyrannical minority has pushed them out of the things. We're seeing some political pushback. The New Jersey governor just signed a law prohibiting book bans.
in schools and libraries. I'd like each of you, Dwight, first. How concerned are you, and what do you think the book market and book critics like yourself can do to push back against the pressure on free speech? Reviewing more books by people of color or LGBTQ writers or what? Well, I'm blown away that anyone is focused on books when we have this torrent of other material bombarding our children every day.
Good Lord. I mean, so few kids are reading in the first place, and banning books just seems like an insane reaction to me. On the other hand, I have a kind of counterintuitive reaction. I remember when the great critic Clive James said, well, if you want our kids to really read poetry, we should ban it.
Then they're going to go look for it. I feel like as a young person, at least myself, any book that had been banned when I was young, that's the first book I'm going to buy. So I hope that this is the reaction of young people in these states, but I'm not sure it's going to be. Do you think it's going to continue?
I mean, this is something that happens periodically in U.S. history, right? Of course it's going to continue. It's going to get much worse the next four years. Becca? Yeah, I mean, I agree it's going to get much worse.
Very concerned about it. I'm not sure what the critic can do about it. I mean, I think there's kind of a tendency, at least in the first Trump presidency, there's a strong tendency among people in the literary world to kind of inflate their own importance, to think that they had some kind of serious... Now they'll change their mind once you hear my effect.
I don't want to name this person because I don't want this person, you know, I think this person's well-meaning. But there was someone who tweeted at one point, you know, if these Republicans had just read one or two books, it's like, I don't think that that actually would change anything. You know, if they'd read Moby Dick, they would suddenly not.
hate gay people. I don't know. I don't think that that's true. But I do think that one thing that one can do as a critic is try to kind of promote the kind of books that are being banned so that people who are not able to find them in public libraries anymore or read them in school anymore can buy them.
All right. Just a few more questions before we go. Each week we get a question from an outside expert. This one is a little closer to home. It is my wife, but you'll see why. She has enough credits to be able to do this. So let's hear it. Hi. This is Amanda Katz. I'm a Washington Post opinions editor as well as a former book editor and book critic.
I would like to know what book you found particularly meaningful in 2024 that did not come out this year. Tell us about a book that is not new, but that you read either this year or in the past and that you found yourself thinking about in this moment. Thanks. Good question.
I love this question. I think that we're way too pegged to the news cycle in terms of our reading, and there's so many great older books that are good to read. A book that I really love is a book called The Politics of Cultural Despair by the Columbia historian Fritz Stern. It's an intellectual history. of the kind of I guess intellectual ancestors of Nazism it's about a bunch of conservative
German cultural critics in the century leading up to the rise of Nazism and I think it has a lot of light to shed on the Trump phenomenon now. There's some striking similarities between the kind of pseudo-intellectual buttress of Nazism. and the kind of things that you see conservative intellectuals saying today. Interesting. I would recommend Tim Snyder's book too, Historian, this year. But go ahead, Dwight.
Well, when I'm off duty, I read, A, a lot of cookbooks. I'm kind of a serious foodie. And B, I love reading old journals. I love journals and books of letters, and I review them a lot, and I'm kind of obsessed with them. This year, I'm reading Boswell, Boswell in London.
great biographer. Go in there. Well, it's the perfect bathroom read for me. It's just every page is just wonderful and brilliant about not just life, but ideas. And the combination, the high-low of them, the intellectual jousting.
combined with his walks and what he had for dinner, and it's just the perfect combination for me of stuff to read on the side. Those are good ones. I'm trying to think of what else. Oh, I've been reading a lot of Kafka lately, and that's because I think it's about loneliness, a lot of his books.
They affected me when I was a kid and I was trying to see. That's why I went back and reread Hillbillyology and realized what an idiot I was. So are there any books from 2024 that will be on your future great books list? Becca? Hmm.
I mean, it's kind of hard to say, but I would imagine that when the clock broke this book by John Ganz that I keep mentioning, you know, I bet people will read this book in 50 years as a way of understanding what led to Trumpism. And I have to say, I think small reign is going to be an enduring. in classics. She's going for it. She's pushing back, Dwight. What about you? Oh, no. I would say...
Perhaps Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake. Kushner has a style, a vibe. She's this generation's Robert Stone of people, what it was like to read him. A bit of Dennis Johnson in her work. It feels built to last to me. Also, I feel like we haven't talked about this book yet. Lucy Sant's memoir of transitioning later in life. Lucy, of course, used to publish another name. She's now added a Y to her name. She's transitioned. And it's very moving, her stories about...
about transitioning in her 60s while teaching at Bard and how her friends reacted, how her students reacted. It's a wonderful book. And I think that might have a chance of living in the culture for quite a while. Living in culture. I noticed neither of you mentioned Ina Garten.
It's okay, especially you, Dwight. I'm just going to ding you for that. She's doing just fine. It's a bestseller. 2025, are there any books or authors you're looking forward to? Any themes you think are going to stand out? Give us a little preview. Becca? Good question. I mean, I have...
have reviews that are slated to come out for many months. I mean, one book that I'm really looking forward to is there's a book of essays by a Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Andrea Longchoo, at New York Magazine. I often really disagree with her. In fact, I don't think I've ever agreed with her.
about a book. Yeah, she's got a lot of opinions. She's an amazing, she's a wonderful prose stylist. She has a book of essays coming out where she's kind of articulating more clearly what she thinks the role of the critic is. I'm really looking forward to reading that book. one that's coming to mind. Okay. And Dwight? Well, the great, great Nell Zink has a new novel coming out this year, and I've admired almost everything she's read. Some is better than others, but Nell Zink, even at...
B-grade Nels Inc. is better than A-grade most novelists living today. Also, the wonderful writer Hanif Kureshi, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, the film director and writer, experienced a terrible stroke a few years ago and has been tweeting from his... bedside and he's written a memoir which is coming out i believe in in march called shattered i believe it is and i can't wait to read that um
And there's a biography of R. Crumb coming out, the cartoonist. And, you know, what a life, what a weirdo. And I'm looking forward to that. Oh, interesting. Indulge me, if you don't mind. I was just talking about it with my wife last night. I have four kids. I was trying to think. We were talking about what my sons are in college. They're doing their college stuff, not reading as much as they should.
My older son does read a lot, a lot of history and everything. If you were to give a recommendation for younger kids, I was thinking, should I have my kids read Harry Potter? I don't really like Raleigh. I didn't love Harry Potter to start with. Is there any book you'd recommend for a younger child, each of you? I don't know if you have expertise in there, but I'd love to know one book that would be amazing. How Young is Young?
Well, say five and up. Five and up. You can pick any age between five and 15. Are they ready for Kurt Vonnegut, do you think? Because some of those books meant a ton to me when I was that age. Okay. Kurt Vonnegut. All right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Why are you laughing? Because I'll get it for my five-year-old tomorrow, but go ahead. Well, you're talking five-year-old books. Yeah.
You know, I wrote a piece for The Times a couple of years. God, now it's been a long time, actually. I'm not going to say a couple of years, about packing up my kids' books. You know, it's an emotional moment when you realize you're done reading to them. It's really sad. We still have the box of all our favorites, and I can't wait to...
give them to them when they have kids of their own. I was lucky enough for many years to sit at the New York Times next to the wonderful children's book editor Eden Ross Lipson, and she gave me many of her favorites. And, you know, we still look at those. And now that I'm just babbling. I can't remember what some of the best ones are. What are your favorites that you would tell other people to read based on what your kids love? Yeah. Good night, Moon.
I could read Good Night Moon, Dr. Seuss, Good Night Moon, all the classics. All right, Becca, I'm not going to put you on the spot. No, no, I actually have. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm 33. I don't have children. And I was a child relatively long ago now. But the books that I remember.
almost make me want to have kids, because I wish I had an excuse to read them a lot, are Dolar's Greek Myths. Oh, yeah. We have that. This, like, sort of classic, beautiful, amazing, illustrated book of Greek myths. It's amazing. Yeah. And for a slightly older child, maybe not 15, I think a really great alternative to... JK Rowling.
just a better better writer as Diana Wayne Jones I was obsessed with the book Howl's Moving Castle to the point where I still have like the opening lines memorized tell me go ahead in the land of Ingrid where such things as cloaks of invisibility and seven league boots actually
it was considered a great misfortune to be born the eldest of three. I read that book over and over and over. It's amazing. Highly, highly recommend. All right. So both of you seem, very last question, positive about where books are going. I know my son only reads books now. He doesn't read anything online.
The young people are changing more than you think, I think, personally, in my experience. Say one really positive thing you think about books as we move into a very probably difficult period for a lot of people. I think they're going to be solace. I think that's where we're going to go.
to retreat a bit into ourselves, to also to find ourselves, I just think increasingly people are going to be turning to longer forms. And I just have no doubt about it. And I know how it works for me. And sometimes, you know, you have to work at it. I sometimes... You know, we'll turn a timer on for an hour and just say, Dwight, you're going to read...
for an hour. That's what I've been doing lately. Don't look at your email. This is your time. Sometimes two hours, but I'm feeling really... But I still feel like the novel is the best delivery device we have in our culture for just news of the self and what it means to be alive. Becca, last word? Yeah, I mean, I think that the hunger to...
Meditate more deeply on what's happening in society is perennial. That's a human need that will never go away. And so I think that the appetite for literature is inextinguishable. And I think that particularly in times of political turmoil or political... There's an even greater need to understand the world by way of texts, by way of people who have thought deeply about similar situations. And so I think that literature will never die.
Thank you so much. I'm so glad I did this. This is a wonderful, wonderful interview with both of you. And you're both really wonderful writers. And I recommend everyone go read their books. And it's really important to keep. supporting books it really is in this especially difficult times thank you so much thanks Kara this was fun thank you bye guys On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Kaylin Lynch.
Mishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, go grab a book and curl up in the corner. I mean, an analyst. catalog book, put down your phone, read a frigging book, people. If not,
Get your library card renewed. It's a wonderful place. I spend a lot of time in libraries because I have small kids. We should support our local libraries and stop banning books from them. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.