SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The holiday break will soon be here. Maybe you've got a getaway plan. Maybe you have nothing planned. Well, why not read a book? It can help you not only find out more about yourself, but about other people.
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SIMON: Books We Love, NPR's list of best reads, has a lot of recommendations, and today, some of our colleagues share their favorite memoirs from 2024.
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LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: Hi. My name is Leah Donnella, and I'm a senior editor on the Code Switch team. This year, I loved the memoir, "Knife," by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is famous, of course, as a novelist for his books like "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses." But that writing has also made him the target of a fatwa, and for decades of his life, he's lived with a looming threat of violence.
In 2022, that threat went from theoretical to very real when Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly at a literary conference. This memoir is Rushdie's attempt to understand the aftermath of that attack, which resulted in multiple long-term health issues, including blindness in his right eye. You might expect a book with that as the baseline to be somewhat grim, and it is, but it's also, in turn, warm, vulnerable, acerbic and surprisingly very funny. I highly recommend it.
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BECK HARLAN, BYLINE: I'm Beck Harlan, the visuals editor for Life Kit, which is NPR's how-to podcast, and I'm recommending Amy Lin's memoir called "Here After." It shares the story of the sudden death of her husband, Kurtis, when they were newlyweds in their early 30s. It sounds really sad, and it is. It's also beautifully written. Lin really artfully weaves her experience into this book in these very short chapters that alternate between her and Kurtis meeting and falling in love, and then his unexplained death and everything that follows in her life - the kind of cascading effects of that loss. And reading it feels like how you might actually process grief in your own brain in a nonlinear way. If you're grieving, if you know someone who's grieving or if you just appreciate such a generous window into someone else's experience, it's an honest and beautifully written book.
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JULIE DEPENBROCK, BYLINE: Hey. My name is Julie Depenbrock, and I'm a producer at Morning Edition. A book I loved this year was "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," by Amy Tan, who you probably know as the author of "The Joy Luck Club." We were lucky enough to interview Tan about her book. She said that she turned to nature in 2016 as an antidote to a world she saw turning uglier and uglier.
She began spending 10 hours a day just watching and sketching the birds in her own backyard. And so the result is this delightful nature journal, which features Tan's own detailed drawings and illustrations. It's not often a book changes the way I experience the world, but ever since reading this, I find myself noticing the birds - the family of cardinals in my neighbor's yard or the blue jay chirping outside my window, the finch fluttering from flower to flower. The world feels very vibrant and alive, and that is definitely a gift.
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FELIX CONTRERAS, BYLINE: Hey, there. This is Felix Contreras. I'm co-host of the Alt.Latino podcast from NPR Music and I'm also a producer for the Tiny Desk Concerts. And the book I want to talk about is "Bird Of Four Hundred Voices: A Mexican American Memoir Of Music And Belonging" by Eugene Rodriguez.
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CONTRERAS: Eugene and I share Mexican American, or Chicano, roots and our relationships to Mexican culture is one of distance, generational and geographic. So as I followed his story of self-discovery through music, I was reminded of my own explorations of my culture and identity and history, through reading, as well as music.
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LOS CENZONTLES: (Singing) Bows and flows of angel hair...
CONTRERAS: I'm particularly fond of how he reimagines some of my favorite classics with Mexican folk music. His version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" is the perfect musical expression of being bicultural and of a certain age. And it's a great way to bring this book review to a close.
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LOS CENZONTLES: (Singing) But now, they only block the sun...
SIMON: Those recommendations of memoirs, once again, were "Bird of Four Hundred Voices," "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," "Knife" and "Here After." For the full list of Books We Love, you can head to npr.org/bestbooks.
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LOS CENZONTLES: (Singing) I look at clouds... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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