SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Only got a couple of days left to meet your 2025 reading goal. But the good news is, boy, do we have suggestions as to how to kick off next year's reading goal. NPR's Books We Love has hundreds of recommendations, including these nonfiction books from a few of our colleagues.
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BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Bob Mondello here, movie critic for All Things Considered. You should never judge a book by its cover, but, man, is it fun to judge a film by its Matt Stevens cover. In his supremely clever volume "Good Movies As Old Books," Stevens reimagines roughly 200 of his favorite films as the covers of vintage paperbacks. "Mad Max" gets a cover that suggests demento Peter Max on acid. "Speed" gets a lit clock-faced bomb. "Ghostbusters" is mid-century sci-fi noir. His covers are sometimes frayed at the edges and convey the 1950s and '60s so effectively that I found myself thinking that maybe I'd somehow missed that Jordan Peele's "Get Out," which was never a novel, was originally published in 1953. I also really wanted to read it. Great fun.
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HANNAH BLOCH, BYLINE: Hi. I'm Hannah Bloch, senior editor on NPR's international desk. And one of the books I really enjoyed this year is a cookbook called "Pakistan: Recipes And Stories From Home Kitchens, Restaurants, And Roadside Stands." It's a beautifully presented book and sort of a travel book alongside the recipes because the author, Maryam Jillani, criss-crossed Pakistan to learn from cooks in all different parts of the country. And even though Pakistani food is often just lumped in together with Indian food, you see from this book that Pakistan has its own distinctive cuisine, with influences from China, Iran, Afghanistan and, yes, India too. So I just loved paging through this book and reading the recipes, and some of them are more unexpected, like a fish soup or steamed dumplings. And others are more familiar dishes, like dal or chicken kebabs. I hope this book will let me expand my repertoire. Though, I got to say, I'm a little intimidated by the goat trotters. But it doesn't matter. I'm still enjoying reading about each thing and having these insights into Pakistan and its food.
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ADRIANA GALLARDO, BYLINE: Hi. Adriana Gallardo here. I'm an editor with NPR's Morning Edition. "Baldwin: A Love Story" was one of my favorite books this year. Author Nicholas Boggs approached the monumental task of revisiting James Baldwin's life through the men he loved. The result is a deeply researched biography that offers intimate cliff notes (ph) to Baldwin's greatest writings.
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LINAH MOHAMMAD, BYLINE: My name is Linah Mohammad. I'm a producer for All Things Considered. One of my favorite books this year was "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Omar El Akkad. This book is a blunt, courageous and searing condemnation of what the author really sees as Western complicity in Israel's war in Gaza, which he labeled as genocide. El Akkad beautifully and painfully just captures what it feels like to be an Arab immigrant in the West while watching mass killing unfold in real time, funded in part by that very place he now lives in. He captures the grief, the anger, the helplessness that we're all feeling, and he says out loud what many have struggled to put into wards, the discomfort of witnessing, the weight of the silence and the question of accountability. This is a book that refuses to let you look away.
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SIMON: Those books again - "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This," "Baldwin: A Love Story," "Pakistan: Recipes And Stories From Home Kitchens, Restaurants, And Roadside Stands" and "Good Movies As Old Books." And for the full list of Books We Love, you can visit npr.org/bestbooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ALBUM LEAF'S "TURN OF FATE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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