Best books of 2024 ... and beyond
Diane Rehm: On My Mind
WAMU 88.5
4.7 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Earlier this week Diane hosted a special edition of The Diane Rehm Book Club, her monthly series held on ZOOM in front of a live audience.
This month she asked some of her favorite book lovers to join her to talk about their favorite reads of year. And they did not disappoint.
Her guests were Ann Patchett, novelist and owner of Parnassus Books, Eddie Glaude Jr., professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of several books on race and politics, and Maureen Corrigan, book critic on NPR’s Fresh Air. She also teaches literary criticism at Georgetown University.
See below for a list of each guest’s top books of the year, along with all of the titles discussed during this conversation.
Maureen Corrigan’s top books of 2024:
“James” by Percival Everett
“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna
“Long Island” by Colm Tóibín
“Tell Me Everything” by Elizabeth Strout
“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar
“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner
“Cahokia Jazz” by Francis Spufford
“The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore
“A Wilder Shore” by Camille Peri
“The Letters of Emily Dickinson” edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
Ann Patchett’s top books of 2024:
“James” by Percival Everett
“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar
“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna
“Sipsworth” by Simon Van Booy
“Tell Me Everything” by Elizabeth Strout
“Mighty Red” by Louise Erdrich
“Time of the Child” by Niall Williams
“An Unfinished Love Story” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
“The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan
“Hotel Balzaar” by Kate DiCamillo (middle grade book)
“Water, Water: Poems” by Billy Collins
Eddie Glaude Jr.’s top books of 2024:
“Slaveroad” by John Edgar Wideman
“Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative” by Isabella Hammad
“We’re Alone” by Edwidge Danticat
Other titles mentioned in the discussion:
“Wide Sargasso Sea” with introduction by Edwidge Danticat
“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
“The Dog Who Followed the Moon: An Inspirational Story with Meditations on Life, Experience the Power of Love and Sacrifice” by James Norbury
“Afterlives” by Abdulrazak Gurnah
“Someone Knows My Name” by Lawrence Hill
“Moon Tiger” by Penelope Lively
“Sandwich” by Catherine Newman
“Windward Heights” by Maryse Condé
“There's Always This Year” by Hanif Abdurraqib
“Mothers and Sons” by Adam Haslett (publication date in January 2025)
“Memorial Day” by Geraldine Brooks (publication date in February 2025)
“33 Place Brugmann” by Alice Austen (publication date in March 2025)
“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
“Independent People” by Halldor Laxness
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
“Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward
To find out more about The Diane Rehm Book Club go to dianerehm.org/bookclub.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Diane. On my mind, the best books of 2024. Earlier this week, I hosted a special edition of the Diane Rine Book Club. My Monthly series held on Zoom in front of a live audience. |
| 0:25.7 | This month, I asked some of my favorite booklovers to join me |
| 0:31.5 | to talk about their favorite reads of the year. |
| 0:36.1 | And they did not disappoint. My guests were Ann Patchett, |
| 0:41.6 | novelist and owner of Parnas's books. Eddie Glog, Jr., professor of African American Studies at |
| 0:51.0 | Princeton University, and the author of several books on race and politics. |
| 0:57.7 | And Maureen Corrigan, book critic on NPR's Fresh Air. |
| 1:03.2 | You can see a complete list of my guest's top books on the website, diane ream.org. |
| 1:15.6 | Thank you, Leslie, and welcome to all of you. |
| 1:21.8 | It's so good to see you, Eddie, I was getting just a little worried about you. So glad you made it. |
| 1:30.6 | Let's start the conversation with something that I am reading right now and which I think is |
| 1:41.2 | going to be a number one on everybody's list. And that is an annotated version of Belcanto. |
| 1:54.5 | Anne Patchett, I have to tell you, I felt as though I was sitting next to you when you were putting in those notes. |
| 2:06.7 | You were talking to me. You were explaining to me what your own inner thoughts were. Tell me why you decided to do that. A little bookstore called |
| 2:22.3 | Newtonville Books outside of Boston that had been particularly hard hit by the pandemic was trying |
| 2:27.9 | to raise money, and they asked 20 authors to annotate one of their books to sell at an auction. |
| 2:34.5 | I annotated Tom Lake. |
| 2:36.7 | And when I finished, I thought, this is actually really interesting. |
| 2:40.3 | I learned so much from the process. |
| 2:42.9 | Took the idea to my editor and said, do you want to give this a try? |
| 2:47.5 | And so I edited, I'd annotated Belcanto, which I hadn't read the book in 23 years. |
| 2:56.0 | And it was, it was really fun. I kept saying it was like a craft project. It wasn't like |
... |
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