Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Happy Friday, folks. Today we've got something a little different for you. You've probably heard by now about NPR's books we love, our year-end recommendation platform. If you haven't, go check it out. I guarantee you'll find some good stuff in there for you. But I recently went on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour

Pod with Linda Holmes to talk about our picks for our favorite reads this year. It's a really

fun conversation. Give it a listen after the break. In the U.S., national security news can feel

far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

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Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

NPR's Books We Love is a roundup of favorite books of the year, sorted and tagged to help

you find exactly what you're looking for.

Recommendations come in from critics and contributors, and as we'll be talking about today,

NPR staff, even me. I'm Linda Holmes,

and today we're talking about books we love on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining me today is Andrew Limbong. He's the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a

reporter for the Culture Desk. Hey, Andrew, welcome back.

Yo, hey, Linda, what's up? We are going to talk about some books if that's okay with you.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Buddy. All right. You may well know what books we love is, but in case you don't, each year, NPR gathers recommendations from contributors and critics and staff in all kinds of genres, fiction and nonfiction, books for kids,

cookbooks, memoirs. There's a little bit of just about everything. And this year, there are more

picks than ever from NPR staff. That includes me and it includes Andrew. So we're both going to

share a couple of our picks. Andrew, what's your first one? Yeah, so one of the books I picked is a biography. It's by Abraham Josephine Reisman, and it's called Ringmaster, Vince McMahon, and the Unmaking of America. I don't know, Linda, were you like a wrestling head? Are you a wrestling head? Not at all. It's one of the things that I just never locked into, but I'm always fascinated by it.

Yeah, same. I was never a wrestling kid either. I was mostly just like scared to get bullied by the other

wrestling kids. But I did have this like fascination with the WWE. And and I think this book,

it's not only a biography of Vince McMahon, you know, head of the W.E. And like a kind of tracing

the life of popular wrestling. But it's also a really interesting look at how American culture

...