Introducing: Books We've Loved

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 670 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2025

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to Books We've Loved, a new limited series from Book of The Day. Every episode, we will dig into some of our favorite books, to make the case for picking up a book from the past. Hosted by Book of the Day’s Andrew Limbong and Code Switch’s B.A. Parker, they will be your guides through these timeless stories. Bringing on NPR voices and book nerds far and wide, they will discuss titles by authors like Anthony Bourdain, James Baldwin, and Jane Austen, and asking their guests questions like — why can’t they get this book out of their head? How did this book shift a paradigm, shake the culture, or change their life? And, most importantly, why should you read it now?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you have an untouched stack of books on your nightstand?
0:03.8	Or a million books on hold at the library?
0:06.8	Well, you are not alone.
0:08.7	I'm B.A. Parker.
0:10.1	And I'm Andrew Limbong, and we're a host of a new limited podcast series, Books We've Loved.
0:15.6	You know me as the host of NPR's Code Switch.
0:18.6	And I'm the host of NPR's Book of the Day.
0:22.5	And on every episode of Books We've Lo loved, we talk to some of our favorite readers, authors, and NPR voices about,
0:28.6	well, the books we love and the books we've wanted to revisit. Like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
0:34.7	I think when people find that it is a really funny book,
0:38.2	because, I mean, it is a general problem throughout society
0:41.2	that people think jokes were invented in, like, 1980.
0:44.3	You know what I mean?
0:45.7	And Amy Tans, the Joy Luck Club.
0:47.9	When I was a teenager, I was not yet at a developmental stage of life
0:53.1	where I was ready to consider that my mother was a full
0:57.4	human being. And we're not just reading books you might have read in high school. We're rereading
1:02.7	books that have a place in the culture. We'll also talk about how these books have shown up in
1:08.4	other places. We're talking made-for-TV movies, blockbuster hits, and shows you might have binged.
1:15.8	Like, interview with a vampire.
1:17.5	There was no sad boy vampire until Anne Rice.
1:22.0	There were, like, sexy evil monsters.
	...

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