Brian Lair on WNYC, and we'll take the last few minutes of today's show to look back at some of the literary gems that have graced our bookshelves in 2024.

My guest for this is Gilbert Cruz,

editor of the New York Times Book Review. Here to talk about the book reviews. Ten best books of 2024, always so highly anticipated. We'll get through this pretty quickly, but there's really

something for everyone, five fiction, five nonfiction.

Gilbert, thanks for doing this.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be back.

And let's just dive in here.

We'll see if we can cut through all ten in brief.

The very first work of fiction on the list is Miranda July's all fours.

What made this book one of the best of the year?

I mean, one of the things that we hope sort of distinguishes at least the five fiction

books is a sense of surprise. We all read a lot of books. These books have to be great. They have

to surprise us. And all fours by Miranda July was utterly surprising. It's about a middle-aged female artist who sort of blows up her life, has a bit of a mid-left crisis as she approaches paramedopause. And it was just, it was a delight to read. It's a book for adults. It's about being in a marriage. It's about desire. It's about middle-age. And it's also very funny. I'm very dubious when someone tells

me a book is funny. I just loved it. Number two, I don't think you rank them, right? This is just

five. No, we did not rank them. Yeah. So just number two out of my mouth is Dolly Alderton's

good material. You describe Alderton as a latter-day Nora

Efron. So you're still on the funny beat here. A little bit. She is a British author, a newspaper

columnist, and this book is about a sort of a middling stand-up comedian who has just been

dumped by his girlfriend of several years, and he, over the course of this book,

tries to figure out why. It's both light and serious at the same time.

Another selection is James by Percival Everett, a radical reworking, you say, of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

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