This is the bookwry podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. And today, we have a very

important job, Rebecca. We are deciding the books of the year. No one else is going to do it.

No one is. No, no. I mean, it's not like the New York Times has a list and we just talk to Gilbert or

you talk to Gilbert. That was a great episode,

by the way. It was super fun to learn about how the New York Times puts their list together.

Yeah, here at the end of the year, no one has taken on the onerous task of rounding up the books

that summarized the year. So I thought we'd break some new ground. I'm kind of kidding and not

that actually people aren't going to do what we do because this is, if you're trying to get a sense of the books that defined the year, that's what we're trying to do. And 10 is not very many. On the other hand, I have to say, I didn't have 15. Did you? No. Yeah, I did some off the dome and there, you know, there's a

significant amount of overlap with our best books conversations, but not all of these are books

that would have come up in those conversations because things can be significant in the zeitgeist

without being good or best.

And it's not a dissimilar process.

Then this is more of a debriefing rear action report on the it books of the year.

Theoretically, if we did our it books right, it would line up like this.

Or I guess the calendar lined up too because there's some of them. And kind of a, the books you need to read to understand what 2024 was, both in books itself and also just in culture.

I maybe did a little bit less in culture. I think that might be one place where we can have some discussion about it.

I have 11 books. One honorable mention that I wasn't sure I wasn't sure what to do with, maybe people already guessing what that book might be. Maybe you are guessing yourself what it might be. And we're going to, we're going to come up with a shared list. This is not where we each have our best books of the year list. Part of this is going to be trying to, what do they call it, reconciliation in Congress? Yeah, sure, budget reconciliation.

Budget reconciliation that goes on here.

After this show, we're going to record the Patreon episode.

Thank you so much for all their Patreon subscribers.

Talking about the books we missed or think we probably were going to miss, there are still

19 reading days left in the year, and I might mop up a couple other. We had some

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