Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour 2025 Books We Love About this episode NPR’s Books We Love https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2025 is a roundup of the best books from the past year, sorted and tagged to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. This year we’ve got hundreds of book recommendations, so today, we’re highlighting some of our favorites – including Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller, The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, and Cannon by Lee Lai.
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0:19 Speaker 01 NPR'S BOOKS WE LOVE is a roundup of our favorite books from the past year sorted and tagged to help you find exactly what you're looking for. Recommendations come in from NPR staff and contributors, including me. I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about NPR'S BOOKS WE LOVE on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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2:13 Speaker 01 Joining me today is Andrew Limbog. He's the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a reporter for The Culture Desk. Hey, friend.
2:20 Speaker 03 Hey, Glenn. How you doing?
2:21 Speaker 01 Good, good. So, listeners, look, you listen to this show, you probably listen to Andrew's show. And if you don't, you should. So you probably know what Books We Love is. But in case there's a handful of you out there who still don't, every year NPR collects book recommendations from staffers, contributors, critics, in all kinds of genres, fiction, nonfiction, books for kids, memoirs, and much, much more. This year, we've got hundreds and hundreds of recommendations. Both Andrew and I contributed to the mix. So we're just gonna get started. Kick us off, Andrew. What's your first pick?
2:50 Speaker 03 One of my personal recommendations was the book Tilt by Emma Pettie. This book was released earlier this year. It is a really tight, action-adventure novel about a woman. It starts off in an Ikea. She's super pregnant. She's running some, like, last-minute Ikea errands, you know? You know, that we all love to do on a Saturday.
3:11 Speaker 01 She's getting a Florb.
3:12 Speaker 03 When an earthquake hits. And this book takes place in Portland and in the greater Portland area, where they're constantly thinking and worrying about earthquakes. On its face, it's a simple story about like, oh, this, like, super-pregnant lady has to get back home. And it's fun and it works on that level. But then every other chapter is interspersed with these, like, not quite social commentary, but kind of sad and funny and interesting perspectives on, like, motherhood and early motherhood and the sort of idea of like, oh, you gotta get, like, the right baby carrier. You gotta go on wirecutter.com and buy the most expensive thing in all of this. It's like nonsense about the culture of pregnancy and motherhood. And it's a really fun and fast and thrilling read. That's Tilt by Emma Pettie.
3:53 Speaker 01 Right, and that made a lot of 2025 Best of lists. And a lot of reviews mentioned kind of what you mentioned, that it's also pretty funny. So that's great.
3:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:00 Speaker 01 All right. My first pick is Florenzer by Phil Melanson. I've mentioned this before. It's a historical novel that takes place in the city of Florence during the Renaissance. Now, Andrew, if you know your history, or if you've forgotten it like I did and just played Assassin's Creed a lot, you know that Florence was a center of art and culture. And let's do some real talk here. Throughout history, wherever you find a concentration of art and culture in one place, you tend to also find dudes getting it on with other dudes. It follows as night to day. Tale as old as time. So case in point, the city of Florence had such a reputation for gay sex that the German word for a man who engages in homosexuality was a Florenzer, a man from Florence. And that's borne out here because one of the POV characters in
4:45 Speaker 01 this book is a young Leonardo da Vinci. He's a student. He's reluctant to go out into the world because life as a student is very safe and supported. So relatable, relatable from the jump. He's just starting to come to terms with his talent and what we would today call his queerness. But what's remarkable, and I think really notable about this book, is how Melanson is very careful not to depict Leonardo's sexuality in a kind of ahistorical modern way. He doesn't cheat and insert, you know, 21st century notions about identity into the mix into this very not-modern world.
5:21 Speaker 03 He's not doing his dating profile?
5:22 Speaker 01 He's not. He's not. He's keeping it real. He's keeping it Florence real.
5:27 Speaker 03 He's not doing poppers or whatever, right?
5:28 Speaker 01 He's not. He also really digs into the, all the stuff the history books talk about, the politics of the papacy and the Medici's, but there is nothing dry or, you know, professorial about this book. What he does is what you have to do. He takes these flesh and blood characters and has them kind of embody all those conflicts. And just the prose, there's a vividness to this writing that I really dig because it's really about how it feels to walk around a city. And he really knows the town, apparently, because every section of the town has a different set of sights and sounds and smells that he captures really well. It's just, you know, every so often you come across a book that has such great
6:07 Speaker 01 prose that you want to read it out loud. So that is Florenzer by Phil Melanson. Now, I noticed that your next book is a graphic novel by someone whose first book, Stonefruit, I really dug. So tell me about Canon.
6:21 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. So this is Canon by Lee Lai. I feel like every year, there's a graphic novel that I get, like a review copy in the mail. And then I just like shit crisscross applesauce on my floor and start peeking through it. And then two hours pass, my legs are numb. And I'm like, oh, my goodness. And like, I'm an emotional wreck. And that book this year is a canon. The titular character, Canon, is like a cook, right, working at a mid-tier restaurant, taking care of an ailing patriarch. And, you know, she's just got a lot on her plate. And she vents about all of this to her best friend. Her best friend is an aspiring and struggling writer, who ends up using some of the material from Canon's life into her own work.
7:04 Speaker 03 And this sort of causes a rift between them. And it's a cute and intimate and deep story about this friendship that kind of cracks apart, while also dealing with questions of identity and identity politics in a very interesting and head-on way, right? The best friend character, who's a writer, you know, she's being pushed in all of these identitarian boxes when, you know, she's just like, I don't know if any of that really fits my steez, right? And so she has to like navigate that with her agent. And meanwhile, Canon is dealing with all of these things that supersede identitarian questions, like someone who is dying, someone who is sick and like paying rent and a boss who kind of sucks. And it's a really interesting and deep slice of life graphic novel. And so that is a book Canon by Lele.
7:48 Speaker 03 Okay, I'm definitely going to check that out. I think I've already ordered it. You're on a roll. Tell me about the 10-year affair. I'm now just realizing what mood I was in this year. The 10-Year Affair by Aaron Summers is kind of a callback to, I don't know, like a John Cheever or Richard Ford, these sort of like literary domestic novels. It's about a woman who is at a baby care class. She has a new child and she meets this guy. And this guy is charming and funny and witty, and she thinks about him a lot. I interviewed the author, Aaron Summers, and she framed it as a multiverse story, which I thought was an interesting take on it. From there, the main character sort of keeps imagining what having an affair would be like with this guy.
8:32 Speaker 03 And it goes between that run of her life and then on a parallel track, her quote unquote, real life, what actually happens in reality. And it follows that through, like the title says, 10 years through COVID, through leaving New York City, moving to the suburbs, and, you know, having a family life there and owning a house and all the pain that millennial ennui and domesticity afford.
8:54 Speaker 03 Like any good multiversal story, you get kind of confused, right? Towards like the midpoint, be like, what's real? Where am I? What parallel universe am I in right now? It's a really great literary drama. And so that is The Ten Year Affair by Aaron Summers.
9:07 Speaker 01 Oh, that's good. I mean, it's nerds like me who foisted the multiverse concept on a unsuspecting world. Sometimes I feel like apologizing for it. But that said, I mean, like you and I have read a lot of literary fiction, right? And sometimes you just get your fill of suburban, middle-aged, straight couples having tiny epiphanies on their patios. And I like that this has a big swing. I like that there's like something in it. And it's also very funny from what I hear. Yes, you agree?
9:28 Speaker 03 Yeah. If you like and understand that Girls was very self-effacing.
9:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure.
9:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's like that kind of comedy.
9:36 Speaker 01 All right, I'm in for it. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, so my last pick is a book by the actor Jeff Hiller. So the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the most recent Emmy ceremony was actor Jeff Hiller winning Supporting Actor in a Comedy for his work on the beloved and much missed series Somebody Somewhere from HBO. But before he won that Emmy, he published a memoir called Actress of a Certain Age: My 20-Year Trail to Overnight Success. So as you can glean from the title, Hiller is one of those actors who's been putting in the work for decades. You've seen him in small roles on like Thirty Rock and Broad City and Difficult People and Crazy Ex Girlfriend. Now, yes, he does tend to play the gay best friend, the gay coworker, the gay brother,
10:20 Speaker 01 the gay uncle, but this book is just a really great look at the unglamorous life of a working actor, or in his case, often a non-working actor. He's funny, he's very dishy, he's self-deprecating. When the occasion calls for it, he is occasionally filthy, and I'm here for that. Mostly, he's just really candid and clear-eyed about acting, about his work, about his appearance, about his sexuality, and he's always very funny about it. And look. He reads the audiobook. That's what I want to convey here. It is a rule, if you glean nothing else, from what I'm about to tell you. Whenever a performer writes a book and they read the audiobook, get the audiobook, because I cannot imagine reading this book without hearing the way Hiller giggles whenever
11:05 Speaker 01 he lands a joke or tells a dirty story, or often both at the same time. So that is Jeff Hiller, actress of a certain age. Now, that's just scratching the surface. There's hundreds more recommendations in this thing, but if you want to discover even more books that NPR loves and Andrew loves and I love, visit npr.org/bestbooks. And that brings us to the end of our show. Andrew Lindbrough, thank you for being here, friend. Thanks a lot, Glenn. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Kayla Latimore, Liz Metzger and Mike Katso, and edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy, and Hello, Kim. It provides our theme music. This year's Books We Love editorial team is Megan Sullivan, Rose Friedman, Beth Novy and Ivy Buck. Thank you all for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn
11:49 Speaker 01 Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.
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