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Here are the Books We Love: 380+ great 2023 reads recommended by NPR

NPR's Books We Love returns with 380+ new titles handpicked by NPR staff and trusted critics. Find 11 years of recommendations all in one place – that's more than 3,600 great reads.

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NPR's Book of the Day

In need of a good read? Or just want to keep up with the books everyone's talking about? NPR's Book of the Day gives you today's very best writing in a snackable, skimmable, pocket-sized podcast. Whether you're looking to engage with the big questions of our times – or temporarily escape from them – we've got an author who will speak to you, all genres, mood and writing styles included. Catch today's great books in 15 minutes or less.

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Most Recent Episodes

May 13, 2024

Rachel khong's new novel explores who gets to be 'real americans'.

May 13, 2024 • Real Americans , the new novel by Rachel Khong, spans generations and decades within a family to understand the ongoing struggle to make sense of race, class and identity in the United States. Like with any family story, there are secrets and confrontations and difficult conversations, too; that desire to fill in the gaps about where we come from and how it has shaped our lineage is at the center of today's interview with Khong and NPR's Juana Summers.

May 10, 2024

For mother's day, two books that tackle motherhood.

May 10, 2024 • This weekend is Mother's Day, a good occasion to reflect on the art of parenting. First, comedian Glenn Boozan speaks to Celeste Headlee on Here and Now about her book There Are Moms Way Worse Than You , a joke-book that uses examples of bad parenting from the animal kingdom to soothe those who might be worried about their own child-raising skills.Then, an interview from our archives: a 1989 chat with Amy Tan on All Things Considered about her novel The Joy Luck Club, the story of four Chinese American families living in San Francisco inspired by Tan's experience as a child of immigrants.

May 9, 2024

In 'soil,' camille dungy weaves together gardening, race and motherhood.

May 9, 2024 • For poet Camille Dungy, environmental justice, community interdependence and political engagement go hand in hand. She explores those relationships in her book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden . In it, she details how her experience trying to diversify the species growing in her yard, in a predominantly white town in Colorado, reflects larger themes of how we talk about land and race in the U.S. In today's episode, she tells NPR's Melissa Block about the journey that gardening put her on, and what it's revealed about who gets to write about the environment.

May 8, 2024

Two mothers clash over integration in 'what's mine & yours'.

May 8, 2024 • At the center of author Naima Coster's novel What's Mine & Yours are two struggling mothers. Jade is a Black single mother who is trying to provide a better life for her son, and Lacey May is a white mother who is trying to give her daughters the life she never had. Their stories will intertwine over decades, starting with when Lacey May opposes the integration of her daughters' school – the same school Jade is trying to get her son into. Coster told NPR's Audie Cornish that fiction gives us a window into other people's lives but that does not mean we have to condone their actions.

Two mothers clash over integration in 'What's Mine & Yours'

May 7, 2024

Poet ocean vuong shares his grief in 'time is a mother'.

May 7, 2024 • Poet Ocean Vuong's collection, Time Is A Mother, is about his grief after losing family members. Vuong told NPR's Rachel Martin that time is different now that he has lost his mother: "when I look at my life since she died in 2019, I only see two days: Today when she's not here, and the big, big yesterday when I had her."

May 6, 2024

'the three mothers' who paved the way for three extraordinary men.

May 6, 2024 • It's almost Mother's Day – so today, we learn about the women who raised some of history's most important men in The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped A Nation . Author Anna Malaika Tubbs told 1A's Jenn White that history is often told by and about men, but knowing these women's stories - "taking their lives from the margins and putting them in the center" - is just as important. As Tubbs notes, "If they'd never had these famous sons, they still were worthy of being seen."

May 2, 2024

Amy tan opens up about her birding obsession in 'the backyard bird chronicles'.

May 2, 2024 • Author Amy Tan spends hours in her backyard, watching and drawing birds go about their business. Her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles , is full of essays and illustrations about her connection to these small creatures. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Leila Fadel about how an overwhelming sense of gloom from racism and political division in 2016 forced her to find a way to immerse herself in nature, and how her obsessive hobby led to a pretty high bird food budget – and mealworms in her fridge.

May 1, 2024

Emily henry's 'funny story' centers a new character in rom-com tropes.

May 1, 2024 • Two childhood best friends realize they're in love and break up with their significant others to be together – that's a classic romantic-comedy storyline. But in her new book, Funny Story , author Emily Henry wonders about some of the other forgotten cast members: what happens to the people who got dumped along the way? In today's episode, NPR's Juana Summers asks Henry about writing male characters that go to therapy, leaning into the cringey moments of falling in love and looking up to her own parents' relationship.

April 30, 2024

'mid-air' is a middle grade book about fitting in, friendship and grief.

April 30, 2024 • Middle school can be a rough time no matter what. But for Isaiah, the eighth grader at the heart of Alicia D. Williams' book Mid-Air , there are some added challenges: feeling like his affinity for rock music and nail polish makes him weird, grieving the loss of a close friend, and drifting further and further apart from his other best bud. In today's episode, Williams speaks with NPR's Andrew Limbong about the particular difficulties Black boys face to feel like they belong, and why — in the face of tragedy or discomfort — it can be even harder for them to connect with one another.

April 29, 2024

'new cold wars' examines the relationship between the u.s., russia and china.

April 29, 2024 • Reporter David Sanger has covered five American presidents for The New York Times . But in today's episode, he tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that there's an unpredictability to the politics of today — particularly on an international stage. His new book, New Cold Wars , analyzes how the ties between the United States, Russia and China have rapidly evolved in recent decades, and how technology, military intelligence and economic sanctions play into the conflict

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Here are the books we love: 380+ great 2023 reads recommended by npr.

Books We Love returns with 380+ new titles handpicked by NPR staff and trusted critics. Find 11 years of recommendations all in one place –...

NPR's Books We Love returns with 380+ new titles handpicked by NPR staff and trusted critics. Find 11 years of recommendations all in one place – that's more than 3,600 great reads.

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Title: Meet The Voice Behind NPR Fresh Air’s Book Reviews

In “Behind the CV,” we explore professors’ deepest passions, what makes them tick and how they got to where they are in academia.

Maureen Corrigan grew up loving all sorts of books. After earning her undergraduate English degree and on her way to her Ph.D., she applied for a job as a book critic at what would become one of the most popular radio shows in America.

She was rejected for being “too academic.” But that didn’t hold her back from trying again.

Thirty-five years later, Corrigan is one of the most recognizable radio and podcast voices as the book reviewer for Fresh Air , one of the most popular programs on public radio and a hit NPR podcast. 

On top of reading countless books every year for Fresh Air , she also teaches in the College of Arts & Sciences as the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism. She is also a prolific writer and has authored two books while regularly writing for the Wall Street Journal , Washington Post and other major media outlets

“I still feel like I’ve got the greatest combination of jobs in the world,” Corrigan said. “I get to go back and read classics like The Great Gatsby every year with my students, and then I get to read the latest books that are coming down the pike.”

Discover how Corrigan found her love of books and became one of the country’s most popular book critics.

Behind the CV: Maureen Corrigan on NPR, Book Reviews, and What Makes a Great Read

My love of reading came: early from my dad, who was a refrigeration mechanic and loved to read. He would come home from work installing refrigeration systems on buildings all over New York City and he would always crack open a paperback, usually an adventure story about World War II since he had been in the war, but also detective novels and some canonical novels. I remember one day when he saw me reading A Tale of Two Cities for school and he said, “That’s a good one.” So that kind of encouragement to read really took root.

The first book that made me upset: was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch because my mother was set on giving it to a younger cousin and I wanted to keep that book. I was probably around six and I really loved that book because it was about a woman with a lot of children. As an only child I was fascinated by big families.

The summer of 1975 was magical because: One of my wonderful English professors at Fordham, Mary Fitzgerald, took six of us rabid English majors to the Yeats International Summer School. She knew Seamus Heaney, who later won the Nobel Prize, and we kept running into him all throughout that trip in Dublin and Sligo. My memory of that summer is of a time that was enchanted. I met a lot of writers and poets and saw that they were living a life immersed in literature, and I felt that somehow such a life might be possible.

Why I hated my Ph.D program: I went to Fordham University for college and had the greatest professors of my life there, and they inspired me to go ahead for my Ph.D.  I was fortunate to be awarded a fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania, but hated the Ph.D program — although I stuck it out because I wanted to be a professor. I was at Penn during the period when deconstruction and continental critical theory ruled, and I found those ways of talking about books deadening and, now I would say, elitist, too. 

I love to teach because: It’s a lot like opening up a fresh book. You walk into the classroom the first day of the semester, and you don’t know who you’re going to be with for the next few months and what your shared experience is going to be. When a class gels, you really feel, as a professor, that you and your students are all together on a freshly illuminating and, sometimes, unpredictable journey through the material.

I got into reviewing books when: a friend of mine in graduate school asked if I would help her with a take-home editing test for a job she was applying to at the Village Voice , which was back then the greatest alternative newspaper in America. The Village Voice is the newspaper that the Georgetown Voice is named after. I helped her, and as a way of thanking me, she asked if I wanted to try to write a book review for the literary supplement. Writing that review felt like the magic antidote to what I so disliked about academic writing. It was as if somebody gave me a life support system to get through the rest of graduate school. In my reviews I could write about books with enthusiasm and humor and, I hope, intelligence, rather than putting my voice through what I considered to be the “deflavorizing machine” of academic critical theory.

“Writing that review felt like the magic antidote to what I so disliked about academic writing. It was as if somebody gave me a life support system to get through the rest of graduate school.” Maureen Corrigan

I landed my job at NPR’s Fresh Air because: I had a gig during two summers during graduate school grading AP English exams. I always compare the speed with which we had to grade those essays to the classic scene of Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory. The conveyor belt would get faster, and you, as a grader, had to read faster. The system was nuts and immoral. I did an exposé for the Village Voice about that escapade. A producer from Fresh Air called me and asked me to do a much shorter on-air version for the show, and the folks at Fresh Air liked it and asked me if I would like to join as a secondary book critic. John Leonard was the book critic at the time and had a reputation for being very generous to younger writers, and when he eventually left the show, I became the book critic — a position I’ve held for some 35 years and counting. 

Reading books every day never gets old: because, while the books I’m considering as a critic may not always be great, they’re always new. Every year there are some books by writers I haven’t read before who are amazing; every year there are books by familiar writers I love who surprise me by going off in new directions. You just never know what you’re going to encounter when you open up a book.

I choose what books to review by: making a master list of what’s coming out at least a season ahead. I probably get at least 25 emails a day from publicists and publishers. I also talk to independent booksellers I know and trust to learn what forthcoming books they are excited about. My current review list changes from week to week. If I feel like I’m getting in a rut or I’m doing a lot of literary fiction, I’ll make a special effort to find some promising non-fiction or genre fiction. If I’m doing a lot of books from major publishing houses written by big-name authors, I’ll try to make a special effort to change up my review list and find an academic or independent press book or something else that’s a little off-road. 

What makes a great book is: if it’s fresh, authentic, conceived out of the author’s soul or imagination; in short, a subject hasn’t been done 5,000 times before or not quite in that same style or voice or form before.

A book I keep coming back to: The Great Gatsby . I’ve read Gatsby well over a hundred times. I learn something new every time I reread it:  that’s one of the marks of a great work of art. Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald himself said, is about aspiration. It’s about reaching with the knowledge that one’s efforts are always going to fall short. And Fitzgerald’s language is so gorgeous. It’s almost unearthly. As other people have said, the last seven and a half pages of The Great Gatsby are the best writing that anybody has ever produced about the promise of America.

In my free time, I gravitate toward: hard-boiled detective fiction. At its best, it’s a form that investigates the underside of American life and society. Detective fiction is also the only literary genre where the act of thinking is at the center of the narrative.  Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the detective story, called his strange new creation “tales of ratiocination” — tales of thinking. How do you make thinking itself engrossing, suspenseful, even sexy? That’s the challenge for detective fiction writers. 

If you asked me how many books I read this year: I couldn’t possibly tell you. 

Behind the CV

Do Men Really Think About the Roman Empire Every Day? This Roman History Professor Sure Does

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Book Review

Sex, drugs and economics: the double life of a conservative gadfly.

The professor and social commentator Glenn Loury opens up about his vices in a candid new memoir.

  By Dwight Garner

Bribing the Navy Is Easier (and More Entertaining) Than You Might Think

In “Fat Leonard,” Craig Whitlock investigates one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. military history.

  By Nicolas Niarchos

What We Didn’t Learn From a Space Shuttle Disaster

As recounted in Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger,” the 1986 tragedy that riveted a nation was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error.

  By Rachel Slade

Adultery Gets Weird in Miranda July’s New Novel

An anxious artist’s road trip stops short for a torrid affair at a tired motel. In “All Fours,” the desire for change is familiar. How to satisfy it isn’t.

  By Alexandra Jacobs

Her Sister Is Dead but Life, and Libido, Carry On

In Kimberly King Parsons’s witty, profane novel, “We Were the Universe,” a young mother seeks to salve a profound loss.

  By Alissa Nutting

The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000

Looking for your next great read? We’ve got 3,228. Explore the best fiction and nonfiction from 2000 - 2023 chosen by our editors.

  By The New York Times Books Staff

17 New Books Coming in May

New novels from R.O. Kwon, Kevin Kwan and Miranda July; a reappraisal of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy; memoirs from Brittney Griner and Kathleen Hanna — and more.

Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book

Reading picks from Book Review editors, guaranteed to suit any mood.

Best-Seller Lists: May 19, 2024

All the lists: print, e-books, fiction, nonfiction, children’s books and more.

Books of The Times

Can a 50-Year-Old Idea Save Democracy?

The economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler thinks so. In “Free and Equal,” he makes a vigorous case for adopting the liberal political framework laid out by John Rawls in the 1970s.

  By Jennifer Szalai

A Portrait of the Art World Elite, Painted With a Heavy Hand

Hari Kunzru examines the ties between art and wealth in a new novel, “Blue Ruin.”

Does a Small Cough Make You Think the Worst? Here’s a Book for You.

Caroline Crampton shares her own worries in “A Body Made of Glass,” a history of hypochondria that wonders whether newfangled technology drives us crazier.

She Wrote ‘The History of White People.’ She Has a Lot More to Say.

“I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of essays and artwork by the historian Nell Irvin Painter, captures her wide-ranging interests and original mind.

Young, Cool, Coddled and Raised on the Internet

The best stories in Honor Levy’s “My First Book” capture the quiet desperation of today’s smart set. But there is such a thing as publishing too soon.

Can You Find The 13 Book Titles Hidden in This Text?

A baker’s dozen of sports books — including athlete memoirs, biographies, team histories and a few classics of the form — are tucked away in this very short story. Can you find them all?

By J. D. Biersdorfer

Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad?

A new book, “The Light Eaters,” looks at how plants sense the world and the agency they have in their own lives.

By Elizabeth A. Harris

She Taught Generations How to Wield a Wok and a Cleaver

As Michelle T. King demonstrates in this moving and ambitious biography, Fu Pei-mei was far more than “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”

By Thessaly La Force

Flipping Off the Patriarchy, Three Chords at a Time

In her intimate memoir, “Rebel Girl,” the punk-rock heroine Kathleen Hanna recalls a life of trauma, triumph and riot grrrl rebellion.

By Evelyn McDonnell

On Mother’s Day, Here Are 2 Novels That Get Babies Right

Barbara Kingsolver’s debut, and a bad seed’s beginnings.

When Anarchists Were Public Enemy Number One

An entertaining new history by Steven Johnson explores an explosive moment when terror and nascent surveillance collided.

By Clyde Haberman

A Family Saga That Stays Calm Through Tumultuous Times

Jessica Shattuck’s “Last House” dips into the cultural intrigues of 20th-century America, but keeps its nose surprisingly clean.

By Kate Christensen

A Loving Daughter, Obsessed With Her Parents’ Misery, Seeks Its Roots

Inspired by her own family’s past, Claire Messud’s “This Strange Eventful History” unfolds over seven decades and two wars.

By Joan Silber

David Shapiro, Who Gained Fame in Poetry and Protest, Dies at 77

A renowned member of the New York School of poets, he also found accidental notoriety when he was photographed during the 1968 uprising at Columbia University.

By Alex Williams

Talking to Leigh Bardugo, Fantasy Superstar

The best-selling author of dark fantasy novels for Y.A. and adult audiences discusses her career and her stand-alone new historical fantasy, “The Familiar.”