The Book Review

Summer is slipping away and we are on break this week. But we have a fantastic rerun for you — our conversation with Min Jin Lee from last summer, when her book "Pachinko" was named one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by a New York Times Book Review panel. She spoke about her novel as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

“I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, period. Without question,” Lee says. “George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist. She really was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then above all, I think she has a great heart.”

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Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next?

The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject — some of it declassified only in recent years — for her 2024 book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which walks readers through the 72 minutes from launch to global annihilation. In the Book Review last year, Barry Gewen said the book was “gripping,” and declared it essential reading “if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision.”

This week, Jacobsen visits the podcast to talk about her book and why she wrote it, as well as offering some hope that catastrophe can be avoided. “I wanted to write a book that showed in absolutely appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be,” she tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And so when people say to me either ‘I could barely read your book, but I had to read it.’ or ‘I had to read it in one sitting, I was terrified, I was horrified,’ I believe I did my job.”

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Summer is the season for road trips, and also for road trip stories. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” may be the most famous example in American literature — but there are lots of other great road trip books, so this week the Book Review’s staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai presented readers with a list of 18 of their favorites. On this episode of the podcast they chat with host Gilbert Cruz about the project, their picks and the top-down, wind blown, carefree appeal of the road trip narrative as a genre.

Books discussed in this episode:

“On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac

“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward

“Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli

“I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore

“Tramps Like Us," by Joe Westmoreland

“Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti

“Gypsy: A Memoir," by Gypsy Rose Lee

“The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis

“All Fours,” by Miranda July

“Hearts,” by Hilma Wolitzer

“The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life,” by John le Carré

“Machine Dreams,” by Jayne Anne Phillips

“Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry

“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck

“The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith

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In this month’s installment of the Book Review Book Club, we’re discussing “The Catch,” the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames.

The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it’s simply not possible for her to be their mother … right?

What’s real? What’s not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about “The Catch” with fellow Book Review editors Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein.

Other books mentioned in this week’s episode:

“The Other Black Girl,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris

“The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson

“Wish Her Safe at Home,” by Stephen Benatar

“Erasure,” by Percival Everett 

“Playworld,” by Adam Ross 

“The House on the Strand,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter

“The Furrows,” by Namwali Serpell

“Dead in Long Beach, California,” by Venita Blackburn

“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett

“Death Takes Me,” by Cristina Rivera Garza

“Audition,” by Katie Kitamura

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We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the ones that just won’t let us go. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the best books of the year so far.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby

“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst

“Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams

“Isola,” by Allegra Goodman

“The Catch,” by Yrsa Daley-Ward

“Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” by Barbara Demick

“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones

“Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin,” by Sue Prideaux

“Raising Hare,” by Chloe Dalton

“To Smithereens,” by Rosalyn Drexler

“The Fate of the Day,” by Rick Atkinson

“Flesh,” by David Szalay

“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean

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