Find your next favorite read with NPR's Books We Love

For the past decade, NPR has curated its Books We Love, an interactive reading guide based on staff and critic selections of their top picks of the year. And the 2023 edition is now live. 

There are nearly 400 books to choose from. While that can sound intimidating, you can mix and match tags like book club ideas, biography and memoir or eye-opening reads to filter those results and find the book that's most in line with your literary taste — or as a gift for someone else. 

CapRadio Insight host Vicki Gonzalez spoke with Andrew Limbong, NPR's Arts desk reporter and “Book of the Day” podcast host, about the work that went into this year's interactive guide with a real-time demonstration to boot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

How did you go about curating this list?

Books We Love is this annual guide that we put out every year that we've been doing for over a decade now. What happens is around the fall, we send a call out to all of our staff and all of our book critics and the reporters and say, ‘Hey, what books have you loved? What books do you really want to talk about? Let us know what you've been reading.’ 

And then after that massive wave of books comes in we gather together — and shout out to everyone else who works on this because it is a work of many — and just do a bunch of long meetings in Excel spreadsheets, cataloging all these books and sort of making sure what goes on there, what doesn't. And I think what's important to point out is it's a conversation, right? It isn't a one directional, word from on high, ‘here's the 10 best books of the year.’ It is, ‘here's 350 plus books that you might be interested in if you want to know about XYZ,’ and we have a long list of filters [and] categories that you can then use to narrow the list and find out what you might want to read next. Because listen, choice paralysis is definitely a real thing and this helps greatly with that. 

How do you want people to experience this guide?

So what I usually do is — because the great thing about it is it collects all of the Books We Love we've done going back to 2013 — so if I want to figure out anything going back then I just use the platform. What I usually do is go to the Books We Love platform and then figure out what mood I'm in. So if I want to read something more literary, I can go to [the] seriously great writing [tag] and then if I want to read about more realistic fiction, I can then use that [tag]. My favorite tag is actually the rather long and rather short tags. So then I can narrow that down to the rather short. I just did all that and I've got a collection of — what is this … eight — eight books that I can then choose from there.

It was a pretty good year for memoirs and biographies. Which are your favorites?

Ah, let me go on to the Books We Love and go to memoirs and biographies and let you know.

I love the live demonstration.

Yeah, I mean this is it in real time. You can't not shout out the Britney Spears book. I was a big part of the coverage when all the hullabaloo around her conservatorship was going on and so finally having that book coming out was of pertinent interest to me. 

The other biography that I had actually blurbed about was this book called “Ringmaster.” It's a biography of Vince McMahon, who is the head of the WWE, by Abraham Josephine Riesman. I don't know if you are a wrestling head, but what’s great about this is that it's not just a book about Vince and wrestling, but it's about how the idioms of wrestling can be translated into a culture today. Right? And so this idea of a heel, of pretending to be a loud mouth bad guy in order to gain attention and how that works. You can see the pattern at work in wrestling, see how people exploit the attention economy using these different methods.

I also have friends who love fantasy and sci-fi. What do you suggest?

If you haven't read the “Fourth Wing,” that's the big one, right?

If you want something a little more under the radar that isn't all over TikTok these days, C Pam Zhangs’ “Land of Milk and Honey” [has] more literary stuff with some sci-fi elements twisted in. Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Family Lore” has fantasy elements within its sort of more lit-ficky type things. “The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi” is actually a fun book about a retired pirate who's got to go in for one last job and the interview that we did with that book is really fun.

It's one thing to choose a book for yourself. It can also be a little more daunting or challenging selecting a book for someone else and we are rounding the corner to the holidays. How do you go about gifting a book?

I try to get a book for my father-in-law every year. He likes biography stuff, right? So click on that. He's a music guy. So I'm clicking on that — I'm just doing this in real time right now — and so cross referencing. I'll probably pick up something like the Lou Reed book by Will Hermes, “King of New York,” and literally just using the the filters to find out what your gift-givee is interested in.