Books We Love comes straight from real human hearts

Plus: 'Napoleon,' 'Scott Pilgrim,' and a very divisive movie that swings for the fences

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when David Letterman paid a visit. It was the week when Fargo returned. And it was the week when another comedian returned to the same old material. (Lots more at the news quiz.) Let's get to it. Books We Love always, always, comes straight from real human hearts This week marked the launch of NPR's 2023 edition of Books We Love, a yearly collection of best books that are just as accurately defined, as in the title, as loved books. There are 380 or so books in this year's collection, and because all the years the feature has run — going back to 2013 — are still there, you can find more than 3,600 book recommendations from NPR staff, contributors and critics. They're tagged to categories you can mix and match, so you can look for, say, a love story ("Love & Romance") that's also a thriller ("Mysteries & Thrillers"). You can look for a funny memoir, or a comic for history lovers. NPR What's particularly special about Books We Love, though, is that it's a radical departure from two very common ways that culture recommendations come to you: top 10 lists from individuals and nudges from algorithms. You don't need me to tell you that any top 10 list — including mine! — will tell you as much about my tastes as it will about what books are good, what books you might like, or what books someone you want to find a gift for might like. And you don't need me to tell you that algorithms are mostly good at telling you what other things are exactly like the things you've already read, which sometimes is what you want, but sometimes isn't. Books We Love is human-driven. Humans make the tags, humans do the massive lift of work (both data and design) that makes the thing run, and humans step up and say, "I read this book and I loved it, and I want to talk about it." For example, this year, I picked four books I had read that I wanted to recommend: Megan Abbott's thriller Beware the Woman, Laura Lippman's twisty Prom Mom, John Scalzi's playful and prescient Starter Villain, and Michael Schulman's delightful and thorough Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. Nobody made me, nobody forced me, nobody led me. I said, "Let me write about these." And generally speaking, the hundreds of books this year — and the thousands of books since 2013 — are all like that. Someone really, truly, just wanted to tell you how good they thought this book was. My PCHH co-host Glen Weldon and I both made recommendations, as did our producer, Jessica Reedy. So did producers like Emiko Tamagawa from Here & Now and Melissa Gray from Weekend Edition, and editors like Megan Pratz from the Washington Desk. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air's beloved book critic, has picks in there. So do hosts and correspondents you may know, like Scott Detrow and Michel Martin. So do some of our engineers and people who work on fundraising, and lots of others. There are authors and book critics from outside NPR who add recommendations. But in every case, they really just want to say: this book is so good. And they answered a request for submissions, all on their own, to tell you so. It's that process, as organic and sprawling as it is, as well as the large number of contributors, that makes Books We Love so engaging and so useful. You could spend a very long time paging through the rich collections of everything from dishy memoirs to cookbooks to kids' books, but you could also go straight there at holiday gift-giving season to find just the right present for just the right person. It is always encouraging and gratifying to see how people respond to this project — and I can say that, because other than recommending a few books, I have nothing to do with it. Mostly, I stand back and enjoy it, which is exactly what I hope you'll get a chance to do. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend Slate's Joel Anderson, who hosted an entire, excellent season of the Slow Burn podcast about the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, wrote this week about the recent lawsuit against Sean Combs and why the allegations didn't surprise him. I strongly recommend the piece, which is thoughtful and, like the podcast season was, great at providing necessary context to a big story. Mike Birbiglia has a new special on Netflix called The Old Man & The Pool. Like all his work, it's impeccably structured, very funny and very personal. I've been watching a lot of old episodes of House, starring Hugh Laurie as the Sherlock Holmes-ish doctor who diagnoses different offbeat diseases every week. With the pretty major caveat that the show ran in the early aughts, and the misanthropic House's racism and sexism and other offensive comments would probably not make the cut today, it has certainly been a fascinating opportunity to see what a mystery/procedural show looks like when it's not about the police. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Barry Keoghan and Archie Madekwe in Saltburn. MGM and Amazon Studios When I walked out of Emerald Fennell's Saltburn, I told people: It's going to be divisive, but I really loved it. As it turned out, Glen, Aisha, Stephen and I all were big fans, and we talked about it this week. Stephen and Aisha sat down with our great pal Walter Chaw to talk about the spectacle that is Napoleon. And Glen, Mallory Yu and Roxana Hadadi tackled Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. While we gobbled some turkey, we got to share a couple of episodes from some of our neighborhood podcasts with you. First, we heard from Brittany Luse and her guests on an episode of It's Been A Minute digging into Killers of the Flower Moon. Second, we shared an episode of Alt.Latino in which hosts Anamaria Sayre and Felix Contreras explore the roots of the rise of Mexican regional music. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Walter Chaw: Blue Eye Samurai, on Netflix Aisha Harris: "Farrah Fawcett Hair" by Capital Cities, ft. André 3000 Stephen Thompson: Ghosts UK Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? 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