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Books We Love is a

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roundup of

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favorite books of the year, sorted and tagged

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to help you find exactly what you're looking

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for. Recommendations come in from

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critics and contributors and as we'll

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be talking about today, NPR staff,

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a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Joining

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me today is Andrew Limbong. He's the host

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of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and

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a reporter for The Culture Desk. Hey, Andrew,

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welcome back. Yo, hey, Linda, what's up? We

2:19

are going to talk about some books, if

2:21

that's okay with you, buddy. All right. You

2:24

may well know what books we love is,

2:26

but in case you don't, each year

2:28

NPR gathers recommendations from contributors and critics and

2:31

staff in all kinds of genres, fiction

2:33

and nonfiction, books for kids, cookbooks,

2:35

memoirs. There's a little bit of

2:37

just about everything. And this

2:40

year there are more picks than ever

2:42

from NPR staff. That includes me and

2:44

it includes Andrew. So we're both

2:46

going to share a couple of our picks. Andrew,

2:49

what's your first one? Yeah. So

2:51

one of the books I picked is a

2:54

biography. It's by Abraham Josephine Reisman

2:56

and it's called Ringmaster. It's

2:58

by Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. I

3:01

don't know, Linda, were you like a wrestling head? Are you a wrestling head?

3:03

Not at all. It's one of the

3:05

things that I just never locked into, but I'm

3:07

always fascinated by it. Yeah, same. I was never

3:09

a wrestling kid either. I was mostly just like

3:11

scared to get bullied by the other wrestling

3:13

kids, but I did have

3:16

this like fascination with the WWE. And

3:18

I think this book, it's not only

3:20

a biography of Vince McMahon, you know,

3:23

headed the WWE and like a kind

3:25

of tracing the life of popular wrestling,

3:27

but it's also a really interesting look

3:29

at how American culture

3:31

translates, translates irony. Oh, wow.

3:34

Yeah. Like idioms of wrestling, you know,

3:36

like heels, cave-ates, all this pretending. Right, right, right. You know,

3:38

you think a lot about like the people

3:40

who have proliferated online and you just have to

3:42

ask yourself, it's like, wait, are they doing a

3:44

bit? Is this like a thing or is this

3:46

real or is this not real? I keep thinking,

3:48

you know, from reading the book, I was like,

3:50

it doesn't matter. The question is the thing that

3:53

they're doing. Right. You know, you could

3:55

obviously extrapolate that out to politics or, you know,

3:57

other forms of culture, but it's a really interesting

3:59

look at how. how, what

4:01

attracts our attention economy these days? Yeah,

4:05

it's always been difficult for me to figure out, like, it

4:07

is not a sport in the traditional sense of

4:10

having a competition that ends unpredictably,

4:12

you know what I mean? It is a

4:14

performance, but it's also a sport in the

4:16

sense that it takes a great deal of

4:18

skill and, you know, physical skills of all

4:20

kinds. I think I've just

4:22

never been sure of how to process

4:24

it. So maybe this

4:26

is the right, maybe this is the right book. Yeah,

4:28

yeah, yeah. It's a very American story. It's

4:30

a very like Gatsby type of

4:32

story where, you know, like it follows him sort of

4:35

like making this thing through

4:37

whatever kind of

4:39

like infotainment BS, spectacle,

4:42

you know, circus that he does. It's

4:45

a really like fascinating look at like

4:48

American business tycoonery. Right, right.

4:50

So that is Ringmaster, Vince

4:52

McMahon and the Unmaking of

4:55

America by Abraham Josephine Reisman.

4:58

And my next pick is

5:00

also kind of a little bit about

5:02

heels, you could say. It is called

5:04

Starter Villain and it is by John

5:07

Scolzey. So Scolzey is a

5:09

sort of a speculative fiction writer of

5:11

all different kinds. Writes some kind of

5:13

more grand fantasy, writes some

5:15

like interesting, crunchy, science fictiony

5:18

things. He wrote this book,

5:20

which one of the first things that I said

5:22

when I talked about this in books we love, on

5:24

the cover of this book, there is a cat who

5:26

is wearing a business suit. And it's like a very

5:28

traditional, what you would see as like a picture of

5:31

an executive in a business suit,

5:33

except it's a cat. Now, is there a reason for

5:35

this? Yes, there is a good reason for this.