November 15, 2025

by Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast

Hey newsletter readers! Got a lot of interesting stories of readers doing a 180 on books this week. Some of your emails below. As always, the inbox is bookoftheday@npr.org. And if you want to hear the latest author interviews from across NPR, subscribe to NPR’s Book of the Day podcast. Here’s this week’s letter!

Liars and cheaters

If you listened to last week’s episode of Books We’ve Loved revisiting Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, we talk about the reaction Tan got particularly from Asian men angry about her depiction of them. We get at a similar conversation from a different angle this week in our discussion of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, with help from Glen Weldon, host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.

What Glen told us is that he first read the novel as a young man just coming out of the closet, and wanted a sexy, simple story about two men falling in love and living happily ever after. If you’ve read Giovanni’s Room, you know how hilariously naïve this is. If you haven’t read it, just know that well, it’s sort of sexy. It isn’t simple. You can argue whether or not the two main characters are actually in love, or if they’re just using each other. And it’s definitely not happily ever after. It’s a book filled with shady people doing shady things thinking shady thoughts. So much so that you could see modern readers criticizing it for not being a positive representation of queer life.

This week on Books We've Loved: James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Gardners Books

Boy, what a loaded term, eh? Is it Baldwin’s job to write positively about queer men? I’d argue no, just as much as it isn’t Amy Tan’s responsibility to positively represent Asian people. For the podcast, my co-host B.A. Parker also spoke with Garth Greenwell, the author of the book Small Rain, who published this essay in Harper’s Magazine a few months back that is, in part, about teaching Giovanni’s Room. He writes about one student who objected to the book:

“The student was a brilliantly gifted poet from Nigeria, and he situated his response in experience: for a reader from a country where homosexuality is still criminalized, where gay people face violence in their daily lives, Baldwin’s novel, with all its tragedy, its unremitting negativity, failed, as he phrased it, to offer anything that he could use.”

“Representation matters” is a bit of a pat refrain that’s been tossed around for a while now. But I think we, as readers, are still trying to suss out what exactly that looks like. This is a tricky conversation with no easy answers but I want to know – if you’re a teacher/educator/librarian do you see younger readers approaching books like Greenwell’s student? And if not, what do you think of writers not just representing their background, but doing so positively? Let us know at bookoftheday@npr.org.

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TBR Pile

Folks, we’re well into the peak of awards season. Flesh author David Szalay was awarded the Booker Prize this year. “We had never read anything quite like it,” said the chair of judges. Find out more about the book in my write up of the win.

Flesh author David Szalay was awarded the Booker Prize this year. Yuki Sugiura/Booker Prize Foundation

Quiara Alegria Hudes won the Pulitzer for Drama back in 2012 for her play Water by the Spoonful. She’s now turned her skills towards writing a novel – her new one is about a mom who leaves her kid. That book – The White Hot – and more are included in this week’s The Book Ahead. And you can hear Isabella Gomez Sarmiento’s interview with the author here.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Patti Smith album Horses. It’s a pretty good time for Smith to release her book Bread of Angels, which critic Heller McAlpin calls “Smith’s most straightforwardly autobiographical book to date.” Check out the review here!

Mailbag!

Last week I talked about how I wrongly assumed Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was a bit of saccharine melodrama. I’m glad how wrong I was! Here are some of your stories of books upending your expectations.

Sherry B. wrote: “That book for me was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Although I am an avid reader, I was never drawn to novels that seemed macabre or gothic, so I never read that one. Instead, what I learned about the story came strictly from popular culture. I went on to major in English in college and became a teacher but still never read Shelley's novel until I had a student teacher who wanted to teach it to a class of high school seniors. Then I read the novel and was pleasantly surprised to find that Dr. Frankenstein was the "real monster" not his creation. He had rejected the very human creation, depriving him of love and illustrated that he, Dr. Frankenstein, was the true monster. I was forever thankful to Mary, my student teacher, for choosing that novel for the class. They really enjoyed it too.”

Jeff G. wrote: “This resonated with me, because I had the same experience with the Larry McMurtry novel Lonesome Dove. I'd gotten it into my head (due no doubt to the TV series, which I hadn't seen) that it was some sort of saccharine sweet Touched By An Angel type fare. I couldn't have been more wrong.”

Julie W. wrote: “I loved your story about changing perspectives on books. This happened to me recently with Danielle Steel. Having been a kid in the 80s and 90s, my only knowledge of Danielle Steel books came from looking at covers in the grocery store check-out line. I'm not a big romance reader, so I thought I would never read her books or be interested in them. Fast forward to now and a good friend is a huge Danielle Steel fan. I read widely, so when she offered to loan me one of her favorites, I accepted. I was hugely surprised when it was not an open door romance, just a sweet historical fiction with some closed door romance elements. My first thought was, 'I would have loved this in high school!' Just another testimony that we should never judge books by their covers.”

See you next week!

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