Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025 : NPR

Books

Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025

November 23, 20258:08 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

By Andrew Limbong, and Ayesha Rascoe 4-Minute Listen Transcript

Books We Love

Here are the Books We Love: 380+ great 2025 reads recommended by NPR

NPR’s Andrew Limbong talks about some of NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Folks, if you can, get out a pen and paper because we’re about to talk about some of our favorite books of the year, and you might want to jot a few of these titles down. With us to talk about NPR’s annual interactive books roundup, Books We Love, is Andrew Limbong, host of NPR’s Book Of The Day podcast. Thanks for being with us.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Ayesha.

RASCOE: We love this time of year. But for listeners who aren’t familiar, tell them about Books We Love.

LIMBONG: It is not just, like, a best of – here’s the 10 best books you’ve got to read in 2025, right? We ask everyone at NPR – so we got editors and producers and people on the business side and all that stuff. We asked them what their favorite books of the year were. This year, we’re in the neighborhood of 380 books, which is a lot. But the size and scope is sort of the whole point.

RASCOE: So what have you got for us?

LIMBONG: All right, well, word on the street, I hear that someone on your staff is looking for something plotty (ph).

RASCOE: OK.

LIMBONG: So one of the books I personally recommended was a Emma Pattee’s “Tilt.” Now, this is a book about a woman. She’s super-duper pregnant, and she’s at an IKEA running an errand when an earthquake happens. And it’s a really speedy book because at its core, it is a very – person has to go from point A to point B, right? She’s got to find her way home out of this IKEA in a Portland that has been ravaged by an earthquake, and she runs into a few obstacles here and there, and she sort of has to be on the move. But what it is also is a critique or a pretty funny send-up of the “Keeping Up With The Joneses” of parenthood – right? – you know, that feeling where if you don’t buy the fanciest schmanciest bajillion-dollar stroller, you are a failure.

RASCOE: Yeah.

LIMBONG: It’s sort of poking at that and asking some interesting questions about motherhood and marriage and relationships, all while being straight up an action-adventure book.

Another sort of plotty book is Kashana Cauley’s “The Payback.” This is a bit of a heist novel about a woman and her friends who concoct a bit of a “Ocean’s Eleven” type caper to wipe out everyone’s student loans. This isn’t necessarily taking place in our world. It’s in a bit of a heightened world where there are these special cops on the hunt for anyone who is late to repay their debts, and they will track you down and kind of assault you if you’re late on your repayment. It’s a pretty thrilling read.

RASCOE: OK. Well, what about nonfiction?

LIMBONG: Yeah. I know – we’re at the time of year where a lot of families are traveling, right? And traveling can be stressful. So a book I’ve been thinking about is called “A Marriage At Sea” by Sophie Elmhirst, right? It’s about a young British couple in the ’70s who decide they want to sell everything off and sail to New Zealand. Things don’t go great (laughter). And they end up floating on a life raft in the Pacific. It’s a deeply reported book, but it does also make me think, like, oh, maybe me dragging my partner to the airport and the plane is delayed – things could be worse than having to eat stale McDonald’s fries. You know what I mean?

RASCOE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LIMBONG: (Laughter) While we’re talking about nonfiction, there’s also this book called “Fetishized” by Kaila Yu. And this is a essay collection about having mixed feelings about being objectified. She was a former model, and so she cops to catering for what we might call the male gaze, but she is also aware of the broader political, cultural baggage that doing that can have. And so I think it’s an interesting insight into a weird slice of life.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025 : NPR

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Former director at the White House Historical Association on the East Wing renovation – NPR

National

Former director at the White House Historical Association on the East Wing renovation

October 26, 20258:51 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

By Ayesha Rascoe 5-Minute Listen Transcript

See Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5582403

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Leslie B. Jones, former Director of Historical Resources & Programming for the White House Historical Association, about the demolition of the White House East Wing.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

The East Wing of the White House is no more. What started on Monday, with images of excavators and talk of renovation to accommodate President Trump’s promised ballroom, finished with the razing of an entire wing of the White House despite the president’s promise as recently as July that the event space, quote, “won’t interfere with the current building.”

Leslie Jones knows the White House. She’s now the chief curator of the Preservation Society of Newport but previously served as curator and director of historical resources and programming for the White House Historical Association. Leslie Jones, welcome to the program.

LESLIE JONES: Thank you for having me, Ayesha.

RASCOE: I don’t want us to talk past people who haven’t been in the White House as much as both of us have. That rounded portico that we all know from pictures – that’s not where the Oval Office is. That’s in the West Wing, which dates to Teddy Roosevelt’s first term. The East Wing was substantially enlarged during World War II. Tell us what the East Wing was and wasn’t from a preservationist’s perspective.

JONES: Well, I’m glad that you brought that up first because I think there is a misconception that needs to be cleared up. The East Colonnade – as it’s more formally referred to, which was fully destroyed – is actually separate from the East Wing. The East Wing was its own block of a building connected to the colonnade, and the East Colonnade actually dates back to 1801. Thomas Jefferson had that built on the addition on both the east and west sides of the White House after he moved in, you know, with James Hoban’s original central block design. So those sort of appendages coming off the east and west side of the house have precedent going back to 1801.

And in 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt adds on the actual East Wing building, it is to accommodate the more staff that was necessary as a part of wartime during World War II, but again, built off of that colonnade as a means of continuing that symmetry and balance that the White House had been subscribed in its earliest days, which is so symbolic for what the hopes of our founders were in our country.

RASCOE: So people were thinking about things like that. People were thinking about democracy when they were designing these additions.

JONES: Well, the house itself was designed to look like a domestic residence, not like the palace of a king or the compound of an autocrat or a dictator. It was meant to look like domestic architecture, even so far as to go – James Hoban tried to proportion the windows with the rest of the house to make it look smaller than it actually is. So that sort of approachability and commonality of the house and its design was important from the get-go.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Former director at the White House Historical Association on the East Wing renovation : NPR

#ArchitecturalReview #Audio #AyeshaRascoe #Demolition #EastWing #FormerDirector #History #LeslieBJones #NationalPublicRadtio #NPR #Transcript #WeekendEditionSunday #WhiteHouseHistoricalAssociation

Having a bad mental health day.

But listening to Ayesha Rascoe and the other usual suspects on NPR Weekend Edition is making it better.

#NPR #WeekendEdition #AyeshaRascoe #ChronicPain