NPR's Book of the Day

Every time the new year rolls around, many of us start trying to "better ourselves." Maybe you decide to read more or clean out your entire house only to find yourself falling short. Author BJ Fogg wrote a book about how not to do that called Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything . Fogg told Life Kit 's Maria Godoy that everyone should try and lower their expectations. It's actuall...

Planet Money 's Stacey Vanek Smith has reported on business and the economy for over 15 years now. She told NPR's Guy Raz that over that time, she's seen the same barriers blocking advancement for women in the workplace again and again. Recently, she's started to recognize that a lot of tools to move past those barriers can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Vanek Smi...

Both our interviews today deal with the pressures we put on ourselves. First, Olympic runner Alexi Pappas on her memoir, Bravey . On the outside, Pappas was living what looked like a great life; she was breaking Greek Olympic records and her movie got a distribution deal. But, she told NPR's Ari Shapiro, she was still deeply sad. Next, an interview from early in the pandemic when women were dispro...

Poet and author Kwame Alexander was feeling the weight of being Black in America last summer and didn't know how to make sense of his feelings. So, he made sense of them through his book of poetry, Light For The World To See: A Thousand Words On Race And Hope . It's three poems on three historic events: the murder of George Floyd, Colin Kaepernick's protests, and Barack Obama being elected preside...

William Shakespeare had a son, Hamnet, who likely inspired one of his most famous plays and who died when he was 11 years old. Novelist Maggie O'Farrell was disappointed that more people weren't familiar with him, so she set out to fix that with her book, Hamnet . O'Farrell wanted to reimagine Hamnet's life, his death, and William Shakespeare's family life. But, she told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, s...

Dwyane Wade's new memoir is not a traditional one. He wanted to show the reader a lot of his cherished memories instead of just writing about them. His new photographic memoir, Dwyane , visually wraps up his basketball career with a series of pictures from his time at Marquette to his 16 years with the Miami Heat. Wade talked to Here & Now 's Tonya Mosely about when he knew it was time to step awa...

Author Emma Straub has written a book about family dynamics and the mess and love that comes with them in All Adults Here . It's no secret that families are complicated. Straub argues a lot of our familial relationships are watching each other grow up and whether or not you allow those you love to grow and change. She told NPR's Scott Simon though that even the bits that aren't perfect are worth l...

It's the holiday season so we at Book Of The Day wanted to bring you two of our holiday favorites. The first is David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries , which first aired on Morning Edition in 1992 and has been an annual NPR tradition ever since. It's a hilarious recounting of his time as a department store elf named Crumpet. The second is some of our staff here at NPR reading the poem A Visit from St....

In the novel Agatha Of Little Neon , a young woman, Agatha, is in need of direction after she loses her mother and finds it in the church. When Agatha and her fellow nuns are reassigned to a half-way house, they start to look inward and reevaluate their own lives. Author Claire Luchette told NPR's Scott Simon that this is a book about finding yourself, but also finding out about the darker side of...

Do you love what some people would consider 'low-brow culture?' Things like The Cheesecake Factory or the band Creed. Well then do we have the book for you! Author Rax King has written a collection of essays that are kind of like love letters to the things that give her pleasure, including but not limited to The Jersey Shore , in Tacky . She told NPR's Sam Sanders she thinks a lot about who gets t...

When author Suleika Jaouad was first diagnosed with leukemia, she felt isolated and like she didn't have control over anything. She told Life Kit host Beck Harlan that creative practices, namely journaling, helped her regain a narrative control of her own life. Jaouad details that struggle and her coping mechanisms in her book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted . See pcm.adswizz.c...

When you think of an epic, what comes to mind? The Iliad , The Odyssey , maybe Beowulf ? Well author Honoree Fanonne Jeffers points out that epics are almost always about white men. She told former Morning Edition host Noel King that she didn't want to tell that story because that story has already been told...many times. So, Jeffers set out to write a different kind of epic about heroic Black wom...

The US Postal Service has played a key role in much of American history - from the Declaration of Independence to more recent mail-in voting. It was conceived of by the founders as the way to create a united, informed and effective American democracy. But today, the postal service's future is in danger. Winifred Gallagher spoke to NPR's Rund Abdelfatah about how the postal service created the Unit...

Today, two takes on stories we tell to make ourselves feel better and the consequences of believing them. First, author Danielle Evans' short story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections . The title story is about a fictional agency that fact checks in real time but, as she told former NPR host Noel King, it's less powerful than you might think. Then, the story of a Black woman's decisio...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most recent public institution to announce that they are taking the Sackler name off of seven of their spaces due to their involvement with the opioid crisis. Author Patrick Radden Keefe wrote a book profiling the Sackler family called Empire of Pain: The Secret History Of The Sackler Dynasty that was one of the biggest of the year. It profiles the family that...

Have you ever wanted to get stranded on a beautiful island? Maybe at the end of a vacation when you think you never want to leave. Well, that's what happens to the protagonist in Jodi Picoult's new novel, Wish You Were Here . It's a little less glamorous than what you might be picturing. It's March of 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic traps Diana O'Toole in the Galapagos Islands with very little w...

Legendary rapper and integral member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Raekwon, is out with a new memoir called From Staircase to Stage . Born Corey Woods in Staten Island, Raekwon takes a look back at hating school, watching his neighborhood decline during the crack-cocaine epidemic, and then finding success with the Wu-Tang Clan. Raekwon told NPR's Steve Inskeep that success came with both big highs and deep...

Author Dave Eggars has written a new book, The Every , satirizing technology and it's ever-expanding hold on us. While publishing and distributing the book, which also happens to be about a tech giant overextending its reach, he tried to keep it out of the hands of one of today's tech giants. It proved to be a difficult task, Eggars told NPR's Audie Cornish, "...[it's] like taking not just the bac...

From creating vertical gardens to breeding pigeons, the people living in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan manage to "carve out a life worth living." Artist and architectural historian Azra Aksamija co-edited a book that looks at the ingenuity found within that camp called, Design To Live: Everyday Inventions From A Refugee Camp . Aksamija told NPR's Scott Simon that even though camps are supposed...

Author Darcie Little Badger has her protagonists, Nina and a cottonmouth snake named Oli, tackle big, real world problems in her new Young Adult novel, A Snake Falls To Earth . She told NPR's Leila Fadel that young people are feeling climate anxiety acutely, so it was important to her to make it a part of this story, even though it takes place in a fantastical world. She does have a PhD in oceanog...

Not all history is learned - or taught - in school. In today's first interview, Robert Jones Jr. tells NPR's Scott Simon that he wanted to be 'a witness to [those] testimonies that have not made it into the official record.' His novel, The Prophets , is about enslaved Black queer people in America. The second interview is about the seemingly mundane day-to-day that makes up a person's history in Z...

Author Huda Fahmy brings us a fictionalized look back on her teenage years in her new graphic novel. The cleverly titled Huda F Are You? is about a girl growing up in Dearborn, Michigan trying to figure out, well, who she really is. Fahmy told NPR's Scott Simon that her own journey of self discovery often left her feeling like a fraud See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and us...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is stepping down after 16 years. Author and former NPR correspondent Kati Marton has written a new biography of Merkel titled, appropriately, The Chancellor . Marton told NPR's Sarah McCammon that Merkel's upbringing in East Germany before the wall fell prepared her for a future as a politician. But it also created some blind spots in her governing; allowing the far...

There are all different kinds of ghost stories and types of ghosts. Maybe the ghost is a malicious spirit out for revenge, or a marshmallow man parade float come to life , or maybe it's truly a friendly ghost — Casper, here to be pals. In today's first featured interview, Here & Now 's Robin Young talks with Louise Erdrich about her novel The Sentence which is set in a haunted bookstore in Minneap...

Camilla Pang talks with NPR's Short Wave host Emily Kwong about her award-winning memoir, An Outsider's Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do And Who We Are . Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age 8, the scientist and writer pairs her favorite scientific principles with human behavior and navigating daily life. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection an...