There’s one in every family — that uncle or sister-in-law who only reads nonfiction. As you seek out the perfect read for your loved ones this year, we can help you find beautifully told true stories. There are more than 50 biographies and memoirs featured in Books We Love, NPR’s annual year-end reading guide. Check them all out here, or browse a sampling, below.

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment
After the death of her husband of nearly 50 years, Jill Ciment reconsiders their relationship, which began when she was 17 and he was her much older, married drawing instructor. She first wrote about their early years together in Half a Life, when she was in her 40s and he was in his 70s. In Consent, she scrutinizes and amplifies that account in light of the #MeToo movement and changing social attitudes. Did she have the agency to consent? Was he a letch? Was she a vixen? How could she have known as a teenager that he was the love of her life? — Heller McAlpin, book critic

A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery by Lawrence Ingrassia
In 1968, when journalist Lawrence Ingrassia was 15, his mother died of breast cancer at age 42. “It was tragic, but what was there to say?” he writes. Ingrassia couldn’t know then that in the decades to come, his three siblings would each die from a different kind of cancer and that a nephew would too. In A Fatal Inheritance, Ingrassia movingly intertwines his family’s oncological experiences with the winding story of how researchers worked to uncover the roles that heritable genetic mutations play in cancer risk. — Kristin Martin, book critic

Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me by Glory Edim
Tenderly written, Glory Edim’s Gather Me is a beautiful memoir that serves as a powerful testament to resilience. It pays tribute to the art of community building from someone whose career and identity are deeply rooted in literature. Edim, founder of Well-Read Black Girl, thoughtfully navigates her emotionally complex life, highlighting the books and authors that have shaped her journey. The chapter about Nikki Giovanni’s work – Edim’s spiritual exploration through it and the solace it brought her – is particularly poignant. Overall, it is an emotional narrative about family bonds and a meaningful gift to her community. — Keishel Williams, book critic

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
For much of his adult life, Salman Rushdie has lived beneath a shadow – he’s as famous for his novels as he is for being the target of a fatwa. But in 2022, that threat went from theoretical to very real when Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly at a literary conference. That attack resulted in multiple long-term health issues, including blindness in his right eye. You might expect Rushdie’s memoir detailing the attack and its aftermath to be somewhat grim. And it is. But it’s also in turn warm, vulnerable, acerbic and, surprisingly, very funny. — Leah Donnella, senior editor, Code Switch

Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen
The American presidency is viewed as the most powerful position in the world. What happens when the job ends? History is often surprising. Not everyone found the role to be the most fulfilling one they ever had. Jared Cohen looks at some fascinating case studies that back that up. John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft found greater joy in other branches of government: Congress and the Supreme Court. George Bush enjoys his private life and art studio. Life after power can be much more rewarding. — Edith Chapin, senior vice president and editor in chief

Little, Brown and Company

The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich
This family memoir begins with a courtroom scene like no other. After a night in jail, Annabelle Tometich’s mom is charged with firing at a man who, she says, was stealing mangoes from the tree in her front yard. Tometich then hits rewind, taking readers back through her Fort Myers, Fla., childhood – with her Filipino American mom and white dad, a couple whose personality differences do not make them stronger together. The writing is both jewel-like and effortless, and Tometich’s memories – some mundane, some extraordinary – are mesmerizing. — Shannon Rhoades, senior editor, Weekend Edition

Little, Brown and Company

My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr
This unusual and beautiful “meow-moir” by The Alienist author and military historian Caleb Carr – the last book he wrote before dying of cancer at age 68 this year – explores the author’s lifelong affinity for cats and his particular relationship with one enormous, fluffy Siberian named Masha. Masha and the writer enjoyed 17 years of adventures together, mostly in and around their rugged rural home in upstate New York. The book chronicles their mutual zest for life and their struggles through illness and financial woes. Even though this is a book for cat lovers, it’s really for everyone: It explores, with somber pathos and wry humor, how we form attachments in life and how they keep us going through it all. — Chloe Veltman, correspondent, Culture Desk

Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy by Sacha Mardou
British cartoonist Sacha Mardou began posting her highly readable comics – about her experiences going to therapy when her daughter was young – on social media. Past Tense chronicles this story – the many steps that led Mardou to an earnest bridging of the past, her family’s history, into the present. Somewhere between Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half and Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, Mardou’s brightly tinted, clear-eyed comics reveal how active self-reflection – combined with art, storytelling and professional supports – can powerfully reshape a person’s sense of self and community. — Tahneer Oksman, writer, professor and cultural critic

Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic Russian penal colony in February. But even in death, he continues his fight against President Vladimir Putin. This posthumous memoir has two sections: The first half is a traditional narrative, beginning with a true crime story when Navalny is poisoned with a nerve agent on a flight from Siberia in 2020. Halfway through, the book pivots to become his prison diary. Through even the darkest episodes, Navalny’s sunniness and humor shine through – whether he’s describing an episode of Rick and Morty that he left unfinished when he collapsed on that flight, or taking joy in the indulgence of bread and butter that he only ate on Sunday mornings behind bars. — Ari Shapiro, host, All Things Considered

In straightforward and affecting prose, Deborah Jackson Taffa writes about being brought up by a Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo father and a Catholic Latina mother, both on and off the Yuma reservation. Although her parents were united in their approach to maintaining a family, their attitudes toward the world diverged in other ways, and Taffa received mixed messages about her Indigeneity, her proximity to whiteness and how she was meant to carry herself. As a teenager, she began to experience anger at the injustices her people were subjected to and, at the same time, began to learn that all change is sacred. — Ilana Masadbook, critic and author of All My Mother’s Lovers

This is just a fraction of the 350+ titles we included in Books We Love this year. Click here to check out this year’s titles, or browse nearly 4,000 books from the last 12 years.

Heading into 2025, housing remains one of the most important issues on the minds of millions of Americans. For many, the dream of owning, or even renting, a place of their own is in peril. In some cities, people are paying $1 million for “starter” homes, while about half of renters are spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

Ben Keys, an economist with the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, characterizes the current market as “deeply unaffordable.” Keys traces some of the current problems back to the financial crisis of 2008.

“We saw a collapse in construction, and so we just stopped building houses, we stopped building apartments for a few years there,” he says. “Now we’re seeing estimates of as much as four million houses that we’re short.”

Keys notes that new construction is occurring “at a snail’s pace,” due, in part, to the high cost of labor and materials and the difficulty of financing large projects. He says that zoning laws and land use restrictions can also contribute to a housing shortage: “[These] policies create a lot of hoops to jump through and make it challenging for developers who would like to build at the scale where they would like to build.”

President-elect Donald Trump has suggested opening up federal land for development, but Keys questions the practicality of the plan.

“When we’re thinking about this federal land out west, I’m pretty skeptical that we’re going to see, you know, cities spring up out of whole cloth,” he says. “Federal land seems promising, but as a solution to our affordability crisis, I just don’t see it.”

Interview highlights

On what Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports, including construction materials, would do to the housing market

Basically, if we’re going to raise the costs of construction materials, that’s going to raise the cost of building a home. Now, a lot of the materials that are used for construction are domestic. So we do have a lot of those in the U.S., but we also import a number of construction materials like lumber for things that would be covered under NAFTA from Canada. But the simple math is that if we are going to impose additional tariffs on building materials, it’s going to be more expensive to build rather than less expensive to build.

On what Trump’s proposed mass deportations might mean for housing 

I don’t think that there is a strong connection between this idea of removing immigrants from our country and making housing more affordable. And there’s a couple of reasons for this. One is that immigrants and undocumented immigrants make up a large fraction of the construction workforce. … And so it is going to make labor costs more expensive to build, and that’s going to drive up the cost of housing.

The trade off there, from a housing market standpoint — we’re talking about this in a very narrow sense — is that there will be fewer people in this sort of numbers game of supply and demand. But if we think about the types of housing that immigrants and undocumented immigrants tend to locate in, they tend to be renters and they tend to locate in low-income neighborhoods. Now, of course, that’s not uniformly true, but that’s where they are concentrated. And so if we’re thinking about the high cost of homeownership, removing undocumented immigrants from the pool of potential homebuyers is simply not going to move the needle on affordability.

On how climate change is contributing to the rise in costs for homeowners 

I think there’s a very direct line to be drawn between rising climate risks and the costs of homeownership in the form of property insurance. … In just the last three years, 2020 to 2023, my research with Phil Mulder has shown that property insurance has gone up by over 33% on average in the U.S., and over 50% in the areas of the country most exposed to climate risk. … The places that might come to mind are places like Florida in the Gulf Coast, wildfire zones in California, but also some parts of Oklahoma where they’re hit with a lot of hail storms and tornadoes. And there we’ve seen big run-ups in property insurance costs. And so what this has done is it’s made the sort of predictability of home ownership a little bit less predictable. …

I worry a lot for homeowners who had bought on a fixed income or were sort of constrained in how much they could afford and now they’re seeing their insurance costs rise sharply. And so this is a reflection of climate change … which is inducing more frequent and more severe disasters. But it’s also a function of mobility patterns. And where we’ve moved in this country over the last really 50 years, we’ve been moving into the danger zones. We’ve been moving into harm’s way.

On how the housing crisis impacts homelessness 

The number of extremely affordable rental units has plummeted in recent years, and this ties back into a housing shortage. Where does that housing shortage squeeze the most? It’s going to squeeze the most at the very bottom of the property ladder. Landlords who previously offered very affordable units have seen a great deal of demand for those units. They’re able to raise the rents. And so we’ve seen a lot of people fall off the bottom of the rental market, and that’s led to a ton of pressure, especially in expensive markets, and I think in many ways the diagnosis is quite clear that we have this supply-and-demand imbalance.

And so the cure is that we need more housing, that we need to prioritize housing. And this has been taken up with what’s been known as a “Housing First” strategy for dealing with homelessness. … With the Biden administration, there’s been an emphasis on this strategy, a recognition that many of the additional challenges that these households face can only be addressed once they’re in a stable housing environment. And there have been a number of pilot programs around the country that have borne this out.

On advice he would give to people who are debating whether or not it’s a good time to buy a home

First, do your homework and figure out the cost of housing in the market that you’re looking in, both for owning and for renting. I think it makes a lot of sense to continue to rent in markets where prices are high and interest rates are high. In many cases … you’d be better off putting your savings into something that’s delivering a safe, predictable return that might be more safe and predictable than returns on housing. So from an investment standpoint, investing elsewhere is very sensible.

And then, I think, as you’re approaching the decision to buy a house, think long term, because there are large fixed costs to buying a house in terms of transaction taxes and in terms of broker fees, title insurance and other costs that need to be rolled into that cost. When you’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison, the right comparison isn’t just comparing the mortgage payment to the monthly rent. And then on top of that, there’s a challenge with rising insurance costs and property taxes. And so you need to take a view on “Can I afford the property insurance, flood insurance, wind insurance, other (or supplemental) insurance policies in a few years when those may be more expensive than they are today?” So I think it takes a more careful budgeting approach than we’ve seen in the past. And, in many of those cases, my sense is that that’s going to come out on the rental side of the ledger rather than owning, given our current affordability crisis.

Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Catherine Laidlaw adapted it for the web.

When it comes to “walkability,” L.A. gets a bad rap. To the weekend visitor, our city can seem like a maze of twisting freeways and roads built for cars, walled off to pedestrians. But those who really know L.A. can tell you it’s a pleasure to stroll through, replete with blooming bougainvillea, rich history and street vendors and shops. You just have to know where to look.

Lucky for you, we’ve put together a guide for exactly that. Discover the essential walking paths that will show you the best of L.A. Get to know local groups and leaders who are fusing community and exercise. Learn about the vast stretch of culture contained on one 27.4-mile boulevard. And connect with personal stories about the power of a good walk.

We’ll be publishing new stories on walking L.A. all week. C’mon, it’s time to get moving.

— Alyssa Bereznak, Wellness Editor

From the Venice Boardwalk to Rodeo Drive and Boyle Heights’ Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, these walks allow you to experience L.A.’s streets and sidewalks by foot.

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Michael Schneider founded the Great Los Angeles Walk in 2006. Now in its 19th year, it’s still going strong.

Do you have a favorite neighborhood, trail or secret pathway to walk in Los Angeles? The Times wants to hear from you.

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How walkable is your L.A. neighborhood? Consult our admittedly biased, wholly unscientific ranking that goes way beyond the numbers.

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Washington Boulevard runs from Whittier to Venice and is filled with every type of Angeleno. Walking it provided me with a genuine slice of life in L.A., a city I love.

These exercise-based social clubs cater to every interest and skill level — from stairclimbing to slow walking — and almost all them are free.

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This solo hike has helped me process life’s hardest moments and become a staple of my life in L.A. After walking it over and over again, I feel more connected to nature — and myself.

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Plan your next walk around L.A.’s many Little Free Libraries, outposts found everywhere from Studio City to Pasadena that allow you to take a book and/or leave a book.

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Comedian Allan McLeod hosts “Walkin’ About,” a podcast that celebrates the “complex and profound” act of traveling by foot in and around Los Angeles.

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Want to explore L.A. foot but don’t know where to go? Here’s our complete collection of city walking guides

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