Turning the page on 10 years of great Texas Standard book interviews

If you’re like us, you looked up recently and asked – where did October go?

Suddenly, the mornings are chilly and Santa is showing up in commercials. It went by so fast that we failed to put together our October top 10 list. It’s one way we’re celebrating 10 years of Texas Standard being on the air.

Our October theme was books because that’s National Book Month. But with the Texas Book Festival still ahead this weekend in the Texas capitol city, it doesn’t feel too late to reveal our favorites.

As usual, putting this list together was rough – simply because over ten years we’ve done bookshelves full of great book interviews. These top 10 were nominated not because they won the best book awards or sold the most copies, but because our conversations with the authors have stuck with us.

Kristen Cabrera / Texas Standard

10. Vashti Harrison – ‘Big’

This is one of the only children’s books on this list – “Big” by Vashti Harrison. We spoke to Harrison in 2023:

“So ‘Big’ tells the story of a young girl who’s going through some really big feelings. I wanted to capture what it feels like for feelings to be so big and overwhelming that you kind of just don’t know what to do with them. So, at a certain point, she starts feeling boxed-in and trapped…. And it’s sort of a roadmap in how to deal with those big feelings and how to let go of the words that don’t make us feel good.”

9. James Kirchick – ‘Secret City’

This is a very different type of book. It’s heavily researched and timely. “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington” by James Kirchick documents homophobia in D.C. Here’s an excerpt from our 2022 conversation:

“In the 1950s, which was really when it picked up, the federal government’s policy against gay people was enshrined in an executive order by President Eisenhower shortly after he took office in 1953. And it prohibited gay people from having any job in the federal government, and it further prohibited any gay person from holding a security clearance. And it’s really unknown how many gay people lost their jobs because of this. But there have been these estimates of about 7,000 to 10,000 in the 1950s alone.”

8. Kevin Cook – ‘Waco Rising’

2023 marked 30 years since the siege at Mount Carmel near Waco. The book “Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias” aimed to answer some questions that remained about what happened decades earlier. The Texas Standard spoke with author Kevin Cook:

“I think this is a misunderstood event that millions of Americans remember as a fiery moment on television. In ‘Waco Rising,’ there’s a good deal of never-reported conversations between Koresh and the FBI negotiators who were trying to get him to lead his people out. His personality comes across, and I think one can have at least a sense of why the Branch Davidians chose to follow him onto death.

There’s also, in the book, a good deal of new material documenting the pressure by the FBI on brand-new Attorney General Janet Reno. The Clinton administration was under a great deal of pressure to end this 51-day standoff at Waco. I believe the FBI misled her. She had made her name fighting against child abuse again and again. They said they were in there beating babies, which wasn’t so, until she gave the OK for the tear gas attack of April 19, 1993.”

7. Aaron H. Aceves – ‘This is Why They Hate Us’

This YA novel by an Austin-based author published in 2022 amid a resurging conversation about what literature is appropriate for young people.

Aceves joked about that with us:

“So I have a TikTok and I made a sort of joke TikTok about, you know, it’s me and I’m holding my book and I’m like, ‘here you go,’ and then it’s the state of Texas and they’re like ‘oh, it’s about a Latino kid who’s bi and mentally ill and you talk about all of that in great detail?’ And I’m like ‘yeah.’ And then they’re like ‘ok, we’re just going to put it here’ – and it’s a box that says like, ‘banned books.’

I really, I did not hold back when I was writing this book. And, yeah, it feels like an honest reflection of what I want to accomplish as a Young Adult writer.”

6. Leonard Moore – ‘Teaching Black History to White People’

In another timely conversation, Texas Standard spoke with Leonard Moore back in 2021 about his book “Teaching Black History to White People.” Moore told us he drew on his experience in college classrooms for the highly readable text:

“So I see a lot of books out there with all these buzzwords and a lot of stuff I think is trying to make white folks feel guilty. I don’t need white folks to feel guilty, you know what I mean? I just want them to understand the history because, to be honest with you, you can’t really understand the history of America or understand the history of this state until you understand the history of Black people.

Now, I’m a Black evangelical guy. You know, I spend some time in white evangelical circles. And what amazes me is they say, “Dr. Moore, I don’t know if we should talk about slavery and lynching.” And I take [them] to the Bible. I say for those of us that are believers, Moses and the Old Testament, the ugliness of his life is in scripture. He killed somebody.

You go to David. The ugliness of David is in scripture. And then the Apostle Paul. He was a killer of Christians. So here’s what I tell them, my white evangelical friends, if the Bible that we believe is to be the infallible word of God… If God had ugliness in scripture about people in scripture we revere, how come we can’t talk about the ugliness of American history?”

5. Johnny Garza Villa – ‘Canto Contigo’

Halfway through the list is our interview just last year with YA author Jonny Garza Villa about the novel “Canto Contigo.” Garza Villa grew up along the Gulf Coast and currently lives in San Antonio – where “Canto Contigo” takes place:

“I like to describe it as sort of half grief novel, half rivals-to-lovers of romance, all about the epic highs and lows of high school mariachi.

It deals with the main character named Rafie Alvarez, who is like the most Leo Sun to ever Leo Sun. Self-described “God’s gift to mariachi… As his senior year approaches, his parents drop the news that they are moving to San Antonio. He is not happy about this, mainly because he has to leave his first place nationally-recognized mariachi group for the constantly second place Mariachi Todos Colores and the fictional Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy in San Antonio.”

Author Louis Sachar reads from his latest book, “The Magician of Tiger Castle,” at BookPeople in Austin on Aug. 13, 2025. Leila Saidane / Texas Standard

4. Louis Sachar – ‘The Magician of Tiger Castle’

Austin-based author Louis Sachar is probably best known for his books for kids: “Holes” and the “Wayside School” series. He told us this year that, in his 70s, he feels too old to write for kids. So he published his first adult novel – “The Magician of Tiger Castle”:

“One of the things that I liked about writing this is that I’m writing for the same people who grew up reading my books. And I hope that they’ll get the same feelings from that that they got from the ‘Wayside School’ books or ‘Holes.’”

3. Simran Jeet Singh – ‘Fauja Singh Keeps Going’

In 2020, Simran Jeet Singh told us that he was one of the only Sikh kids growing up in San Antonio. The birth of his own daughter inspired him to write a book representing families like his.

The story he decided to tell was “Fauja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest Person to Ever Run a Marathon”:

“There’s this illustration in the book where Fauja Singh is braiding his daughter’s hair and when my daughter, she was three at the time, when she first saw that illustration, she squealed with delight and she said, ‘oh that’s you and me every morning.’ And that, to me, my heart just melted in that moment. To me, it was like that was the dream – that means the world to me.”

2. Jedediah Berry – ‘The Naming Song’

This is a conversation we had last year with author Jedediah Berry about the novel “The Naming Song.” It explores a world in which every border has fallen and all words have disappeared. A committee is tasked with making sense of the world again:

“I started to think a lot about words as borders. There are ways that we define things and then understand the world. But they can also set our thinking down sometimes.

And so a lot of what this book is about is actually the absence of words: what things are not named, what things are kind of beyond the reach of language. And those things deserve our attention as well, I think.

And sometimes a lack of a border is maybe more important than a border being present.”

1. Tim O’Brien – ‘Dad’s Maybe Book’

Our top book conversation from the past 10 years was with Central Texas author Tim O’Brien and his deeply personal book about fatherhood. “Dad’s Maybe Book” published in 2019. We talked with him about it then:

“I’ve always wished my dad had left for me what I am trying to leave for my kids in this book: some love letters, just to say, ‘I love you. I’m proud of you. I wish you well in your life…’ I didn’t receive that, and I want my own children to receive it through this book, if nothing else, to know they were adored by their father.”

So that’s our look back on our top 10 book conversations from the past decade of Texas Standard. If you were paying close attention – you may have noticed most of these were more recent interviews, so maybe our memories are already starting to wear out on us at the ripe old age of 10?

You can explore our other Top 10 lists – from film to insects to the outdoors – on our Texas Standard birthday page. That’s also where you can find out about our upcoming live broadcasts and leave us a happy birthday message – we may just play it on the show!

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