#3 – The Known World by Edward P. Jones – 2024 Best Reads

The top 3 books that I read this year were all exceptional and any of them could have been at the top of the list. The recency criteria came into effect to determine the order.

Edward P. Jones’ 2003 work, The Known World, was just an exceptional book. It built off of the rare but documented instance of slaveholding free blacks in the antebellum South and created a fictional Virginia county that contains all the texture of those troubled times.

The characters—white, black, and Native American—are richly drawn and their loves, conflicts, and dilemmas are realistic. Typical is this passage in which a white slave patroller stares up at a moon and imagines a light of truth so that he could give witness to the sin he has seen in which Augustus, a free black man is sold into slavery:

He shifted in the saddle once more. The moon was just above the horizon now, a large, dusty orange point, but Barnum did not raise his head high enough to see it. “It’s just that there should be a way for a body to say what is without somebody sayin he standin on the n—— side. A body should be able to stand under some…som kinda light and declare what he knows without retribution. There should be some kinda lantern, John, that we can stand under and say, ‘I know what I know and what I know is God’s truth,’ and then come from under the light and nobody make any big commotion bout what he said. He could say it and just get on about his business, and nobody would say, ‘He stickin up for the n——, he be stickin up for them Indians.’ The lantern of truth wouldn’t low them to say that. There should be that kinda light, John. I regret what happened to Augustus.” (303)

It’s the kind of longing to speak truth that brings humanity to situations of profound injustice. And this is the kind of book that does the same, looking back into the past and finding the fire that still burns today.

Previously in this series:

#4 – Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman

#5 – The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

#6 – The Ninety-Third Name of God by Anya Krugovoy Silver

#7 – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

#8 – The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

#9 – Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty

#10 – Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson