#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett – 2025 Best Reads

James was a big novel for Percival Everett in 2024, garnering all kinds of awards, (including our #1 Best Read), for its clever retelling of the Huckleberry Finn story from the perspective of Huck’s companion, Jim, an enslaved black man seeking freedom. It had all of Everett’s trademark humor and social commentary as well as his engaging writing style.

For my money, though, Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, is even better. I hadn’t heard of the novel until it was made into the 2023 movie American Fiction and subsequently wound up on the New York Times list of 100 best books of the 21st Century.

It’s a story of a black academic named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison whose writing career is in a slump and whose mother is struggling with Alzheimer’s. After watching a colleague shoot to critical acclaim with a blaxploitation novel titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk writes a similar book under a pseudonym and it threatens to become the darling of the literary world.

Reading the novel in 2025, I found it far ahead of its time. It’s the kind of clear-eyed view of the knotty world of American racial politics that we still need and that only seemed possible after the upheavals of 2020.

Everett is a gifted writer and I’m glad to have found this early classic. It’s #6 on our 2025 list.

Previously in this series:

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel