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#5 – The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The class and race lines are complicated. It’s America, after all. One of the Jewish characters wonders if becoming part of the American stewpot is worth the cost. “We are integrating into a burning house,” he says. But there is life bursting out everywhere, despite the trials. →
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#6 – The Ninety-Third Name of God by Anya Krugovoy Silver – 2024 Best Reads
What to do with these strangely limited bodies? Perhaps poetry is the best defense we have against oblivion. As Krugovoy Silver shows, God is found in the reflected light of passing things. →
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#7 – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – 2024 Best Reads
Mantel makes Thomas Cromwell a charismatic and sympathetic figure, even if he has some undeniable rough edges. You get the sense that it took a man like him to make a nation out of England. →
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#9 – Larry McMurtry by Tracy Daugherty – 2024 Best Reads
Texans today are noted for loud self-assertion, but just below the surface is an unfinished project—to make a place out of the disparate dreams and violent expeditions that have led people here. And in the nascent Texas literary world there is a recognition that its chroniclers are still waiting to be celebrated. →
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#10 – Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson – 2024 Best Reads
We have been reading and, as we’ve done since 2017, we’re ready to spill some tea on the 2024 reading campaign. →
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Slow Books and Deep Rivers: David James Duncan’s My Life as Told by Water
I like to keep a slow book in the stack of my morning reading. These are books that reward patient reading and the goal with them should never be to get to the end. →
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Nancy French’s Ghosted Looks at What’s Haunting America
This is a central message she wants to convey in her story—that the ideological cleansing practiced by both parties is actually harmful hubris. →
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Esau McCaulley’s Unexpected Journey
You come out of this memoir feeling McCaulley’s hard-won wisdom, openness, and faith. His difficult, often-absent, father, his resilient mother, his racially-intolerant in-laws, and his big, loving Alabama family all find their place in McCaulley’s heart. →
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Heartlands 