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#3 – The Known World by Edward P. Jones – 2024 Best Reads
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. →
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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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#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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#3 – All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – Best Reads of 2023
What Cosby brings to the table is a landscape I know and love and people who are too often hidden in plain sight. And the context of his fiction is both as ancient as the Chesapeake and as contemporary as a black sheriff in a rural Southern backwater county. →
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#4 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Best Reads of 2023
Yeah, this Dostoevsky guy has got potential. →
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#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023
Victor Lavelle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror. →
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#8 – The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer – Best Reads of 2023
What did I know about Mailer? Well, he liked to write long books, could be insufferable and borderline lethal as a spouse, and absolutely chewed up the scenery wherever he appeared. What I discovered was that he was also an energetic and ambitious writer who could move a story along. →
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#9 – Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles – Best Reads of 2023
Paulette Jiles, with her poet’s eye, has a knack for writing books that feel small even when they’re about a place as vast as Texas. →
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Heartlands 