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#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett – 2025 Best Reads
Percival Everett makes the Top 10 list for the second straight year. →
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#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot – Best Reads
It only took 150 years for George Eliot to make the Best Reads list. →
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#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – 2025 Best Reads
A timeless tale, well-told. Claire Keegan brings in the next Best Read. →
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#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge – 2025 Best Reads
The 2025 Top 10 continues with one of my favorite Virginians – Fleming Rutledge. →
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Among the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers – 2025 Best Reads #10
I’ve been ranking best reads of the year since 2017. Here’s what I wrote by way of criteria from that first year: Since everyone else is doing their end-of-the-year list, I decided to join the fray with a Heartlands Best Reads of 2017. Some caveats: These are books I read in 2017, but they weren’t →
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#1 and a recap – 2024 Best Reads List Concludes
I like being an iconoclast but James was worthy of all the accolades. →
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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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#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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