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Tag: Best Reads

20 December 202026 December 2020Alex Joyner

#1 and a Recap: The Heartlands Best Reads of 2020

Topping this year’s list of Best Reads is Yaa Gyasi’s sophomore novel, Transcendent Kingdom. It’s a book about race, the South, the immigrant experience, science, family, and faith. It captures a lot of the interests of this web site and it’s flat great writing. You can read the full review by clicking the link but […]

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19 December 202018 December 2020Alex Joyner

#2-Survival is a Style-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

Like Jesmyn Ward at #3, Christian Wiman is a three-time visitor to the annual Best Reads list, having been here in 2018 for his exquisite memoir, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art, and in 2019 as editor of the collection, Joy: 100 Poems. In 2020 Wiman published a solo […]

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18 December 202017 December 2020Alex Joyner

#3-Men We Reaped-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

OK. I’ve gushed over Jesmyn Ward enough in the past three years. Her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing made the Best Reads list in 2017. Salvage the Bones, her Hurricane Katrina novel, was on the list last year and is on my all-time Top Ten. So, it’s not surprising that this Mississippi writer finds her way […]

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17 December 202017 December 2020Alex Joyner

#4-One Long River of Song-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

I like to keep a magical writer by my morning reading chair. For a few blessed months this year and last it was Brian Doyle, whose brief essays in the collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder sing. His observations have the attention of a nature writer and the lilt of an Irishman […]

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16 December 202015 December 2020Alex Joyner

#5-As I Lay Dying-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

Part of my return to the classics this year included another run at William Faulkner. I had only ever gotten through an audio version of A Light in August, which I listened to on a drive across the South a few years ago. The Sound and the Fury seemed impossible, but I started this year’s […]

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15 December 202014 December 2020Alex Joyner

#6-A Prayer for Orion-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

Memoirs were big in my 2020 reading. But I would have read anything Katherine James put out after her debut novel, Can You See Anything Now? James is not one of those Christian writers who submerges harsh reality beneath a pious gloss. She combines an artist’s eye with brutal honesty and yet suffused throughout is […]

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14 December 202013 December 2020Alex Joyner

#7-One of Ours-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

I got to Willa Cather late. Despite encouragement through the years that I would find her a fellow traveller, I only got to My Antonía a few years ago. But it was enough to get me primed for more, and when a New Yorker article suggested that her 1922 novel One of Ours made a […]

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13 December 202012 December 2020Alex Joyner

#8-North Toward Home-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

Another memoir at #8–Willie Morris’s North Toward Home, written in 1967. I read this in the summer of Black Lives Matter and there are plenty of jarring moments as Morris describes growing up white in segregated Mississippi. But he makes it out, first to Texas and then to New York City, and when he does […]

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12 December 202012 December 2020Alex Joyner

#9 – The Yellow House–Heartlands 2020 Best Reads

Sarah Broom earned rave reviews in 2019 with The Yellow House. It’s a memoir of one Black family’s experience in New Orleans East, built around the frame of a shotgun house that did not survive Katrina. It’s a dreamy sort of book, and by that I mean elusive. But the storytelling and the characters are […]

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11 December 202010 December 2020Alex Joyner

The Heartlands Best Reads for 2020! #10—Nothing Happened

For the last four years, I’ve been producing a list of Best Reads to end the year on Heartlands. It’s an eclectic collection and should not be mistaken for one of those Top Ten lists of books that actually appeared in print during the current year. Especially this year when the pandemic sent me back […]

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Alex Joyner

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editor, Heartlands magazine author United Methodist pastor on Virginia's Eastern Shore

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What We’re Talking About:

Annie Dillard Arlie Russell Hochschild Best Reads Bible Books Carson McCullers church Civil War Eastern Shore Flannery O'Connor General Conference Great Divide history Israel Jesmyn Ward memoir memory Mississippi Poetry politics Prayer race rural America sexuality small churches small town South Texas theology United Methodist Virginia Virginia Reeves Way Forward William Faulkner writing

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