This is where making this list gets hard. Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, was, by far the best book I read this year. It is way too reductive to call this a Katrina novel, even though the 2005 hurricane broods over the whole story. It is a book about family, mothers, violence, […]
Christian Wiman made the Best Reads last year with his memoir He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art. It was poetry itself. This year his 2017 collection of poetry itself, Joy: 100 Poems, graces the list. Wiman has a wonderful soul, as we all do and would notice if we just paid […]
We’re halfway through the best reads of the year. We’ve had poetry, history, and an African adventure tale. How about a mythic journey into the Yorkshire woods? Fiona Mozley’s debut novel, Elmet, is the story of a wild man, his vulnerable son, and his ferocious daughter. It is also one of the best pure stories I […]
A second history book makes the list in the #7 spot of our annual countdown of Best Reads. Anthony Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, focuses on a potent symbol of antebellum America, the fugitive slave, and shows how the unspooling […]
Jill LePore’s These Truths: A History of the United States came out in 2018 but I got to it this year and was glad I did. The audacity of a one-volume history covering a 500+ year arc of the American story, especially when that story has become so contested and fragmented, was a thing to behold. […]
As we continue the countdown of best reads of 2019, we come to Out of Darkness, Shining Light by the Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah. It’s a vivid imagining of the company that escorted the body of Dr. David Livingstone, the famed explorer and missionary, back to the coast following his death in central Africa. Gappah’s novel […]
This is the 3rd year for the highly-anticipated Heartlands Best Reads list. If you want to check out previous years you can look here (2018) and here (2017). How does a book make the Heartlands list? Well, the main limiting factor is that Alex Joyner has to read it during the year. It’s been another […]
