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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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#1 & A Recap & A Few More Best Reads of 2023
Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life was a doorstop of a book, coming in at 688 pages, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any shorter than it was. →
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#2 – big wonderful thing by Stephen Harrigan – Best Reads of 2023
Mary Austin Holley, author of the first English history of Texas, (and cousin to Stephen F. Austin), said “One’s feelings in Texas are unique and original…and very like a dream or youthful vision realized.” (116) Many a Texas visitor or emigré has discovered the same thing about the state, despite its outsized contradictions. →
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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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#6 – I, Julian by Claire Gilbert – Best Reads of 2023
The writing is simple and elegant. The characters illustrative of the times without being preachy. And the post-pandemic world Gilbert evokes is eerily similar to our own. →
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Heartlands 