Tag: Best Reads
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#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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#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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#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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#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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#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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#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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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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#3–Salvage the Bones: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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,…
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#4–Joy: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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…
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#6–Elmet: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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…
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