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#3 – The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – 2022 Best Reads
Maggie O’Farrell’s breakthrough novel, Hamnet, which was named a New York Times ten best in 2020, didn’t do it for me. I appreciated the gorgeous details of life in Shakespeare’s England, but the connection to Shakespeare himself seemed tenuous at best. However, The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s follow-up novel, hit the sweet spot, even though she… →
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#4 – Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby – 2022 Best Reads
This is the first crime thriller I’ve ever put in the Top Ten, but I got hooked on S.A. Cosby this year. His books are crackling page-turners filled with similes and energy. And, o yes, violence. There’s a lot of that, too. Cosby attracted my attention because he’s a Virginia native and aspires to the… →
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#5 – Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv – 2022 Best Reads
At the age of 6, Rachel Aviv was hospitalized when she stopped eating and was diagnosed with anorexia. At such a young age, the details of such a diagnosis were lost on the young girl. She explained her situation to herself by saying she had it because “I want to be someone better than me.”… →
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#6 – Fatal by Kimberly Johnson – 2022 Best Reads
I’ve gushed about Kimberly Johnson’s poetry on this blog before. Called Johnson “one of our best living poets.” Noted that she is “the rare poet who consistently evokes for me the presence of the barely-cloaked divine.” Credited her with making me a daily reader of poetry. So when Johnson produced a new collection in 2022,… →
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#7 – Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty – 2022 Best Reads
So much has gone wrong on the Penobscot reservation in rural Maine. Read these fictional short stories by Morgan Talty and it’s hard to get past the poverty and pain along with the sense that the whole place is so marginal as to seem the backside of nowhere. But the place is haunted by things… →
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#8 – Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell – 2022 Best Reads
Katherine Rundell is a scholar but she doesn’t write like one. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Rundell has made a name in children’s books, but with this biography she has brought to life one of the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan Age. And she has done it with a very light touch.… →
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The Heartlands Best Reads of 2022 – #10 Shaking the Gates of Hell
It’s that time of year! Although Heartlands has been on hiatus, the reading has been ongoing and it’s time to take stock of the year that was in reading. Since its inception in 2016, Heartlands has been offering book reviews based on my eclectic tastes. Each year I comb through the list to choose ten… →
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#1 & a Recap:The Heartlands Best Reads of 2021
George Saunders is our first time two-time recipient of the much-coveted Heartlands Best Reads award. Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo haunted and charmed back in 2017, but it was his master class on storytelling that captivated me this year. Saunders is a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University and he has influenced a generation… →
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#2 — No Cure for Being Human by Kate Bowler — 2021 Best Reads
To read Kate Bowler in her latest book, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), is like hearing from the dead. As she did in her last book, Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Told), Bowler takes a blow torch to received pieties when intense suffering comes… →
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#3 – My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson – 2021 Best Reads
Moving back to my old hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2021, I was aware that a lot had changed since I left 16 years ago. No book chronicled and processed those changes better than the debut collection of stories by Charlottesville writer Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. My Monticello, particularly the included novella with… →
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