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#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett – 2025 Best Reads
Percival Everett makes the Top 10 list for the second straight year. →
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Among the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers – 2025 Best Reads #10
I’ve been ranking best reads of the year since 2017. Here’s what I wrote by way of criteria from that first year: Since everyone else is doing their end-of-the-year list, I decided to join the fray with a Heartlands Best Reads of 2017. Some caveats: These are books I read in 2017, but they weren’t →
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Fleming Rutledge would like a word…from God
For all the space it takes up in our worship services, the sermon as an object of critical study has suffered from criminal neglect. Enter Fleming Rutledge. →
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#1 and a recap – 2024 Best Reads List Concludes
I like being an iconoclast but James was worthy of all the accolades. →
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#3 – The Known World by Edward P. Jones – 2024 Best Reads
It’s the kind of longing to speak truth that brings humanity to situations of profound injustice. And this is the kind of book that does the same, looking back into the past and finding the fire that still burns today. →
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#5 – The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The class and race lines are complicated. It’s America, after all. One of the Jewish characters wonders if becoming part of the American stewpot is worth the cost. “We are integrating into a burning house,” he says. But there is life bursting out everywhere, despite the trials. →
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#6 – The Ninety-Third Name of God by Anya Krugovoy Silver – 2024 Best Reads
What to do with these strangely limited bodies? Perhaps poetry is the best defense we have against oblivion. As Krugovoy Silver shows, God is found in the reflected light of passing things. →
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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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