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#2–Heavy: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir, Heavy, made many best book lists last year. I got to it this year, partly because I understood that it was about Laymon’s struggles with his weight. It’s about a lot more than that. And Laymon’s struggles as a young, African-American man growing up in Mississippi are different than mine. With sparkling →
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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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#5–A Shout in the Ruins: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Kevin Powers’ historical novel, A Shout in the Ruins, had me from the first paragraph. It’s not just that he told a gripping and heart-filled novel of my home state, Virginia, in the Civil War and mid-20th century eras. It’s also that Powers is an elemental writer who uses words to explosive effect, touching on the →
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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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#7–The War Before the War: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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 →
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#8–These Truths: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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. →
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#9 – Out of Darkness, Shining Light: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
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 →
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It’s Time for the Heartlands Best Reads of 2019! #10 – Uncommon Prayer
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 →
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Love And Fire Children: Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here
I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine →
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An Antidote to Gutless Prayer: Dreaming Like Jesus with Rebekah Simon-Peter
The wonderfully-named Rebekah Simon-Peter looks around at mainline Protestantism, including The United Methodist Church of which she is a part, and sees some problems. It’s not just that the church is competing for attention in a post-Christian world with Sunday morning soccer practices. It’s not even the eight maladies she lists that include shrinking numbers, →
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