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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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Slow Books and Deep Rivers: David James Duncan’s My Life as Told by Water
I like to keep a slow book in the stack of my morning reading. These are books that reward patient reading and the goal with them should never be to get to the end. →
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Nancy French’s Ghosted Looks at What’s Haunting America
This is a central message she wants to convey in her story—that the ideological cleansing practiced by both parties is actually harmful hubris. →
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Esau McCaulley’s Unexpected Journey
You come out of this memoir feeling McCaulley’s hard-won wisdom, openness, and faith. His difficult, often-absent, father, his resilient mother, his racially-intolerant in-laws, and his big, loving Alabama family all find their place in McCaulley’s heart. →
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Marilynne Robinson Goes Back to the Beginning
Robinson, the storyteller who created such vivid, fleshed-out characters in her Gilead series, turns a practiced eye to the characters of Genesis, finding some surprising stand-outs. Cain, for instance, creates real issues for a God who has established the utter sacredness of life. Given that the earth’s first family includes a murderer, how will God… →
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The Lightness of Abigail Carroll
She has a knack for going to the deep and sometimes difficult heart of things without flinching and yet returning with something like uplift and joy. There is a lightness verging on flight to her images and words. And a reassuring faithfulness in her discipline of witness. →
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Christian Wiman Cuts Close to the Bone Again
Here is a scrapbook, a glorious one, that dabbles in autobiography, poetry, biblical exegesis, and compendia of quotations from some of literature and spirituality’s greatest lights. Is it seamless? Far from it. But should you submit to the grim and magnificent ride? Absolutely. →
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Fleming Rutledge Upends Another Season
Alongside Dry January, a preacher might offer a sermon series on ‘6 Ways to Up Your Spiritual Game in 2024.’ I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds…productive. Inconveniently for such well-intentioned attempts to enter the marketplace of resolutions, the calendar of the Christian year gives us Epiphany, an obscure season that puts… →
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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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Heartlands 