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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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#2 – big wonderful thing by Stephen Harrigan – Best Reads of 2023
Mary Austin Holley, author of the first English history of Texas, (and cousin to Stephen F. Austin), said “One’s feelings in Texas are unique and original…and very like a dream or youthful vision realized.” (116) Many a Texas visitor or emigré has discovered the same thing about the state, despite its outsized contradictions. →
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#9 – A Place Like Mississippi by W. Ralph Eubanks – 2022 Best Reads
At number 9 on the list of Best Reads of 2022 is W. Ralph Eubanks’s beautiful book A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Landscape. Eubanks loves driving through Mississippi, and I do, too. It is a place that has played an outsized role in my understanding of what America means →
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#3-Men We Reaped-Heartlands 2020 Best Reads
OK. I’ve gushed over Jesmyn Ward enough in the past three years. Her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing made the Best Reads list in 2017. Salvage the Bones, her Hurricane Katrina novel, was on the list last year and is on my all-time Top Ten. So, it’s not surprising that this Mississippi writer finds her way →
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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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#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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Love, Life, and Salvation in As I Lay Dying
Perhaps someday I’ll get around to re-reading William Faulkner, which numerous guides suggest one do in order to get the full flavor of his writing. In the meantime, I’ll step back and gawk, wondering why I’m persisting in this recent quest to get to the heart of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s mythical Mississippi landscape. I mean, →
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Reading The Sound and the Fury in 2020
In 1929, William Faulkner had a keen sense that it was all falling in of its own weight. When he published The Sound and the Fury, now recognized as an American classic, it confused folks more than wowed them. The first section, written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the intellectually-challenged son of a white →
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Saying Their Names: Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi Memoir
Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, derives its title from an arresting Harriet Tubman quote that appears in the book as an epigraph: We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the →
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Belated Reviews: Willie Morris’s North Toward Home
“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.” …”Maybe he just sick, Skeet.” “What if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?” —Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward It took some chutzpah for Willie Morris, at the age of roughly 33, to believe that his →
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Heartlands 