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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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#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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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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#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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#3 – All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – Best Reads of 2023
What Cosby brings to the table is a landscape I know and love and people who are too often hidden in plain sight. And the context of his fiction is both as ancient as the Chesapeake and as contemporary as a black sheriff in a rural Southern backwater county. →
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#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023
Victor Lavelle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror. →
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#10 – 24 Hours in Charlottesville by Nora Neus – Best Reads of 2023
Charlottesville is still a mostly progressive city that sometimes fancies itself a small piece of the Northeast Corridor. But every so often we get painful reminders that this is still the South and there is much to do. This is the searing record of one of the most painful. →
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#1 & a Recap – How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith – 2022 Best Reads
Poets can make excellent prose artists, as Clint Smith proved once again in my favorite read from 2022: How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Smith takes a journey to sites associated with slavery from Monticello to Angola Prison to the Door of No Return at Goree Island, →
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Heartlands 