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#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston – 2025 Best Reads
Surprise! A tale of Texas makes the Top 10 Best Reads of 2025. →
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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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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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#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 – Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles – Best Reads of 2023
Paulette Jiles, with her poet’s eye, has a knack for writing books that feel small even when they’re about a place as vast as Texas. →
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The Heartlands Best Reads of 2021 –#10 On Juneteenth
The end of the year is approaching quickly so it must be time for the Heartlands Best Reads list. It’s been a good year for reading, even with a move and shift in environment. This is the fifth year for this list. A quick reminder of the criteria for making this list: writing with a →
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Very Dusty, Windy, Mean – Lessons from the Dust Bowl
“On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there.” An opening sentence like that sets up high expectations for a →
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Going West With Wiman
A few more words for Christian Wiman. As if my words for Joy, (an edited collection of poems), and He Held Radical Light, (a memoir), and Survival is a Style, (a personal collection of poems), have not been enough to convince you that he’s a writer worth savoring. Seeking more I went back to his →
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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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