A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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While many have certainly heard of Dickens’ other history (A Tale of Two Cities), few know his first. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty was originally published in installments throughout 1841 and it fictionalizes the very real Gordon Riots of 1780.
Margaret Atwood’s Dearly: New Poems (2020) is a lovely collection that reflects themes of aging and loss as well as the mythology, the classics, and magical creatures.
Nuala O’Connor’s brilliant, moving, and yes, delightful, NORA: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (2021) gives today’s readers a first-person narrative through which to meet and admire Nora Barnacle Joyce. From her own perspective, O’Connor’s Nora shares details of her life with legendary James Joyce, from courtship, to shared self-exile, parenthood, chronic illness, literary success, and, ultimately, death.
Catherine A Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War (2020), is a moving and informative historical fiction. Victoria’s War opens as Germany invades Poland, shattering the life of its titular character.
Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.
Michele Duster’s Ida B The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B Wells (2021) is at once a powerful, aesthetic biography of Ida B Wells and the Civil Rights Movement generally, and a coffee table book brimming with engaging photos and moving graphics accessible to every member of the family.
works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) is a gut-punch of YA novel. Starr, the novel’s high school protagonist, exists between two worlds. She lives in the poor, predominately Black, neighborhood of Garden Heights; she attends high school in an upper-middle class, predominately white suburb.
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies.
Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us (2018) is a touching a family drama punctuated on modern American issues, particularly those of immigrant families.
Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.
I convened with the Owens family in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995), Rules of Magic (2017), and Magical Lessons (2020). By reading all three novels together, I enjoyed a month of magically lovable witches battling the challenges and frustrations of being independent creatures in a world that doesn’t appreciate their unconventional style or power. Hoffman’s novels build prequel upon prequel as she works closer and closer to the root of the Owens’ family story and its curse.
Set in the early twentieth-century English county side, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, is the first-person journal of Cassandra Mortmain in year of her eighteenth birthday.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.
Humankind interweaves anecdotal evidence and extensive research to prove that humans are, in fact, kind, cooperative, and trusting, even if we are doubtful of that fact ourselves.
Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020) is a collection of six essays in which she ruminates upon her myriad mental wanderings during this unprecedented year.
John Williams’s Stoner (originally published in 1965 and re-released in 2003) follows the life of titular character William Stoner from his childhood home on the Missouri plains to the University of Missouri where he found his calling in the study literature. Williams’s prose is as plain and straightforward as is his protagonist, but the emotional depth of this novel as it weaves through decade upon decade from the 19teens onward, is deeply moving.
