[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
I know
James McBride’s masterpiece of a revisionist historical novel The
Good Lord Bird (2013) is far from a new release (and indeed that his newest release has
been even more acclaimed still, and I promise to check that out one sooner than
a decade down the road). What I can say, I had really slacked on my pleasure
reading for far too long (and hadn’t had a chance to teach McBride’s book, so
didn’t have that reason to check it out). But McBride’s hilarious, pointed, and
ultimately profoundly moving depiction of John Brown through the eyes of
fictional escape enslaved person Henry “Onion” Shackleford was more than worth
the wait, and might well have even edged out Russell
Banks’ Cloudsplitter (1998), itself one of my very favorite novels,
as the best book about Brown I’ve ever read. No matter what, this is quite
simply a unique and amazing book, and of all the great ones I read this summer
was the one that most fully reminded me of the unabashed and to my mind
unequaled pleasures of pleasure reading (and, not unrelatedly, convinced me to
get off of Twitter, but that’s a story for another time).
Next
summer read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
have you been reading?
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