Monday, September 16, 2024

September 16, 2024: Summer Reads: The Good Lord Bird

[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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