It’s been a great year for reading. I credit Sarah Willson Craig for inviting me into a real mid-life reading renaissance. She’s the one who posted the Better World Reading Challenge on Facebook in 2016 and got a group of friends committed. I’m grateful.
Since everyone else is doing their end-of-the-year list, I decided to join the fray with a Heartlands Best Reads of 2017. Some caveats: These are books I read in 2017, but they weren’t all published this year. 2017 books did get some extra points in the ranking, however.
Also, I’m not making any allowance for genre. Fiction, non-fiction–theology and journalism–cats and dogs living together–it’s one big, unruly house on my nightstand.
Of course there are some great books that didn’t make the final list. Here are a few of the near-misses that I loved reading this year (with links to reviews where I’ve done them):
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Cancer is not Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Cancer by Jason Micheli
All True Not a Lie in It by Alix Hawley
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Duane’s Depressed by Larry McMurtry
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Given the quality of those books, you can see why the Top Ten are extra special to me. So today we start the countdown with #10.
Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild was not one of the best-written of the Top Ten, but it lingered with me and proved to be a very useful book during a year when I was trying to get my mind around the Great Divide. Her “deep story” that emerged from many days of living as a California sociologist in rural Louisiana was a very useful framework that reminded me of a Flannery O’Conner story. A bonus for me was the opportunity to interview Hochschild and she turns out to be a delightful, perceptive, authentic person.
