2017 Holiday Book Roundup

If you love to read, there’s not really such a thing as “book season,” but winter is an especially nice time of year to be a bookworm. It’s cool out (if not always cold, down here), and you can snuggle up with a good solid read for a whole weekend if you like. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a cold and—the horrors!—get to stay in bed for a few days: just you, some Kleenex, and your favorite authors. Here are a handful of the best books that came across our desks this year that we didn’t have a chance to address before. Check them out of the library for yourself, or buy copies to wrap and set under the tree. 

Kelly Williams Brown, Gracious: A Practical Primer on Charm, Tact, and Unsinkable Strength

Part modern etiquette manual, part self-help, Covington native Kelly Williams Brown’s Gracious aims to help readers become the put-together, calm-under-fire, good-hearted omnicompetent hosts so many of us think we could become if we only had any idea where to start. Delightfully not self-serious (footnotes are marked with little blue pineapples and sometimes describe imaginary manatees), Gracious (Rodale Books, 2017) identifies kindness and consideration as the central factors in living a gracious life. Practical advice, like a basic list of what refreshments to have on hand to satisfy most tastes and food restrictions, is interspersed with reflections on how to practice graciousness as a way of life; readers get the theory and the practice.

A concept that could have been cloying from another writer’s pen works for Brown because she’s earnest without being oblivious; she knows writing a modern etiquette guide is a funny undertaking, but… people need one, and her pages shine with an enthusiasm for sharing her insights into pleasant, considerate living with a frustrated, fractious world. This is, simply, a book about being nice, and you will be a more considerate person for having read it.

Shane K. Bernard, Teche: A History of Louisiana’s Most Famous Bayou

The Mississippi is the great, muddy artery flowing through Louisiana’s land and history, but it’s far from the only waterway to have had a formative influence on our watery state. Shane K. Bernard’s Teche (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) shows readers how central this “other” waterway has been to the state’s history: running through the muggily productive farmland of Acadiana, the Teche attracted natives, colonists, free creoles, and planters with slaves in tow. The mishmash of cultures created a region that was “foreign” to the Americans who arrived after Louisiana’s purchase and has remained so, to an extent, today: Acadiana still markets itself as decidedly different from the rest of the country. 

Aided by the vividness of the history he describes, Bernard tells a gripping story, centered on the narrative of the people who live along the Teche. A colonial flood is so bad it swamps the dwellings of the Chitimacha; a Union commander describes the battles for the Teche as the back-alley brawl needed to secure the main-street Mississippi; Jim Crow and successive natural and financial disasters so blight the area’s future that its poor residents don’t notice the onset of the Depression. The final third or so of the book recounts Bernard’s canoe trips covering the whole length of the bayou; this is an extra treat, combining the historian’s love of on-this-spot anecdotes with the appreciation of nature that can only come from a self-described “avid indoorsman” stepping out of his natural habitat.

Michael H. Rubin, Cashed Out

A down-on-his-luck attorney, a corpse, a briefcase full of cash, and an ex-wife—Michael H. Rubin’s Cashed Out (Fiery Seas Publishing, 2017) has all the ingredients of a good, solid noir novel. Rubin’s previous book, The Cottoncrest Curse, enjoyed rave reviews, including one from this magazine, and won the Book of the Year Gold Award from the American Library Association for a thriller or suspense novel published by an independent or university press. Cashed Out has all the page-turning oomph and verve that made Rubin’s previous book a success. If you’re looking to spend a day in a book, pick up a copy—it pulls you forward so firmly and unapologetically that your spouse is liable to find you standing in the kitchen, eyes glued to the text, a half-eaten sandwich gently warming in your hand.

Cashed Out also takes home an honorable mention for “Most Convincing Name for a Fictional Louisiana Parish” for St. Bonaventure—amuse yourself this Christmas by telling people you’ve just been out to St. Bonaventure Parish, and see where people think it is.

James Nolan, Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy

Like many adults who were once well-behaved children, I sometimes feel a pang of nostalgia for the bad kid I never was. Maybe I should have run away to Montana that summer, or at least snuck bourbon into the high school just once, so I can honestly tell my godchildren I wasn’t always this square. Fortunately, James Nolan’s memoir Flight Risk (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) contains enough rock-em sock-em rebelliousness that I can steal what anecdotes I need.

Nolan knows how to grab the reader; within the first few pages of the book, he’s been committed to a mental hospital, had his girlfriend smuggle in an ACLU lawyer claiming to be a relative, met a woman who nearly drowned in a bowl of turtle soup (if you have to go…), and gotten released from the facility on the morning of Mardi Gras Day, which may have softened the transition. And then he’s off, gallivanting across continents, collecting showstopper anecdotes at a breakneck pace. Flight Risk is dense with unimaginable but convincingly told stories, improbable encounters, and the golden lines that make Nolan’s work such a pleasure to read (“How gray, to be a Catalan civil servant”). Let it inspire you both to step out of your comfort zone and give thanks for the comfort zone’s existence.

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

I wish I hadn’t read Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (HarperCollins, 2017) for work. I love writing about what I read and sharing good books with Country Roads readers, but there’s always a part of you that can’t quite get lost in a book you know you’ll have to write about: “…maybe quote that line…that might need to be in the review…yeah, I can get 1200 words out of this one.” Thomas’ writing makes you want to lock the door, turn off the phone, and get to next chapter. 

I often shy away from “difficult” books—reading has always been my escape, and I don’t want my vacations from the real world to be to sad or frightening ones. The Hate U Give looks at the aftermath of the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager and is anything but light or carefree, but even the reader most reluctant to engage with a topic this heavy will be enticed by the verve and intelligence of Starr, the book’s narrator. Thomas strikes the neat balance of making Starr a relatable yet extraordinary narrator. She’s clever and eloquent enough in her internal monologue; but in the complexities of her relationships with her parents, her friends, her boyfriend, and perhaps especially herself, we recognize the common struggles, momentous and trivial, that make adolescence so challenging, even as they play out against a situation many readers will find completely alien. Get two copies—you’ll want to have someone to talk about this one with.