Our 2018 Book Recommendations

Spiritual Gifts by Dalt Wonk

One of the most important skills any person can develop is to

eavesdrop well. If you can gaze vacantly at a paperback while skimming the conversations around you like radio stations, you’ll seldom have a dull flight. (The paperback is essential; the last thing you want to have happen is that someone you’re trying to

eavesdrop on actually addresses you.) If you can master this feat, the world is your Scheherazade; prison stints, miscarriages, failed loves, alcoholic binges, dramatic resignations, ashtray-throwing breakups, and any other human drama you can imagine will be described within eight feet of you if you but look nonthreatening and hide behind a novel.

Dalt Wonk’s slender new volume of short stories is a veritable bus station of these conversations. Loosely organized around a technically fictional piano bar (most pianos bars are the same, wherein lies their appeal), the stories capture the tense interactions one loves—okay, I love—to witness from a safe distance. A breakup leads to a man angrily dividing a thick envelope of cash in the middle of Canal Street; a conversation between a doo-wop-era has-been and a perfume counter saleswoman turns into a nuclear confrontation over a purse. This book is the perfect way to experience a good old New Orleans scene, hissy fit, donnybrook, or altercation without actually having to go to the Quarter.  

Cups Up: How I Organized a Klavern, Plotted a Coup, Survived Prison, Graduated College, Fought Polluters, and Started a Business by George T. Malvaney

By page 51 of this apparently-real-life picaresque, author George Malvaney has already started a Ku Klux Klan chapter on board a ship of the United States Navy, left both the Klan and the Navy,

and begun planning to invade Dominica, a small Francophone island in the Caribbean with a population comparable to that of Lake Charles. In 1980, the government of Dominica was teetering from a recent hurricane and violence between Dominican forces and Rastafarian groups; these factors may have daunted conventional tourists and traditional investors, but Malvaney’s brio draws him inexorably to the island and its promise of adventure. Then he goes to prison, then college, and ultimately helps with the Deepwater Horizon recovery efforts. I need a nap just having written that paragraph, but Malvaney doesn’t seem to have slowed down yet, as the release of this memoir shows.

Like many memoirs by controversial figures or those with difficult pasts, there’s a bit of a protests-too-much factor in play in Cups Up; even if perfectly natural, the benefit of the doubt with which we view our younger selves doesn’t always translate well when that younger self was in the Ku Klux Klan, though Malvaney does make clear the differences between his former and current beliefs. Where he succeeds most, aside from an anecdotal knack that reflects his bonkers joie de vivre, is when he writes frankly about the accumulation of experiences that make up our selves. We are not the sum of our best days and noblest impulses but the sum of everything we have been and done; Malvaney understands this better than most. (Lest you think the book is too reflective, one passage discussing this idea is preceded by a description of a dinner at which Malvaney served frog legs to Yankees and said they were raccoon testes.) Of all the authors I’ve reviewed at Country Roads, Malvaney is the one I want to be trapped with when the zombies come.  

Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta by Julian Rankin

You might think that it would be unremarkable to be the first black owner of a catfish plant: catfish are common, relatively easy to farm, and prominent in both white and African-American Southern

cuisine—of course there were black catfish farmers. But the persistence of racism, the changing face of agriculture, and the perverse machinations of government agencies not only made such businesses unattainable for many but also hamstrung the successes of Ed Scott, who nonetheless has come to represent an African-American entrepreneurial success story. Julian Rankin’s portrait of Scott celebrates the man’s determination and records his big personality while also reporting the stumbling blocks that littered his path because of his race.

An important secondary realization the book helps readers come to is that the Mississippi Delta, often mythologized as a place fixed in time for both good and ill, has not been so stagnant; the lands on which Old South planter fortunes were built came to be farmed, in part, by independent black farmers descended from the slaves on those properties, who were themselves eventually superseded by the titanic plots now planted with regiments of experimental soybeans by the major agricultural companies. “Good farmland” it has always been, but what that means for its residents keeps changing. It’s easy to note that Scott, who was born in 1922 during Jim Crow and died in 2015 during Obama’s second term, saw an eventful span of African-American history, but it’s less obvious that he lived through these changes in American agricultural roles, themselves intertwined with race.

Rankin’s prose has an unusual, almost rhythmic quality; it took a moment for me to get used to, but I found myself wanting to hear him read it out loud. Part of this must be that he hears the cadences of his subjects in his head as he writes (Rankin interviewed Scott before his death and subsequently worked with his family), which makes me appreciate both Rankin and the Scotts, who I like to imagine sharing good fried catfish as they talked about the book. 

The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard

Magical realism is an especially difficult genre to execute well, probably because it represents the world we wish we lived in; a frank conversation about premodern sanitation is enough to turn

most people off the concept of the swords-and-sandals high-medieval pastiche in which much high fantasy is set, but I defy you to honestly say you don’t wish that you could get a referral to a good witch as easily as you can now find a dermatologist. Ladee Hubbard, whose debut novel The Talented Ribkins earned her a deserved Ernest Gaines award, effectively describes us a world instantly recognizable, with the pitfalls and failures common to every life that lasts long enough—but that also contains a family of African-American superheroes.

The Ribkins’ unusual family name comes from a barbecue tycoon paterfamilias, the Rib King; their even more peculiar family heritage is their “talents,” superpowers of varying strengths and levels of usefulness that crop up in most of the Rib King’s descendants. The concept comes from W.E.B. Du Bois and others’ idea of a “talented tenth,” an elite leadership class believed to be emergent among African-Americans in the early twentieth century; instead of the classical education Du Bois hoped for or the concentrated wealth that ultimately emerged, Hubbard imagines the Talented Tenth’s talents coming from arcane powers. It’s a great idea that could have fallen apart in the execution, and where Hubbard succeeds most as a novelist is that she doesn’t assume such abilities would make their bearers happy. Or successful. Or sensible. The result is a human portrait of the superhuman and a hell of a good read. An added treat is an especially well-crafted grandparent-grandchild relationship; these are seldom done well in fiction, usually winding up like Werther’s commercials, but Hubbard nails it.  

Louisiana Trail Riders by Jeremiah Ariaz

Jeremiah Ariaz is a confident photographer. Most books of photographs are surprisingly text-heavy, seeming to justify their “bookness” with captions, essays, and reflections. While the result

is often a good or even excellent book, there’s also a lot to be said for simply letting the photographs “speak” for themselves and allowing the reader—viewer—to consume the images unencumbered by text. Louisiana Trail Riders begins with an introductory paragraph describing Ariaz’s initial encounter with a welcoming trail riding group and closes with a three-page, accessible-yet-scholarly essay on trail riding groups by Alexandra Giancarlo. The interior of the book is simply a hundred gorgeous, compelling, evocative images of one of the most distinctive ways Louisianans have found to enjoy themselves and keep traditions alive.

Trail riders tend to be drawn from the old black Creole populations in the south-central and southwestern parts of the state. In his closing acknowledgments, Ariaz connects this modern heritage pastime with the equestrian cultures of the American West, which Louisiana was once part of; until 1845, going west from Louisiana meant you crossed an international border. The images are, in many ways, “Western”—Stetsons perch atop heads; a young woman with an impressive belt buckle gazed into the distance, with the narrow-eyed self-assurance of a movie gunslinger. The pictures are much more than postcards from the eastern edge of the West, though. Ariaz’s unfailing eye catches a woman absently caressing a horse’s neck and a row of feet in boots and flip-flops dangling over the edge of a truck bed. They are beautiful and, as Ariaz must have been pleased to realize as he assembled his book, nearly impossible to do justice to with words.