It’s next weekend, friends! Soon, the Tennessee State Museum and Library and Bicentennial Mall will buzz with authors, book lovers, vendors, food trucks, and music. Some of the year’s biggest authors are coming, plus a political luminary: Ann Patchett (Whistler), Kathryn Stockett (Calamity Club), Belle Burden (Strangers), Maria Semple (Go Gentle), and Lamar Alexander (Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump). Margaret Renkl in conversation with Billy Renkl, Susannah Felts, and Aimee Nezhukamatathil will amuse and delight! Today I offer my Top 10 Non-Famous Books and Authors – a highly personal list of course. You’ll want to check out the schedule yourself. Here goes…
1 – Go Gentle, by Maria Semple
Breaking my own rule: you’ve likely heard of Maria Semple (Where’d You Go, Bernadette). I’m putting her at the top of the list because I get to interview her and this is a fascinating book! Go Gentle tells the story of Adora Hazzard, philosopher and tutor to the twins of one New York’s richest families. She’s living a quiet life with her 15 year old daughter and her close group of women friends (“the coven”), when she gets caught up in a steaming hot romance and also begins to suspect she’s discovered an art heist connected to international terrorism. It’s laugh out loud funny, as you’d expect from Semple – and suspenseful. It conveys many of the major precepts of Stoic philosophy with charm and a light touch. Yet the middle of the book turns awfully serious and painful. Does Semple pull this off? Yes – I think so! She’s defying gravity.
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2 – Nashville’s New Americans, by Sheri Lea Sellmeyer
I’ve heard a lot of inspiring and challenging immigrant stories while chatting with Nashville Uber drivers over the years. I can’t wait to hear more stories from Sellmayer.
About the book:
“Whether it’s building skyscrapers, running successful restaurants, researching diseases, performing music, cleaning hotel rooms, or holding public office, immigrants are changing Nashville from a mid‑sized city known for its country music industry to an increasingly diverse, multicultural destination. In Metro Nashville schools today, students speak more than 120 languages. The city is bigger, more congested, and more expensive than it’s ever been, drawing criticism from both longtime residents and newcomers. But growth has also brought top‑notch scientists and educators, a world‑class symphony, major league sports teams, investment from major corporations—and a wide range of immigrants whose talent and hard work have helped make all of that happen.
Through its profiles of thirty-nine immigrants from thirty-eight countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, Nashville’s New Americans provides a case study from one of the fastest-growing cities in the country on the contributions immigrants are making to its culture and economy.”
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3 – How Flowers Made Our World, by David George Haskell
This is obviously on my list!
About the book:
“We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their power. In this examination of the role flowers played in creating the world we know today, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we’ve been missing.
Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: Gorgeous petals and alluring aromas transformed former enemies into cooperative partners. Flowers reinvented plant sexuality and motherhood, bringing male and female together in the same flower and amply provisioning seeds and fruits, innovations that also feed legions of animals, ourselves included. Through radical genetic flexibility, flowers turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.
Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust.
…How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.
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4 – Forest Time, by Jeremy Lloyd
The older I get, the more I just want to be outside. Preferably among the trees. Jeremy Lloyd has made a life of it…
About the book:
“In his twenties, broke, brokenhearted, and fearful about the future, Jeremy Lloyd stumbled into a job that would change his life. More than two decades later, still an educator at Tremont in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Lloyd recounts his journey as a teacher and student of the great outdoors in Forest Time: Footnotes to an Education Outdoors. Blending natural history, daring – and sometimes foolish – adventure, and spiritual balm for a world suffering from widespread disconnection from nature, Forest Time is equal parts personal, educational, and existential. Lloyd’s stories about his work as an educator at an overnight nature center are filled with humility and conviction, examining his relationships to the forests, mountains, and rivers he calls home.”
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5 – Mystery Play, by Elizabeth Kostova
Remember The Historian? Seems like a lifetime ago. I remember loving it. (I think I remember loving it.) Mystery Play sounds like a delicious read for the short days and cold nights ahead, Halloween coming. At 652 pages, I’m expecting an immersive experience.
About the book:
The last living member of a family of historians who has been hunted by dark forces associated with Dracula finds himself in peril at the hands of a new threat in this thrilling novel from the #1 bestselling author of The Historian.
After his beloved mother passes away suddenly, Jay Turner finds himself at a crossroads. She was always secretive, and when he returns to their Boston home to clear out her possessions, he finds an unusual item: a partially burned scrap of newspaper bearing the name “Gael Brogan.” Soon after, a deliveryman leaves behind a package containing a small antique volume bound in leather—and two bloody footprints.
The sight of the volume is chilling. As a young scholar, his mother had been given the medieval book—one of a set commissioned by Vlad Țepeș, otherwise known as Dracula, just before his death in 1477. She’d always warned Jay of the dangers associated with it, and had donated it to a museum before she died . . . yet here it is, back in his possession…
In this epic and riveting tale, Elizabeth Kostova takes us deep into the Gilded Age of the theater and across the Atlantic in pursuit of an ancient evil and its dramatic followers.”
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5 – Music Against the Night, by Yiyun Li
Li’s memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, published last year, moved me deeply. She lost her two sons to suicide.
I feel invested in her mental health. I want to follow her journey as a writer. This is her latest.
About the book:
“In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family has visions of him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far―to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy, languorous melodies that enchant the night air…
Oceans away in Pondicherry, in French India, Adelaide Percheron has a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her imperious, enterprising grandmother. Her cousins give her the name Percherette, an impish reminder that despite their shared relations, Adelaide is not one of the crowd, owing to her parents’ differing ancestry. Without a connection to aristocracy or the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity―until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her secret love of music and a desire to see the world, Percherette engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon’s army sets out to conquer the continent.
Peopled by rival prodigies, irate tutors, begrudging guardians, and the true-to-life masters of the trade, Yiyun Li’s magisterial, polyphonic novel depicts two aspiring musicians… in pursuit of success…Music Against the Night comes to life with the sweep and dimension of the Romantic era and a deep understanding of the demands of living and of art.”
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7 – The Great Wherever, by Shannon Sanders
I love the talking ghosts in Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders; The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman; and A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. I want to see what Shannon Sanders does with this concept…
About the book:
“The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are.
An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait.
At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm she sees an opportunity to get out of the city―and to erase a mounting pile of debt.
Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts―Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades.
Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.”
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8 – This is Not About Us, by Allegra Goodman
The Boston Globe called it a “funny and moving Jewish family saga.” I’m in.
About the book:
“Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubinstein family, it could go either way.
When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.
With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman…returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.”
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9 – Pimento Cheese, by Rebecca Lang
About the book:
“In Rebecca Lang’s Pimento Cheese, the storied food writer and ninth-generation Southerner gives readers a taste of the famed spread’s history and versatility. The collection includes more than sixty-five recipes: over thirty-five for making pimento cheese and thirty recipes that include pimento cheese to make creamy and comforting favorites. In Lang’s beloved writing style, her recipes are served along-side rich storytelling. Readers will learn the origin story of pimento cheese as a textile workers’ staple in South Carolina during the 1920s and how Georgia became the largest grower of pimentos in 1929 after the boll weevil ravaged the state’s cotton economy. The book expands the recipe repertoire of pimento cheese lovers with recipes that incorporate unexpected ingredients like lemon, goat cheese, honey, and horseradish in dishes like Pimento Cheese Buttermilk Biscuits, Adair’s Tomato and Pimento Cheese Pie, and First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s “Plains Special” Cheese Ring. But Lang stays true to her roots as well, encouraging us to stack up the white bread and make a sandwich worthy of a meal―or the Masters.”
Tell me you’re not hungry right this second.
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10 – The Ice Cream Queen, by Lokelani Alabanza
To end on a sweet note…
About the book:
“Back in the 1840s, a free Black woman ran a successful ice cream saloon in Nashville. Her name was Sarah Estell, and she became known as “the Ice Cream Queen.” Now taking up her crown is Lokelani Alabanza, a trained pastry chef and avid collector of all things Black Americana. Her love of ice cream and appreciation for those who preceded her come together in this joyful cookbook.
Ice Cream Queen features Alabanza’s original creations and revamped classics such as Malted Vanilla, Roasted Strawberry, and Mint Chip. Building on simple bases, standout flavors range from boozy and fruity to adventurous and decadent. Recipes include Nashville Hot Chicken, an ode to her adoptive city’s iconic dish; Juneteenth Sorbet, with summer-ripe raspberries and hibiscus flowers; PB&J, a vanilla swirled with peanut butter, strawberry jam, and slices of white bread; Chocolate-Covered Kettle Chip, a crunchy mix of sweet and salty . . . and many more.”
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Bonus Picks:
Already featured at Bacon, and participating in the Festival this year:
Also, a film screening:
I hope to see you at the Festival! Xoxo
