Books like Charms for the Easy Life

Here’s another book-to-movie entrant on the list. This book follows the exploits of a Confederate soldier who makes his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. It’s like the Odyssey—he has a series of memorable encounters and run-ins along his journey, and things are not as they seem when he eventually returns home. I love the novel's tension and the artfully crafted characters.

This is a bittersweet novel that actually made me cry, and there are not a lot of books that have this effect on me. It is a story about a chance encounter between an American woman and a South African man that touches both for a lifetime.

Both struggle against the practicalities of life to make their relationship work, but despite the obstacles and other love interests they encounter, they are unable to forget each other. Sparks, as a male author, is an absolute master at capturing a female protagonist’s thoughts and emotions and at describing moods and landscapes (especially North Carolina). As a reader, I found myself deeply empathizing with Hope and Tru and rooting for a happy ending.

This is another one of Nicholas Sparks books that I read at the recommendation of a good friend and I’m so glad I did! Denise is one of my most favorite fictional female main characters, and there was absolutely no surprise that Taylor fell for her despite his best efforts!

I was completely immersed in this book to the point that I stayed up way later than I should have when I needed to work the next morning and then woke up with a book hangover! This one was one that I needed a palette-cleansing book to read after because I was so emotionally invested!

Richard Walser, in his book North Carolina Legends, covers forty-eight of the state’s legends in this easy-to-read and enjoyable book. From the mountains to the coast, Walser describes how Joe Baldwin lost his head while trying to save two trains from crashing into one another at Maco Station and why a particular spot in Chatham County is thought to be the devil’s tramping ground. Walser’s short tales are the perfect read at a sleepover or during a night around the campfire. They are without a doubt tales that will be enjoyed time and time again.

Wilmington’s Lie, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, documents one of the darkest episodes in North Carolina’s history – the violent overthrow of an elected government in the Black-majority city of Wilmington. It was a massacre that left at least 60 Black men dead. I lived in North Carolina for decades before I heard about this history. And I’m hardly alone. Until recently, this coup had been described as a “race riot” and largely omitted from textbooks, while its White supremacist organizers had been revered as great North Carolinians. If you want to understand what people mean when they talk about the “whitewashing” of American history, this book is the ultimate case study.

This book crawled under my skin and stayed there.

It starts off ordinary, familiar, even as the unease builds slowly. The fear isn’t loud or in-your-face; it’s quiet, creeping, and emotional. 

I found myself questioning what was real, what was imagined, and whether it even mattered once the darkness started closing in. What really got me was the sense of something just out of sight, something you can’t quite explain, but you know it’s coming.

Grief and fear twist together in a way that feels inescapable. You try to run, to reason, to fight, but in this story, none of that may be enough. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t scream. It whispers, and somehow, that’s so much worse.

This was a pioneering book from an earlier age.

In a world populated by official reports and officers’ memoirs, Babits and Howard dug into an untapped resource, the pension applications from the thousands of ordinary soldiers who had fought the battles.

In a flash, gone were the dry ponderings of commanders, lucky and unlucky, looking to resurrect or burnish their reputations. The soldiers fought the do-or-die moments on the front lines and told their stories just as they remembered them.

This book carries all the dash, the heroism, and the slug-in-the-gut terror of the men in the trenches. The authors are true wordsmiths of the old school.

I have read it a dozen times and still marvel at their storytelling. 

Robert F. Williams may be the most influential, inspiring, and entertaining leader to be written out of popular American civil rights history. Tyson rescues him and his story, showing how one man can combine writing and organizing talent to outwit the Klan, the FBI, change his community, challenge movement orthodoxy, and then have unforgettable and unpredictable encounters with Castro, Mao — and Nixon, at the dawn of a new foreign policy era. This book, like Williams himself, forces us to wrestle with the nuances of arguments about social justice, racism, violence, and ideology. It’s also an unforgettable story in and of itself.

Wow, reading this book is tragic and illuminating all at once.

I had never heard about the Hamlet Fire, during which twenty-five people died in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, before reading this book.

But the story of this industrial disaster answered so many questions about how deregulation, reduced labor and environmental protections, racism, and a desire for cheap food came together in this disaster—one that sheds light on the broader problems of the modern American food system. 

This atlas, a beautiful but money-losing coffee table book from the book-publishing arm of Southern Living, appeared just as a new CEO ordered the company’s book people to think of themselves “more in the direct-marketing business, as opposed to being a book publisher.” (This strategy led eventually to How to Cook for Your Man and Still Want to Look at Him Naked.) It was probably treated as a write-off from the beginning and not marketed at all, which is a shame, because it is much more than a handsome ornament for your living room. Three geographers and a historian, all from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, produced a solidly-researched and profoundly informative work of cartographic excellence, one that repays both casual browsing and close study. (Some used book sites incorrectly show a different cover, but don’t worry about that.)