Books like The Bitterweed Path — picked by fans

This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.

Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.

Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long… show more.

Coleman got very famous, and very rich, from Beulah Land, a trilogy of plantation life in the pre-Civil War South that was variously viewed as a much racier Gone with the Wind or simply dismissed as an interracial soap opera. What a surprise, then, to find he wrote this beautiful coming-of-age story about a sensitive boy who is a budding writer. The novel richly depicts Mark’s life in Alabama and Georgia during the 1930s and early ’40s. We are as elated as he is when he finally finds people who understand him, most notably his teacher, who is the kind of quietly strong woman character all too often overlooked in such a milieu, and equally, the unexpected young man with whom Mark finally finds a romance both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

This is my favorite novel of all time, bar none.

The sweeping saga of two seemingly socially disparate boys caught up in the volatile world of early 1900s Ireland from which springs forth the Easter Uprising. As a writer and a reader, I am amazed at the historical details and language that are completely immersive, as well as by the structure and control O’Neill wields over the book. Yet he never overwhelms with the “history,” nor does he ever lose sight of the true story, the true heart of his stunning novel.

The love story between the boys is timeless and beautiful and, of course, tragic, as is so often the case with gay love stories from our history. It has haunted me since I first read the novel some twenty-two years ago. It is yet another book I often come back to reread, and I am astounded all… show more.

When Wingmen was published in 1979, there had been nothing else quite like it: a war novel, very well researched, with plenty of action and adventure… plus a romance between two men at its center. Those feelings emerge, in a classic slow burn, between young Ensign Fred Trusteau and the more seasoned Lieutenant Commander Fred Hartigan against the backdrop of the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The often-harrowing life of naval aviators is vividly conveyed in action scenes set in places whose names will be familiar to students of WW2 – Wake Island, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Truk. Case has certainly done his homework on the hardware and the military lingo, but what lifts the narrative is the uncertain, unconventional romance between the main characters. What Top Gun could have been.

Richard Grant a British journalist and adventure writer traveled the world before moving from New York City with his Brookland girlfriend to transform a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Mississippi into a new home and a new life.

In the process he discovers the real Mississippi—good and bad—as “the most American place on earth.” This book makes the reader laugh, cry, but most important think deeply about jazz, sex, politics, food, America’s class system, racism, democracy, and what it means to be American which is in constant change.

Grant’s writing is addictive and an elixir—you can’t put it down. 

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

I almost chose a fifth book by an author more readers will likely have heard of (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower), but I’m going with a second autobiography, Anne Moody’s, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

Between ages 13 and 16, I read my blue paperback cover of this book more times than I can remember. It’s about Anne Moody’s growing up amid poverty and Jim Crow, beset by sexism and danger from within and outside her community due to her gender and race.

It chronicles her childhood in Mississippi to her evolution into a Civil Rights Activist as a teen and college student. It’s so unforgivingly honest, detailed, and visually rich on the page - it humanizes the history like an Eyes on the Prize documentary but way more personalized.

I think it taught me further about the value of writing very visually, the power of our individual… show more.

As someone who considers her brother her creative muse, I would describe this novel as one interested in siblings.

Between Leonie and Given, and Jojo and Kayla is an indescribable, utterly unique bond, held within and beyond both family and friendship. 

I was utterly consumed by this heartbreaking novel. From the opening scene where Pop and Jojo kill and skin a goat, to the heat in Leonie’s car and the scene of Jojo’s police cuffing, Ward delivers a pace, language, and viscerality that means you can’t look away. 

Somewhat surprisingly, I was even compelled by the book’s ghostly elements. I found they enhanced the magnitude of the characters’ burdens, especially for thirteen-year-old Jojo, who already shoulders so much.

I highly recommend this book, as a pleasure and as a duty to your fellow human beings. 

Ace Atkins played defensive end for Auburn. His picture once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. His dad coached for the 49ers. In other words, Ace knows football, and that fact is on full display in The Innocents. Although the plot doesn’t center around football, this novel features one of the best depictions of a Southern, sleazeball coach you’ll ever find in fiction. Oh, and it’s a part of Ace’s Quinn Colson series. So if you like it, there’s more where that came from!

This book by John Grisham asks how moral people live in an unjust society. They either come to terms with the wickedness of a broken world or end their lives.

The opening page of the Grisham novel reveals a man who can’t cope with his sins, those of his ancestors, and society. I submit the reader wants a more courageous protagonist capable of coping with the chaos. The entire purpose of crime fiction is to re-establish the order shattered by evil.