Read more in 2023 and join the Herald-Leader’s Kentucky book club
This year I resolved to read more books. It occurred to me I just haven’t been reading as much these past couple of years and, simply put, I want to remedy that.
So when the calendar flipped over, I decided to join Goodreads and participate in their 2023 reading challenge. My personal goal for the year is to read 15 new books; I wanted to start small and have something of an achievable goal in mind. But then I thought to myself: Why not open up this opportunity to others, and what if we threw a Bluegrass State spin on it?
To that end, I’ve created the Herald-Leader’s Kentucky Book Club for 2023. Each month has been curated with a book from a Kentucky author, spanning a variety of genres. The list is largely compiled of native-born Kentuckians, or those who currently live in Kentucky, but there are some authors whose subject matter pertained a great deal to Kentucky and were included.
This list is by no means an endorsement of any particular book or author, or to display any kind of favoritism. There are a number of fantastic authors who call Kentucky home and I encourage you to read all of them if you can. I simply came up on the constraints of there being 12 months in a year; of course, there’s always next year.
For each of these entries, I encourage you to check your local library for them or support a local bookseller wherever possible. Some may be, admittedly, a bit harder to find going that route than others; however, so long as you have the book in hand (or in ear in the case of audio books) you’re welcome to join the club!
You can also join this book club over on Goodreads to participate and share your thoughts on each month’s book. Now let’s take a look at the tome of 2023.
January - “Bright Dead Things” by Ada Limón
Granted since we’re already a bit over one week into January, I thought it would only be fair to not saddle us all with a 500-page novel. Plus, January still has the air of newness and freshness, bustling with potential as we begin each year anew again.
Keeping some of these things in mind, plus with my own added preference of wanting to read more poetry, January’s book will be “Bright Dead Things” by Ada Limón, the United States poet laureate, and a resident of Lexington.
At 46, Limón has published six books of poetry, most recently, “The Hurting Kind;” won major awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; taught writing at universities such as Columbia and Stanford; and appeared in The New Yorker.
So why choose “Bright Dead Things” over her more recent work? In part because the book’s description, at least according to the National Book Foundation, praises the work as a “book of bravado and introspection” and one that “examines the chaos that is life.” To me that spoke somewhat to starting off a new year with a healthy dose of introspection.
February - “The Birds of Opulence” by Crystal Wilkinson
Continuing on with the theme of poet laureates, February’s book is “The Birds of Opulence” by Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson. Wilkinson, also a Lexington resident, is the first Black woman named to the post of Kentucky Poet Laureate, and only the second Black writer after fellow Affrilachian Poet Frank X Walker.
Her 2018 novel “centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness,” according to University of Kentucky Press.
Wilkinson is the winner of several literary awards, such as a 2022 NAACP Image Award, 2020 USA Fellow of Creative Writing and a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner. Her most recent work is her poetic memoir “Perfect Black.”
March - “Bluegrass Conspiracy” by Sally Denton
March’s book is tied directly to the theatrical release of, what’s sure to be a blockbuster of a film, the one and only “Cocaine Bear.”
The 2023 thriller, with a late February release date, directed by Elizabeth Banks is inspired by true events with connections to Kentucky.
Andrew Thornton, a former Lexington narcotics officer turned drug smuggler, died parachuting out of a plane over Knoxville in 1985. He was carrying $15 million in cocaine with him when he jumped. Some of the cocaine was carried miles away and later eaten by a black bear.
Those true events, in which the movie draws its inspiration, have been chronicled in Sally Denton’s 1990 book “Bluegrass Conspiracy.” So whether you want to watch the movie first and then read the book for comparison, or vice versa, you’ll have enough bears and cocaine to hold you over.
April - “Shadowspawn” by Andrew J. Offutt
In April, we’ll switch up the genre list a bit and sprinkle in some science fiction and fantasy.
Kentucky-born author Andrew J. Offutt began publishing his work in 1954, many of them novels and short stories. A good number of them appeared in the “Thieves World” series edited by authors Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey.
The fantasy anthology series takes place in the city of Sanctuary at the edge of the Rankan Empire. Offutt’s contribution to the first volume of the series is his novel “Shadowspawn.” This only joins the list largely because of my own interest in tabletop role-playing games, of which “Thieves World” was later spawned into.
Offut died in 2013; notably, he is also the father to another Kentucky-born author, Chris Offutt. The younger Offut’s 2016 memoir details his relationship with his father.
May - “My Old Kentucky Home” by Emily Bingham
The month of May is largely synonymous with the Kentucky Derby here in the commonwealth. To that end, I thought the book for this month should have some ties to horse racing.
Louisville-native Emily Bingham’s book “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song,” seemed to fit the bill. Every Kentucky Derby, those of us in the crowd at the track, and watching at home, sing along to Kentucky’s state song, “My Old Kentucky Home.”
Bingham’s book explores the history of that song and asks the question: How did a minstrel song about the slave trade become a beloved melody, a celebratory anthem and an integral part of American folklore and culture?
June - “Lark Ascending” by Silas House
One of the things I struggle with is falling behind on the recent works of authors I enjoy reading, like Silas House.
In high school, I read a lot of House’s early novels and now I’m going to try my hardest to catch up on all the ones I haven’t gotten around to reading. With that in mind, June’s book will be “Lark Ascending.”
The book by the Laurel County-native, tells a “riveting story of survival and hope” is set in a not-too distant future about a young man who is forced to flee the U.S. and seek refuge across the Atlantic. However, House wants readers to focus on the “human story” told in his novel against an otherwise grim-looking backdrop.
To its added benefit, parts of the novel are told from the perspective of a beagle, which really seals the deal for me.
July - “Mud Creek Medicine” by Kiran Bhatraju
July’s book is one that’s been sitting on my bookshelf for several years now. The worst thing is the last time I picked it up, which was several years at this point, I was quite nearly done with it when I made the poor decision of simply not finishing it.
In order to remedy this mistake, in July we’ll read “Mud Creek Medicine: The Life of Eula Hall and the Fight for Appalachia” by author Kiran Bhatraju. The 2013 biography of Hall chronicles the story of how she created and sustained the Mud Creek Clinic in rural Floyd County in order to provide people health care, even if they couldn’t pay.
Bhatraju, the founder and CEO of Arcadia, a clean tech company, was born in Eastern Kentucky and his father worked as a doctor at the Mud Creek Clinic and Pikeville Medical Center for several decades.
Hall died May 8, 2021, at the age of 93.
August - “The Mad Farmer Poems” by Wendell Berry
You can’t have a true Kentucky book club if you don’t include some work from Wendell Berry on the list.
The Henry County native has authored over 50 books of poetry, fiction and essays largely around themes of agrarianism and rural communities. His collection of poems gathered in “The Mad Farmer Poems” volume tells the story of how Berry has become “mad” at what “contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past.”
Berry’s latest work of nonfiction is “The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice.”
September - “In Country” by Bobbie Ann Mason
In September we’ll read Mayfield-native Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1985 debut novel “In Country.”
The novel focuses on a rural Kentucky girl in her senior year of high school. Her father, whom she never knew, was killed in Vietnam during the war before she was born. The novel, according to its provided description, is “a powerful and touching novel of America’s ghosts and a beautiful portrayal of a family, not unlike many others, left bruised and twisted by the war.”
Mason’s most recent novel is “Dear Ann,” published in 2020.
October- “Y” by Sue Grafton
There had to be space in this list for a mystery and October was, of course, the obvious spot for one such book.
Sue Grafton, a Louisville-born novelist, is best known as the author of the “alphabet series,” which features private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, California. As the name would suggest, each of the books in Grafton’s series is titled in the order of the alphabet, starting with “A is for Alibi” and ending with “Y is for Yesterday.”
October’s book will be Grafton’s final entry in her alphabet series, the 2016 detective novel “Y is for Yesterday.” Grafton died in December 2017 at the age of 77.
November - “Fear and Loathing” by Hunter S. Thompson
There’s a rather big election happening this year so the book for November needed to reflect that. In the run-up to Kentucky’s 2023 gubernatorial election and other races (and continuing to read it after said elections have passed), we’ll be reading Louisville-native Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.”
Thompson’s patented form of gonzo journalism is on full display in this 1973 book which recounts the 1972 presidential campaign where President Richard Nixon was reelected to office.
Choosing this book comes along with the added benefit of me being able to read a book that’s been on my bookshelf for longer than I’d like to admit.
December - “All About Love: New Visions” by bell hooks
We’ll close the year out with bell hooks’ 2000 book “All About Love: New Visions.” This work gives readers “a non-academic, though personally profound look” into the universal and ageless question about what love is.
hooks, a native of Hopkinsville, was an author, critic, feminist and public intellectual. She published her first book, “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism” in 1981. In 2004, she returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, and in 2010 the school opened the bell hooks Institute at Berea College.
She adopted her great-grandmother’s name as her pen name in lowercase letters, she told interviewers, in order to emphasize the “substance of books, not who I am.”
hooks died Dec. 15, 2021, at the age of 69.
Happy reading to all of us in the new year!
