Read with Rooted Magazine in 2024
Introducing the Rooted Book Club, our first book club pick, and a link round-up.
I love reading books and talking about books, and (if I can make a widespread generalization about Rooted subscribers), I think you probably do, too. Perhaps, like me, you keep a tally of the books you’ve read in 2023 and a list of ones you want to read in 2024. Maybe your favorite place to buy holiday gifts is also your local, independent bookstore. Are many of your New Years’ resolutions reading-related? Same.
My favorite books are the ones that I can’t stop thinking about, the ones that deepen my understanding of the world, of my home, of myself. I love novels narrated by unreliable and unlikeable characters. I love a complex female protagonist. I love probing, soul-searching memoirs. If a book makes me cry or laugh or both, I can’t put it down. As a Mississippi transplant, books about Mississippi by Mississippi authors have helped me to understand and appreciate the place I now call home. And lucky for me, this state is rife with writers and their books. Their words delight and educate and inspire me. Year after year, my Mississippi syllabus grows, and still there is so much left to read, so much more to discuss.
Why is sparsely populated Mississippi so dense with story? It’s one of the questions I think about a lot, and one that W. Ralph Eubanks explores in A Place Like Mississippi, his book about the state’s literary landscape:
“Mississippi’s history is filled with suffering that must be explained; it is a place that comes alive in its stories and inspires those stories, which flow through every bend of its winding rivers and across every piece of land within its borders. It is the beauty of the land mixed with the state’s complex history that inspires and perplexes its writers.”
One of the highlights of publishing Rooted Magazine has been getting to hear from Mississippi creators and storytellers about how their home state has shaped the way they create. C. Liegh McInnis writes: “I was taught to use my head and my hands to craft the world that I wanted to have.” For Katy Simpson Smith, growing up in Jackson affirmed her writerly ambitions: “I wouldn’t have been so bold as to pursue a career as a novelist if I hadn’t grown up in a place so wholly accepting of writers, and so rich with characters.” For so many writers, especially Southern writers, (home)place and creativity are intertwined.
For awhile, I’ve been thinking of starting a book club for Rooted subscribers. We already have a growing recommended reading list of books written by Mississippi authors (including quite a few Rooted contributors). Plus a book club seemed like a natural outgrowth of the question we ask every contributor: “Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?” Given that we are already deep into conversations about literature, place, and creativity here at Rooted Magazine, I thought, why not go even deeper?
So, in 2024 we’re launching our monthly Rooted Book Club.
The Rooted Book Club will be a celebration of Southern writers and readers (yes, we’re expanding beyond the borders of Mississippi, though Mississippians will still feature heavily). A partnership between Rooted, the Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and Friendly City Books, we’ll be reading works of fiction and nonfiction about the South and/or by an author with a deep connection to the South. Each month, I’ll announce the new book club pick and post a discussion thread. Near the end of the month, we’ll host a live Zoom conversation with the featured author. Anyone can register and receive access to the Zoom.
I hope you opt in to our online discussions and author talks (which you can attend even if you haven’t read the book). I look forward to reading and talking about works by veteran Southern novelists and memoirists, along with powerful debut authors. We’ll be diving into new releases and also checking out the backlist. Come along for the ride!
Without further ado, I get to announce our first book club pick of 2024! We’ll be reading The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning by Ellen Ann Fentress. Ellen Ann will join us to talk about her book on Monday January 22nd at 7 p.m. CST. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
What books are on your to-read list for 2024? What Southern books and authors would you love to see as part of the Rooted Book Club? Tell me in the comments below.
I consume a lot of content about Mississippi and the South, so this month I thought it would be fun to try out a link round-up. Let me know in the comments if you want to see more (or less) of this…
In the least populated county in Mississippi, getting a college degree means leaving home behind. Books by Rooted contributors Ellen Ann Fentress, Katy Simpson Smith, and Lee Durkee (along with some other superstar MS-ians, like Jesmyn Ward) are on Garden and Gun’s list of Best Books for (and about) Southerners of 2023. Belle Point Press, one of my favorite independent presses based in the South, is now offering a membership program. MS expat Kate Medley has published a book of photography with The Bitter Southerner called Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South. It includes a must-read essay by Kiese Laymon. Speaking of Kiese Laymon, he writes the foreword for this new edition of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. MS Representative Bennie Thompson signed on to a letter urging for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza - Palestine. (Please keep calling legislators urging for a permanent ceasefire.) Sadé Meeks wins the Southern Foodways Alliance’s 2023 John Egerton Prize. Michael Farris Smith has a short story in Salvation South. Tyriek White won the prestigious Center for Fiction’s 2023 First Novel Prize for his novel We Are a Haunting. A Jackson transplant created a text service to alert residents about boil water notices. Text “join” to 833-366-2498 to get free alerts or visit boilalert.org. Three synagogues in Mississippi (including my own) received bomb threats this month. Not MS-related, but certainly MS-adjacent: there is a new Substack called City Quitters that explores “the potential of creative rural regeneration.” And just when you thought the Mississippi Welfare Scandal couldn’t get any weirder, “Ghanian Gold Bar Hoax” enters the chat.
I absolutely love Rooted and can’t wait for the Book Club.
GREAT IDEA! I’M IN.