Catherine’s Picks
Catherine has long been a fan of literary fiction, especially when it comes to Southern authors and titles published by smaller presses. She also enjoys reading memoirs as well as non-fiction including books about gardening, nutrition, music, cooking, and beekeeping. It’s a pretty good day when she can sit on the porch swing and read to her son.
Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard
Jessica K. Whitehead
Hardcover/February 25, 2025
University Press of Kentucky
“I need a flood in my soul, to carry off all the old drift and the flimsy habits that have extended down to the water’s edge.”—Harlan Hubbard, Journals
Writer, artist, and sustainability pioneer Harlan Hubbard (1900–1988) lived a quiet, unassuming life, and yet he is thoroughly embedded in Kentucky’s historical memory. While some may know of Hubbard’s shantyboat sojourn on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers with his wife, Anna, or of Payne Hollow, their hand-built homestead, few know the full story. After four decades of transformation, Hubbard emerged in middle age as the rightful heir to the Transcendentalist ethos, ready to envision a unique existence of simplicity and wild beauty akin to that of the revered Henry David Thoreau.
In this comprehensive biography, Jessica K. Whitehead reveals why Hubbard is beloved by his fellow Kentuckians and has been an inspiration to generations of readers interested in art, adventure, and environmentalism. Driftwood delves into Hubbard’s family background, education, and relationships, and into his theories on art, writing, music, and philosophy. Using journals, letters, paintings, manuscripts, and sketches, Whitehead pieces together the distinct phases of Hubbard’s life, providing new insights into his character and legacy. By examining his perspectives on creativity and responsible living, Whitehead connects the early Hubbard, who grappled with his identity and yearned for travel, with the confident and intentional Hubbard of Payne Hollow.
Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard is a complex portrait of a person who deserves a place alongside other iconic American thinkers and artists in the nation’s broad cultural history. It offers a vivid depiction of Hubbard, the traces he left behind, and his template for sustainability in our modern ecological landscape.
Illuminating Nature
Jon Reynolds
Hardcover/September 17, 2024
Countryman Press
Jon Reynolds is a seeker. As a child, he spent countless hours searching for the source of the creek on his grandfather’s Central Kentucky farm. In adulthood, he has spent more than a decade traversing the United States in search of the perfect shot. For Reynolds, photography is a pursuit of love: for the mountains and rivers, sunrises and sunsets, the stars and the moon in the night sky. In Illuminating Nature, his mesmerizing photographs—waves crashing on Acadia’s Boulder Beach, the icy expanse of the South Dakota Badlands, a solar eclipse tracking above Arches National Park—invite the viewer to share in this admiration. Complete with the photographer’s reflections on the peace we find in nature, the importance of planning and equal power of serendipity, and his tips for getting that photo, Illuminating Nature is a testament to seeking to understand and illuminate the beauty that surrounds us all.
The Leaving Season
Kelly McMasters
Paperback/May 28, 2024
W.W. Norton & Company
“One of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. Kelly McMasters is a literary giant.”—Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
A memoir in intimate essays navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the elusive concept of home.
Kelly McMasters found herself in her midthirties living her fantasy: she’d moved with her husband, a painter, from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, where their children roamed idyllic acres in rainboots and diapers. The pastoral landscape and the bookshop they opened were restorative at first, for her and her marriage. But soon, she was quietly plotting her escape.
In The Leaving Season, McMasters chronicles the heady rush of falling in love and carving out a life in the city, the slow dissolution of her relationship in an isolated farmhouse, and the complexities of making a new home for herself and her children as a single parent. She delves into the tricky and often devastating balance between seeing and being seen; loss and longing; desire and doubt; and the paradox of leaving what you love in order to survive.
Whether considering masculinity in the countryside through the life of a freemartin calf, the vulnerability of new motherhood in the wake of a car crash, or the power of community pulsing through an independent bookshop, The Leaving Season finds in every ending a new beginning.
Night Came With Many Stars
Simon Van Booy
Paperback/October 18, 2022
David R Godine
“It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book…In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived.”
—NPR, “Books We Love”
In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol’s daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy’s spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.
“What you give in this world,” an old man tells his grandson, “will be given back to you.” Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. “Everything was moving,” observes Samuel (Carol’s grandson) in the Kentucky woods. “An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch.”
Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be—the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
Paperback/June 1, 2021
Penguin Books
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
The Alzheimer's Prevention Program: Keep Your Brain Healthy for the Rest of Your Life
Gary Small, Gigi Vorgan
Hardcover/December 17, 2011
Workman Publishing Company
Catherine’s Thoughts: This is a research-based guide offering ways to optimize brain health to help prevent or stave off Alzheimer’s. Backed by science, Small describes ways to strengthen memory through nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, & social interaction.
Want to keep Alzheimer’s at bay for years—ideally, forever? Prevention is the way, and this is the guide. Now in paperback and updated throughout, The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program is essential for everyone with a family history of Alzheimer’s, and for the 80 million baby boomers who worry whenever they forget someone’s name. It’s the book that shows how to strengthen memory and avoid everyday lapses. How to incorporate the top ten brain-protecting foods into your diet. How to cross-train your brain, exercising both the right and left hemisphere. And how to reduce stress, a risk factor for developing dementia and Alzheimer’s, through meditation and 11 other relaxation strategies.
Written by the New York Times bestselling authors of The Memory Bible, this book is an easy-to-follow regimen based on the latest comprehensive research into Alzheimer’s disease, and especially the critical connection between lifestyle and susceptibility. The paperback edition is updated with a brand-new section that answers the most compelling questions asked of Dr. Small after publication of the first edition, including: the power of exercise to offset a genetic predisposition; antibodies that can clear Alzheimer’s plaques from the brain; and promising new treatments, from drugs to deep brain stimulation.
It’s the science-based, breakthrough program that will bring mental clarity to every day and help you take control of your brain’s health.
Bearmouth
Liz Hyder
Hardcover/September 8, 2020
Norton Young Readers
Catherine’s Thoughts: This young adult fantasy debut is a suspenseful, grim thriller perfect for reading during cool, spooky fall nights. It is a coming of age story featuring Newt, who since the age of four has been imprisoned in the dark trenches of a coal mine. Along with others, Newt is subject to harsh slave labor & wretched conditions. Hyder pulls the reader into this harrowing, violent world in a unique way as the story is narrated by Newt’s phonetic spelling of the ongoings. When a new character, Devlin, befriends Newt & urges a revolt against the brutal leaders of the mine, tension escalates & challenges unfold as the longtime inhabitants meet with uncertainty & the hope of freedom.
Life in Bearmouth is one of hard labor and isolation, the sunlit world far above the mine a distant memory. Newt has lived in the mine since the age of four, and accepts everything from the harsh working conditions to the brutality of the mine’s leaders—until the mysterious Devlin arrives and dares to ask the question, “Why?” As tensions rise, Newt is soon looking at Bearmouth with a fresh perspective—challenging the system and setting in motion a change of events that could destroy their entire world.
An utterly distinctive voice, propulsive and page-turning storytelling, high stakes, heart-stopping twists, and a sense of moral purpose make Bearmouth an unforgettable and unparalleled debut.