Here are 74 books that Let the Lord Sort Them fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have spent over twenty years over (fifteen in Texas) recommending crime fiction as a bookseller in a couple of prominent stores. Texas and its writers have always fascinated me. Now that I get to call myself one, I am connected more to the genre literature of my adopted state and have an insider's view as both writer and resident.
Still one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read from one of the great noir artists.
Thompson gets into the mind of Lou Ford, a psychotic killer who works as a sheriff’s deputy in a West Texas town. The book skillfully maneuvers through Ford dealing with his own crimes and the political maneuvering and blackmail plots in the town that build into an explosion.
This book showed me how turning down the volume in a story can be effective in a novel.
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. But now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again and the consequences are brutal and devastating. Tense and suspenseful, The Killer Inside Me is a brilliantly sustained masterpiece…
When I was participating on a crime fiction panel in 2022, we were all asked to recommend books, and I was struck that none of us mentioned a book by a writer of color. Since I knew there were many excellent books by writers of color, I felt this was something I needed to fix. This past summer I decided to make a concerted effort to read more books by writers of color/#OwnVoices, and looked to members of Crime Writers of Color as a starting point. Encouraged by that very exciting read, I went to Bouchercon in Minneapolis where the association Crime Writers of Color was actively promoting the works of their members.
Edgar Award-winner Bluebird, Bluebird, is the first in the Jay Porter Series. Black Texas Ranger, Jay Porter, tried to escape East Texas and become a lawyer, but his home and people clawed him back. Jay is on the verge of losing his prestigious job, his reputation in tatters, when he heads to a tiny rural town to investigate the death of a visiting Black lawyer from Chicago and the seemingly separate death of a local white woman. Locke deftly reveals how the persistent stain of racism continues to poison many facets of life, while the law enforcement hierarchies and jurisdictional infighting threaten to undo Jay’s best efforts.
Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2018 2018 Edgar Award Winner for best novel
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply conflicted about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him back.
So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town…
I was born and raised in Texas, and I’ve lived here most of my life. For good or for ill, Texas looms large in the American consciousness and, since everything is bigger in Texas, so are the stereotypes. While you can definitely still find cattle ranches and oil wells in our state, modern Texas is much more complex and diverse than many people might think. While I love books that show those traditional elements of Texas (looking at you, Lonesome Dove!), I have always delighted in finding books that give me a new lens on what it means to be a Texan. I hope you’re delighted by these too.
I tend to be a language-driven reader, as delighted by an unexpected and beautiful sentence as I am by a thrilling turn of a plot. On the second page of Flores’s novel about genetic manipulation and organized crime near the Texas/Mexico border, we get this stunner: “It was a roosterless dawn, in the part of South Texas where no beast yawned.” I knew from that moment that I was in excellent hands and would follow the book wherever the author wanted to take me. Flores takes multiple genres—sci-fi, surrealism, crime, and others—and gives us an utterly original tale that defies easy summary. And it’s very funny!
Near future. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there's a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals - species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking.
But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself…
I was born and raised in Texas, and I’ve lived here most of my life. For good or for ill, Texas looms large in the American consciousness and, since everything is bigger in Texas, so are the stereotypes. While you can definitely still find cattle ranches and oil wells in our state, modern Texas is much more complex and diverse than many people might think. While I love books that show those traditional elements of Texas (looking at you, Lonesome Dove!), I have always delighted in finding books that give me a new lens on what it means to be a Texan. I hope you’re delighted by these too.
There’s a special pleasure in reading novels set in the place you’ve long lived, and there’s also a special pleasure—at least for me!—in diving into subcultures with strong and strange beliefs. Owen Egerton delivers on both in Hollow. Set in the Austin far removed from tech money and hip new restaurants, Hollowfollows Oliver Bonds, a former religious studies professor whose life unraveled after the death of his young son. Oliver finds distraction in Hollow Earth theory and the idea a whole different world lies inside the one we currently occupy. Hollowbroke my heart in the best sort of way with its exploration of grief, regret, and the lengths we go to in order to survive being human.
An NPR Best Book of the Year, Hollow is the story of a professor whose life is unended after an unspeakable tragedy.
When Oliver Bonds, a revered religious studies professor at the University of Texas, loses his toddler son and undergoes intense legal scrutiny over his involvement, grief engulfs him completely. His life as he knows it is over; Oliver loses his wife, home, and faith. Three years after his son's death, Oliver lives in a shack without electricity and frequents the soup kitchen where he used to volunteer.
It's only when befriended by Lyle, a con artist with a…
Over the past 50 years, I've been one of those “tenured radicals” the right-wing loved to bash. But before that, during the 1960s, I worked, often full-time, in the social movements that didchange America: civil rights, anti-war, feminism. I was older, so I became a “professor-activist.” As a teacher, I applied what I had learned in the movements to reconstruct ideas about which writers mattered—women as well as men, minorities as well as whites: Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Adrienne Rich as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway. Using that principle, I led a team that created a very successful collection, The Heath Anthology of American Literature.
Alice Embree’s story features growth and change. From a home-town girl in a once-sleepy college town, Austin, she becomes an early Students for a Democratic Society activist, a participant in the best—and worst—of SDS campaigns, a central worker—first typist, then writer and printer—in influential underground papers like Rat and especially TheRag. Embree also supported Latin-American progressives, especially in Chile. Most powerfully, she becomes a fierce and energetic trailblazer in the women’s liberation movement and the many activities that movement continues to open for all of us, even in deep red states like her native Texas. Important for Americans to read, especially those who cannot imagine that girl and mother next door is a Democrat, much less—gasp!—a still-active Socialist.
Voice Lessons explores the rich personal and political terrain of Alice Embree, a 1960s activist and convert to the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, bringing a woman's perspective to a transformational time in US history. This riveting memoir traces the author's roots in segregated Austin and her participation in efforts to integrate the University of Texas. It follows her antiwar activism from a vigil in front of President Lyndon Johnson's ranch in 1965 to a massive protest after the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Embree's activism brought her and the Students for a Democratic Society into conflict with…
The first biographer, Plutarch, wrote that “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." Biographies help kindle this flame by presenting a person who displayed such character and attempted such noble deeds that the reader should follow their example. The biographer narrates the events of a life well-lived and draws out examples for the reader of the virtues and vices, strengths and foibles, of the person whose life is on display. In this way, biographies help us to be better people by showing us either a model to follow or an example to avoid.
Robert Caro’s book is nothing less than a masterpiece.
I love it for the unique perspective Caro has for his subject, Johnson, which is rare among biographers. Most biographers love their subjects and want their readers to admire their subjects as well. They gloss over their faults or explain them away so the reader is left with the positive impression the biographer has. Not so with Caro.
Caro admires Lyndon Johnson as a politician but also loathes him; he respects Lyndon’s radical ability to read and manipulate other individuals and Lyndon’s pure, unadulterated pursuit of power and higher office, but he despised Lyndon for his ability to use people, a “morality often bordering on amorality.” In this way, Caro’s biography helps the reader “be as wise as serpents, yet as innocent of doves,” to quote Matthew 10:16. He explains how Johnson committed deeds that were unjust and unethical and condemns…
'The greatest biography of our era ... Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics' The Times
Robert A. Caro's legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America.
This first instalment tells of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country, revealing in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy and ambition that set LBJ apart. It charts his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut…
Political power has intrigued me since I read Macbethand Machiavelli in high school – how to acquire it, wield it, and keep it, and how it seduces and ultimately corrupts. Political bosses fascinated me – Svengalis who built empires, often through charisma, populism, and ruthlessness. I began writing about politics as a newspaper reporter, then ran press shops for lawmakers and candidates, including a presidential campaign; co-wrote three nonfiction books with senators, including a former majority leader; then turned to writing fiction, a passion since boyhood, largely under the theme “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
Brammer’s novel has resonated throughout my career, warning of almost inevitable disillusionment with a political powerhouse. Brammer had served as a top aide to Lyndon Johnson, on whom he based Arthur Fenstemaker, a star as bright as Penn Warren’s Willie Stark. The Gay Place spoke to me even more directly, focusing on minor politicos and their ambitions, frailties, and humanity. And the book drove home, through a pervading sadness, the anomie that rises from disillusionment. Brammer’s “Flea Circus” metaphor continues to amuse and bum me.
Set in Texas, The Gay Place consists of three interlocking novels, each with a different protagonist-a member of the state legislature, the state's junior senator, and the governor's press secretary. The governor himself, Arthur Fenstemaker, a master politician, infinitely canny and seductive, remains the dominant figure throughout.
Billy Lee Brammer-who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff-gives us here "the excitement of a political carnival: the sideshows, the freaks, and the ghoulish comedy atmosphere" (Saturday Review).
Originally published in 1961, The Gay Place is at once a cult classic and a major American novel.
I'm an independent historian and journalist who has spent over 25 years studying Abraham Lincoln and his family. My fascination with the Great Emancipator began when I worked first as a student volunteer and then as a park ranger at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Illinois. As I writer who has always loved history, I decided I should start writing about history. I've authored or edited eight books (seven on Lincoln and his family) as well as numerous articles. My big break came when I discovered a cache of Mary Lincoln’s missing letters, written during her time in a sanitarium in 1875, which had been missing for nearly 100 years.
George W. Bush, even today, 14 years after leaving the presidency, is a controversial president. But as with all presidents, to understand their politics and policies you have to first understand their personality and character. That’s what I like about this book: Bruni seeks to explain and understand who Bush was as a man—a man who, although the son of a president, never seemed destined to lead a nation and the world and yet ultimately faced one of the greatest crises in US history. Bruni, a former New York Timesreporter who covered Bush as presidential nominee and president, shows W.’s weaknesses and strengths, his somewhat surprising life journey of serious endeavors for an often less-than-serious man, and ultimately how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed Bush’s entire outlook and demeanor, thrusting him into an unprecedented challenge that elevated the laid-back good-time guy to a serious and dedicated leader.…
The unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. As the principal New York Times reporter assigned to cover George W. Bush's presidential campaign from its earliest stages - and then as a White House correspondent - Frank Bruni has spent as much time around Bush over the last two years as any other reporter. In Ambling Into History, Bruni paints the most thorough, balanced, eloquent and lively portrait yet of a man in many ways ill-suited to the office he sought and won, focusing on small moments that often escaped the news media's notice. From the author's initial introduction to Bush…
I’ve always liked to imagine how things might have been. In my thinking, a good historical novel is a story set inside the larger world of the time, like a nesting doll with a story inside a story. I look for accurate research, well-developed characters, a unique storyline, and dialogue that comes alive on the page. I expect the history to be a backdrop for a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. This is what I like to read and how I have written my novels set during the Civil War, Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, and the home front of World War 2.
The Time It Never Rained tells the grim battle between ranchers and drought in 1950s western Texas.
I grew up on a small Minnesota farm and remember my father’s struggle to keep the farm going, but at least he never faced a seven-year drought. A stubborn rancher who reminded me of my father, refuses to give in or ask for help.
I especially liked the secondary story of illegal immigrants, attitudes of ranchers toward the Feds tasked with arresting and deporting them, and the government programs that backfired in the end. It’s an excellent read that left me thankful for every drop of rain and blade of green grass. Its lessons of racism and kindness are pertinent to today’s world.
In the 1950s, West Texas suffered the longest drought in the memory of most men then living. By that time, Charlie Flagg, the central character of this novel, was one of a dying breed of men who wrested their living from the harsh land of West Texas. The struggle made them fiercely independent, a trait personified in Charlie’s persistence throughout the seven dry years, his refusal to accept defeat, his opposition to federal aid programs and their inevitable bureaucratic regulations, his determination to stay on the land he loves and respects even as he suffers with that land. Charlie is…
I’m just a guy, a normal guy who enjoys thinking and writing about things that can nudge humanity along towards peace. If everybody thought just a little bit about it, we’d have it.
I love this story! It’s a wonderful romp through the lives of the characters, characters who are like everyday people that we could know.
It’s at once bizarre yet relatable, imaginative yet real, and just all-around fantastic. This is a story that I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first time and one that I would read again.
This is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.
