You're Listening to "Cowboy Carter"

Are looking for a challenging read or want a comedy of manners

Hi pals,

I hope those of you who celebrated Easter yesterday had a joyous holiday! I spent the day with friends and enjoyed the sunshine.

There are two new books out tomorrow I want to draw your attention to:

• Learning to Disagree by my friend (and What To Read If Subscriber) John Inazu (

  *Some Assembly Required
  ), a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, hits bookstores tomorrow. I’ve told John that an alternative title could be How Not to Ruin Thanksgiving Dinner — it’s a great read for what is already a contentious election cycle.

• The Murder of Mr. Ma, by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan, is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche starring academic Lao She and Judge Dee Ren Jie, who have come to London to investigate a series of murders of Chinese immigrants. I loved this book and am excited to partner with its publisher Soho Press for a giveaway. Ten lucky winners will receive a free copy. Enter here.

And, now, what to read if…

You Have Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” on Repeat

Old Town Road by Chris Molanphy

Beyoncé blessed us all with a country-infused album, “Cowboy Carter,” last Friday. Featuring cameos from Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, as well as covers of Jolene and Blackbird, it’s a fabulous album (and I’d love to hear your favorite tracks in the comments).

 When announcing the album, Queen Bey said it was “over five years in the making … It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.”  Most music watchers read that as a reference to the criticism, much of it explicitly racist, of Beyonce’s performance of her first country hit “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Awards. (Vulture has a great oral history of the performance.) The CMAs received so much negative feedback on Beyoncé’s performance “not being country,” it pulled video clips. 

This is all a long preamble to say that if “Cowboy Carter” has you thinking about race and modern country music or the Black roots of the genre, grab a copy of Chris Molanphy’s Old Town Road, a slim book about the 2019 hit of the same name. In it, Molanphy, host of the Hit Parade Podcast, examines Lil Nas X’s successful quest to make a meme song with “Old Town Road,” and the refusal of powerful country music radio stations to embrace the song even as it became a breakout hit, keeping even Taylor Swift out of the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Along the way, Molanphy documents the way Black musicians shaped the country genre, in sharp contrast to the image of country today.

Old Town Road is just 150 pages but packs more information than some books twice its size. Even, maybe especially, if you never quite got the “Old Town Road” phenomenon (I did not), this book is well worth a read for what it says about our culture. As Emily Lordi, author of The Meaning of Soul, said, “Chris Molanphy provides a (typical for him) master class in understanding 'Old Town Road' as well as the interaction between race, the charts, and country music. A fascinating, rigorous, and joyful book."

Reminder recs:  I’ve been thinking a lot about Marissa Moss’s Her Country as I read the coverage of “Cowboy Carter.” And, I adore A Cowboy to Remember by Rebekah Weatherspoon.

You’re Looking for a Challenge

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Each year, my book club reads a Booker Prize winner, an award given to “what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.” We met recently to discuss the 2022 awardee, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I was reminded that I appreciate our Booker tradition because these books, often a bit experimental, push me out of my comfort zone as a reader. If you’re looking for a complex but captivating book, add this one to your list.

The magical realist novel set during the Sri Lankan Civil War follows Maali Almeida, a recently murdered war photographer during the seven days after his death. Maali decides to ignore advice that he use this week to travel to the afterlife. Instead, he opts to try and contact his loved ones and lead them to a secret cache of photos that will expose the cruelty of the war.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida gave me The Master and Margarita vibes. They both use a bizarre, mystical approach to critique state-sponsored violence, and manage to intersperse moments of humor and levity into very somber stories. This book does require some focus to get through (unless you, unlike me, are an expert on Sri Lanka in the early ‘90s), so pick it up when you have some time to get into it.

You Want a Comedy of Manners — and Murder

A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales

Beatrice Steele is hiding a secret that would get her ostracized from her manners-obsessed village, Swampshire. Unlike the other ladies of Swampshire, Beatrice cannot sing, needlepoint or paint; she’s fixated on all things crime and secretly devours all the detective stories she can.

She decides to put aside her fascination, though, so her sister can more easily make an advantageous match with Edmund Croaksworth, an eligible bachelor who could solve their family’s money problems. But when Edmund drops dead at a ball, and Beatrice realizes her family is trapped with a murderer, she steps up to find the killer, decorum be damned.

A Most Agreeable Murder is very fun and very silly. The village busybody wears hats with live animals in them. The frogs that live in the town’s eponymous swamps glow and residents wear their slime as a moisturizer so they too can glow. Beatrice’s love interest speaks almost exclusively in rhyming couplets summarizing the town’s absurdly detailed thousand page etiquette manual.

Despite these quirks — or perhaps because of them — I found my trip to Swampshire quite delightful and have my fingers crossed for a sequel.

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Have a great day. And don’t forget to enter the giveaway for The Murder of Mr. Ma.

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