5 ways to indulge your literary love on National Book Lovers Day

Sometimes Columbia feels like one great book club. Our city loves its books and authors — and well knows that a good book will always love you back.

From the Unbound Book Festival each spring to one-off author events throughout the year, homegrown texts to wide access to the literary world through the Daniel Boone Regional Library system, our collective nose stays in a book.

It seems, then, that Book Lovers Day — coming up Wednesday, Aug. 9 — would be the most natural occasion for our college town to celebrate. But where to get started when so many books await? Here are just five of many possible ways you can mark the holiday.

1. Read a page-turning mystery

A wealth of new, gripping mysteries live on bookstore and library shelves. In S.A. Cosby's "All the Sinners Bleed," gnarled roots of brutality and racism twist through a Virginia county. What starts with a school shooting becomes a fevered manhunt for a serial killer as Titus Crown, the county's first-ever Black sheriff, stares down demons past and present.

An American master, Dennis Lehane returns with "Small Mercies," a searing slice of life in 1974 Boston. The "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone" novelist follows a working-class mother as she searches for her missing daughter and runs headlong into made men, the drug trade and uncomfortable realities around race and the prospect of school integration.

"Crook Manifesto" is Colson Whitehead's second trek into the world of furniture store owner/sometimes fence Ray Carney (2021's fabulous "Harlem Shuffle"). Also staked to the '70s, "Crook Manifesto" bobs and weaves around New York City's boroughs with an idiosyncratic cast of characters but keeps Carney as its beating heart. The two-time Pulitzer winner takes the essential structure and feel of a genre novel, then does what no other writer could. Something as simple as a criminal enforcer's philosophy of wearing socks gives Whitehead's work a wholly original spirit.

2. Delve into the work of past and present Missouri poet laureates

Missouri's lineage of poet laureates is deep, their work measured in fathoms.

You could revisit the first of their kind with "Too Late to Turn Back," the new collection from inaugural poet laureate (and mid-Missouri treasure) Walter Bargen; or dig into newly-minted laureate David Harrison's catalog with a book like 2021's "The Dirt Book: Poems About Animals That Live Beneath Our Feet."

Other collections from past poets laureate include:

David Clewell, "Almost Nothing to be Scared Of"

William Trowbridge, "Call Me Fool"

Aliki Barnstone, "Dwelling"

Karen Craigo, "Passing Through Humansville"

Maryfrances Wagner, "Solving for X"

3. Spend time with other excellent 2023 reads

Eight months in, 2023 has more than proved itself a strong year in literature. Make time to crease the spine on a few gems from earlier in the year.

Catherine Lacey engages in a dangerous, alluring dance with questions of art and reality, intimacy and strangeness in "Biography of X," the story of a fictional artist as told by the partner picking up pieces of her beloved's mysterious life.

"The Deluge," from novelist Stephen Markley, is a sprawling, 880-page effort — every last one worth turning — that connects seemingly disparate characters through a force which should unite us all: the fearsome warming of our planet. Casting his narrative into the near, not-yet-realized future, Markley sounds warnings without preaching; people, and our need to live together under nature's abundant graces, always matter most on the page.

Edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, and with a foreword by the luminous Tracy K. Smith, "Minor Notes, Volume One" connects generations of Black poetics, delving into the work of George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké and others. Affectionately presenting these poems, the editors underline their importance to today's Black writers as well as the timeless relevance of their stanzas.

4. Shop local, of course

Columbia maintains a strong stock of bookshops. Head down the south side of Ninth Street and you can double your pleasure, purchasing new favorite reads from Skylark and Yellow Dog. Over at the Columbia Mall, our local Barnes and Noble keeps a keen eye on area authors. And particular gems like Adams Wall of Books, only open on Saturdays; or Columbia Books, with its 32,000 or so titles ranging from new releases to antiquarian and collectible volumes offer a unique experience — and a chance to support local business while steering clear of that one huge bookselling website ... you know the one.

5. Get your hands on this year's One Read

If you haven't yet picked it up, this year's Daniel Boone Regional Library One Read is well worth your time. Margaret Verble seamlessly blends the spiritual and material, as well as moments of tension and wholesome delight in "When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky." Her novel unspools the story of a Cherokee horse diver navigating injury, racism, ghosts and more at a 1920s zoo/amusement park in Nashville. Rich in character, and capturing unique scenes, Verble's book will make a true conversation starter when the library system mounts its One Read events in September.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 5 ways to indulge your literary love on National Book Lovers Day