Another book thread - best books with American Southwest as the setting

Parent Cafe
1

<p>Does anyone have a recommendation for a book set in the American Southwest (Arizona, Utah, Nevada, etc.)? I think I would like it to be a novel/work of fiction, but if you feel there is a really good non-fiction book, I am certainly interested. I am open to pretty much any genre: mystery, fantasy, classic, historical fiction, etc.</p>

<p>The setting doesn’t have to play a huge role, but I would like something that mentions the landscape/scenary/or even just the feel of the region.</p>

<p>Any ideas?</p>

2

<p>Any of Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries - most are set in the Four Corners region of NM and Arizona. Great writing, beautiful settings - plus, you learn a lot about the Navajo culture.</p>

3

<p>Thank you! Do you have a favorite in mind or a good one to start with?</p>

4

<p>Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. At least some of it set in Arizona, but also other parts of the west. I think Idaho and California. And one part in Mexico too.</p>

<p>Follows a engineer and his wife from the “civilized” East as they make home in various mining camps throughout the West</p>

5

<p>I was not a big fan of the first book “The Blessing Way,” but the second (“Dance Hall of the Dead”) and third (“Listening Woman”) books were very good, maybe some of the best in the series. I think “Dance Hall” won an Edgar Award for best mystery of the year.</p>

6

<p>Some of the Nevada Barr mysteries are set in the desert Southwest. There’s one set at Guadalupe Mountains National Park and one set at Carlsbad Caverns. Sorry, can’t remember the names off the top of my head. </p>

7

<p>Much of Stephen King’s “The Stand” is set in the Southwest, but that may not be what you’re looking for. I also like the Hillerman books.</p>

<p>You could also read some old Zane Grey novels.</p>

8

<p>You could join us at the CC bookclub and read Lonesome Dove. :)</p>

9

<p>For Hillerman fans—</p>

<p><a href=“The Tony Hillerman Portal | An interactive guide to the life and work of Tony Hillerman”>The Tony Hillerman Portal | An interactive guide to the life and work of Tony Hillerman;

<p>University of New Mexico Libraries (to which all of Hillerman’s papers were donated at his death) has a interactive portal. You can hear interviews with Hillerman, see maps and images of the locations, and use the Hillerman encyclopedia to look up characters and events. (BTW, my IRL boss has an entry as a Hillerman minor character…)</p>

<p>~~~~~</p>

<p>Another mystery series set in the American Southwest is the Ella Clah series by Aimee & David Thurlo. Ella Clah is Navajo Nation Police Officer and all novels are set or around Navajo lands in NM/AZ.</p>

<p>Michael McGarrity’s Kevin Kearny mystery novels are set in and around the eastern plains of NM and the Gila region.</p>

<p>James Doss has a series of supernatural mysteries featuring Charlie Moon, a Ute tribal member and reservation police office. These are set in NW New Mexico, southern Colorado and NE Arizona.</p>

<p>Sarah Andrews’s Em Hansen mysteries is about a forensic anthropologist and mostly set in the Rocky Mtn states.</p>

<p>Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr is set in the Guadalupe Mtns of west TX/SE NM.Her Ill Wind is set in Mesa Verde National Park in SW Colorado. Blind Descent is set in Carlsbad Caverns National park. The Rope is set in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.</p>

<p>The durable Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, is set in Taos, NM.</p>

<p>Edward Abbey paean to the desert Southwest is his collection of essays/musings, Desert Solitaire. Also Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang–a novel about a bunch of misfits who are trying to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. (NOTE: do NOT go the Glen Canyon Rec Area bookstore and ask if they carry Monkey Wrench–they were NOT amused.)</p>

<p>Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy is about Billy the Kid and takes place mostly in southern NM/AZ.</p>

<p>Bless Me Ultima by Rudolpho Anaya is about growing up Hispanic in a small, rural southwestern town. (Ultima is one of the most widely banned books in US, according to ALA.)</p>

<p>John Nichols comedic “New Mexico Trilogy” (First book in the series is The Milagro Beanfield War) is about the complex relationship between history, race and ethnicity, and land and water rights in the fictional Chamisaville County, New Mexico.</p>

<p>D.H. Lawrence wrote a book, Mornings in Mexico, about his experiences living in Taos and what is now called Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. Beautiful, beautful poetic writing!.</p>

<p>~~~</p>

<p>For non-fiction, try a biography of John Wesley Powell, first head of the USGS and the first American explorer to document the length of the Colorado River and extensively explore the many canyon of the Grand Canyon. I like: A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell by Donald Worster.</p>

<p>~~~</p>

<p>Oh, and then there is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, a classic SF novel set in a post-apocalyptic future Southwestern US. For a post-apocalyptic novel it is surprisingly hopeful and not all dark & violent.</p>

10

<p>J.A. Jance has two series set in AZ-Her Ali Reynolds books and the Joanna Brady series. They both star women displaced by events in their lives who end up doing detective or police work. They’re very well done. Ms. Jance has actually lived in southern AZ so she’s not just phoning in her location work. She also has a very good series set in Seattle and that main character and Joanna Brady meet up in one of them. Jance has lived in Seattle for many years. I second (or third) the Nevada Barr novels.</p>

11

<p>Along with the above recommendations, I also liked Terri Windlings adult fairy tale set in Arizona, The Wood Wife.
<a href=“The language of stones: Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife | Tor.com”>http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/07/the-language-of-stones-terry-windlings-the-wood-wife&lt;/a&gt;
Barbra Kingsolver also wrote Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven and the Bean Trees, which are set in the southwest.</p>

12

<p>Does Texas count? The Son by Philipp Meyer is excellent. It came out last year. It spans several generations; the most interesting storyline involves a white kid who was kidnapped and raised by Comanches. It is very violent, though.</p>

<p>I haven’t read it, but I know several people who loved Men To Match My Mountains. I forget who the author is. It is a page-turning nonfiction account of the founding of the American West. </p>

13

<p>The Milagro Bean field Wars </p>

14

<p>The Artist, by Peter Heller, set mostly in Santa Fe, settings include the mountainous roads and trout streams of the area. </p>

<p>Ostrich, by Michael A. Thomas, a surprisingly good Tom Robbins-style novel with a Nevada sheep farm as a central location.</p>

15

<p>Votes again here for "Angle of Repose’ by Wallace Stegner and “The Monkey Wrench Gang” by Edward Abbey. Two of my all-time favorite books. I will freely say that Seldom Seen Smith from the MWG book was one of my heroes as a teenager. Probably lucky I didn’t write a college admissions essay about him and get myself jailed instead of getting into college. :)</p>

<p>If you like Young Adult literature, I am a fan of “The Green Glass Sea” about a girl growing up in Los Alamos during WW II when the bomb was being built there. </p>

<p>A coffee-table type book with incredible photographs of what is now under the Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon dam is “The Place No One Knew” by Eliot Porter. “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey is about rafting down the stretch of river just before it was dammed, too (but I admit I like The Monkey Wrench Gang better).</p>

<p>And I liked “A River No More: The Colorado River and the West”, nonfiction about the Colorado and water issues in the west. By Philip Fradkin.</p>

16

<p>The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver.</p>

17

<p>One of my daughters favorite professors, ( who just retired this year) had been friends with Abbey.
Except when I was trying to explain how venerated he was to my mother in law, I couldn’t remember Abbeys name and said he was friends with John Muir instead!
( Muir died 100 years ago)</p>

18

<p>Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather.</p>

19

<p>Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls. It starts in Texas, but is set mostly in AZ, and paints an interesting picture of ranch life and early days in the state. One of my favorite reads of the last few years. </p>

<p>Any of Edward Abbey’s essay collections are very good, if irreverent reading. I’m less a fan of his fiction, but the fiction and Desert Solitaire, musings during his time as a ranger at Arches National Monument (before it was a park) are what made his name. </p>

<p>If interested in water use issues, Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner is a classic book from the '90s that really made me aware of what the SW is facing long term, and how water has been dealt with or not, since the area was settled. </p>

<p>The writings of Gary Paul Nabhan, dealing with the ethnobotany of the Sonoran desert are good reading. Here is a more recent book. <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Terroir-Exploring-Flavors-Borderlands/dp/0292725892/ref=sr_1_23?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406088640&sr=1-23”>http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Terroir-Exploring-Flavors-Borderlands/dp/0292725892/ref=sr_1_23?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406088640&sr=1-23&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

20

<p>Putting in more votes for lots of what’s been mentioned – Hillerman, Abbey, Cather, Nichols, McCarthy, Kingsolver. As far as I can tell, those are the books that the people in the region define themselves by.</p>

<p>A couple of grace notes: </p>

<p>For Hillerman, I really like the three novels he wrote after he recovered the rights to his original Joe Leaphorn character. Those are Skinwalkers, Coyote Waits, and Sacred Clowns. At that point in his career, he was being much more thoughtful about what he was trying to accomplish than in his first mysteries, and his writing powers had not yet begun to decline (as is painfully obvious in his subsequent books).</p>

<p>Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses takes place mainly in West Texas and the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, so maybe that’s not quite what the OP wants, but it has stunningly beautiful landscape description and a body count that is way lower than Blood Meridian. It’s still Cormac McCarthy – i.e., if you are allergic to macho b.s., then it’s probably better to avoid it – but it’s the most general-reader-friendly of his books.</p>