A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All in Reading The West
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story.
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (originally published in 1927) is the story of Fathers Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant as they arrive in the New Mexican dioceses in 1851 as its new, young Bishop and Vicar respectively. The novel follows their lives as they grow to love and respect the land and its people: the various indigenous groups with their many ways of life, the Mexican families who settled the land generations before, and the newly arrived Euro-American settlers.
After reading it slowly over the course of nearly six months, I realized that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is in many ways a book that defies categorization. It is so novel in its craft and so touching in its humanity. The Overstory challenges its human reader to look beyond the human and greet all the living.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a story about the complicated nature of mother-daughter relations, compounded by the unshared, unknown, unspoken backgrounds of the immigrant mothers. The novel takes the reader through all eight women’s perspectives, from late 20th century San Francisco to China many years prior.
Timothy Egan’s The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016) tells the life story of Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced Mar). Egan’s work is a biography albeit one brimming over with adventure. Meagher’s story winds through Irish poets and liberation politicians to the penal colonies of Australia, and finally to life in the United States.
So much about Ellen Webb’s coming of age in Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat (1944) is bound to the land of central Montana. Few novels place a reader so solidly in a landscape like Walker’s Winter Wheat. This novel is both inspiring and heart-breaking, as Ellen becomes a woman amidst the backdrop of WWII.
Through a melting pot of storytelling traditions that explore the uncanny, the prophetic, Shields’ The Cassandra, scrutinizes the sheer inhumanity of Hanford site’s project, the nuclear arms race, and environmental contamination, both in Washington state and across the world in Japan, that followed.
Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999) is a delightful, compelling and educational story about a fictional botany expedition into the wilds of late-nineteenth-century Yellowstone National Park. Smith inserts historically accurate details about the early years of Yellowstone National Park including cavalrymen stationed at the park and a young Native American family living quietly in its back country.
