25 Best Western Books of 2010: Colorado, Idaho, Montana & New Mexico

New West Best Books in the West 2010: Part 1

By Jenny Shank, 12-06-10

It is my pleasure to bring you the fourth annual New West Best Books in the West.  Today and tomorrow, I’ll be running down the 25 best books set in the American West or written by authors from this region in 2010.  I’ll break down my selections state by state, and list them according to their setting.  As always, I welcome audience participation.  Please add your favorite Western books of the year in the comments.  If you leave a comment by Sunday, December 12 on any of my three Best Books of 2010 posts, you’ll be entered for a chance to win a copy of one of the best books in the West this year, The Wilding by Benjamin Percy.  Today I’ll discuss the best books of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico.  Tomorrow, it’s on to Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, other western states, and books that roam throughout the region.  And on Wednesday I’ll narrow this list down and announce my picks for the top six books of 2010 set in the West.

Colorado

It was a light year for books by Colorado writers.  My favorite was Boulder-based Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains (W.W. Norton, 276 pages, $26.95), a thoughtful book that invites us to reflect on how our lives, attention spans, and brains have changed over the past heady decade of rapid adoption of constant use of the Internet.

Idaho

It was a strong year for Idaho writers. Anthony Doerr, Idaho’s current Writer-in-Residence, published a collection of six elegant stories, Memory Wall (Scribner, 243 pages, $24), in which he transports the reader from South Africa to China to Wyoming to Lithuania to Idaho in an exploration of the power and limits of human memory.  Doerr writes in precise, scientific language that makes any subject fresh, and his characters are all sympathetic, even the most flawed ones.

Brian Hart‘s surefooted debut novel Then Came The Evening, which will be released later this month in paperback (Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $15) drew praise from The New Yorker and a starred review from Publishers Weekly.  Bandy Dorner, a Vietnam veteran, wakes up after a night of drunken carousing to find his Idaho cabin destroyed by fire.  He believes his pregnant wife was inside, takes his anguish out on some policemen, and lands in prison. Hart doesn’t offer any easy solutions to the trouble the Dorners have gotten themselves into, and he writes with emotional honesty and convincing detail from all of the characters’ perspectives.

Christopher Corbett investigated an intriguing figure from Idaho’s past in The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West (Atlantic Monthly Press, 218 pages, $24). In 1872, a teenage girl who was to become known as Polly Bemis, “Idaho’s most romantic character,” was sold into slavery by her impoverished family in China.  She was shipped across the ocean to San Francisco, where a wealthy Chinese businessman purchased her for $2,500.  Polly’s owner transported her on a steamboat and a pack train to Warrens, Idaho, a rough mining outpost that featured a thriving saloon run by a gambler from Connecticut named Charlie Bemis. According to many accounts, Polly’s owner wagered her in a poker game with Bemis, and Bemis won. Even though Corbett sticks to a straightforward, just-the-facts delivery of Polly’s story, the reader can’t help but become caught up in it.  The West that Polly Bemis encountered was a rough, unwelcoming place toward people of her gender, ethnicity, and situation, yet somehow she rose above her circumstances to live a long, contented life, isolated in the Idaho wilderness.

My favorite book by an Idaho writer this year, Boise resident Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, is set in Utah, so I’ll discuss it later in my Utah section.

Montana

As usual, Montana writers produced many impressive books this year.

Kevin Canty’s accomplished novel Everything (Nan A. Talese, 282 pages, $25.95) tackles life on its elemental level, forming an understated drama out of the ordinary events of a handful of lives: birth, death, sex, youth, aging, marriage, divorce, illness and real estate.  Written in spare, concentrated prose and suffused with wry humor and frank observations, Everything follows a group of Montanans at a point when they’re battered by the regular everything that has happened in their lives and are searching for what to do next.

Berl Pickett, a ditzy Montana doctor, narrates Thomas McGuane‘s funny tenth novel Driving on the Rim, (Knopf, 306 pages, $26.95).  Berl outlines his entire off-kilter youth, detailing how the town doctor in Livingston, Montana, took an interest in him, paid for his college expenses, and convinced him to go to medical school.  But the book doesn’t proceed chronologically; instead it alights on one story after another from somewhere in Berl’s span of years, cycling around an incident for which Dr. Berl is accused of malpractice.

The girls and women in Aryn Kyle’s droll, astute story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me (Simon & Schuster, 225 pages, $24) are apt to evaluate the social situation they find themselves in and calculate their actions based on what will gain them the most power or popularity.  They might sleep with a married man or a man their father’s age, if only out of boredom.  They might break up a couple or diss a downtrodden classmate.  If they are employed, they don’t like their jobs or don’t try very hard at them.  Kyle, who grew up in Grand Junction, Colo. and studied creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, sets her surprising stories, for the most part, in generic places that might be anywhere, but happen to be the archetypal proving grounds of a girl’s heart and mind.

Rick Bass, who calls Montana’s Yaak valley home, set his new novel Nashville Chrome (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24) in the South, describing the lives of the Brown family, a real brother and two-sister trio who were country music pioneers, friends and influences of Elvis and the Beatles. Nashville Chrome is a book about longing, fame and its corruptions and its aftereffects and the tempering influence of returning to home ground.  It’s Bass’s best novel yet.

And speaking of the Yaak, Doris Knowles Pulis published an engaging memoir about the years she spent growing up there, beginning in 1949, How it Looks Going Back: Growing Up in the Montana Woods (Riverbend Publishing, 256 pages, $12). The six years Pulis spent in the Yaak were the formative ones of her childhood, and she recalls them with a clarity and good humor that makes How it Looks Going Back a pleasure to read.

New Mexico

In the moving and evocative novel The Ghost of Milagro Creek (Algonquin, 258 pages, $13.95), which tells the story of a tragic love triangle, Melanie Sumner transports readers into a part of Taos, New Mexico that is well off the tourist path. In The Ghost of Milagro Creek, Taos is a place where cultures mix and clash, where police officers don’t always follow the letter of the law when they have a personal connection to someone they’re supposed to arrest, where people observe Catholic traditions, but mix in Native American rituals and colorful New Mexican Santos.  In Taos, where every aspect of life has dual qualities, an ending that seems irredeemably sad can be found, on closer examination, to hold happiness within it.

Los Alamos-raised writer Liza Campell’s debut novel, The Dissemblers (The Permanent Press, 199 pages, $28) is an elegantly crafted, introspective novel that tells the story of a young painter named Ivy Wilkes who moves to Santa Fe to work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.  O’Keeffe is Ivy’s artistic idol, and Ivy becomes frustrated that her own paintings can’t compare to O’Keeffe’s.  When a friend suggests she try copying O’Keeffe’s work for profit, Ivy puts aside her moral qualms and plunges into the world of art forgery.  (You can catch Liza Campbell at the Boulder Book Store on Wednesday, December 8 at 7:30 p.m.)

Tomorrow I’ll continue this list of the top 25 books set in the West of 2010 with a look at the best books from Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and other western states.

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