Western Book Roundup

Your Turn: Choose the Book That I’ll Review

By Jenny Shank, 3-03-10

Every week, publishers and authors send me books in the hope that I’ll review them for New West.  I read pretty fast, but I can’t get to all of the deserving books, so some of them end up in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  My daughter keeps her crayons in the same cabinet, so every time she wants to color and opens the cabinet’s door, little wafts of guilt escape.

I review a book a week for New West, and cover many more through this column and author interviews.  I try to write about books in advance of their authors’ regional appearances so people can go to the readings if they’re intrigued, and I try to discuss most books as closely as possible to their release dates so people can check them out while they’re still in book stores.  (Books are shuffled in and out of stores in just a few weeks, these days.) But some books, as intriguing as they are, take a while to make it to the top of my review pile.

I have one free slot in March for a book to review and a whole pile of interesting books languishing in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  How can I choose?  That’s where you come in.  I’ll list four books below.  Between now and March 15, leave a comment on this post with your vote for which book I should review, and I’ll review the book that receives the most votes.  These books all look good to me, so I hope to review as many of them as I can eventually—but I can only cover one of them this month. 

Choice 1: Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Meredith Hensley (High Plains Press).  Hensley writes about single women who homesteaded in the West in the early 1900s.  This book won a 2009 Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Award and was a finalist for the 2009 WILLA Award for women writing about the West.

Choice 2: How it Looks Going Back by Doris Knowles Pulis (Riverbend Publishing).  This is a memoir about growing up in the Yaak Valley in Montana, an area best known to folks who don’t live there through the writing of Rick Bass.  Pulis moved to the Yaak in 1949 with her family when she was a third grader.

Choice 3: Writers and Their Notebooks by Diana Raab (University of South Carolina Press).  This is an essay collection in which writers such as Sue Grafton and Phillip Lopate discuss the writing notebooks that they maintain.

Choice 4: Cowboys, Mountain Men & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West by Matthew P. Mayo (Globe Pequot Press).  I think the title of this one says it all.

I look forward to hearing which book everybody wants me to review first.  Whew.  My shoulders feel a little lighter already, knowing that you will help me with the decision.

• Tomorrow, March 4, the Center of the American West will celebrate the release of Anders Halverson‘s An Entirely “Synthetic” Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World (7 p.m., CU Boulder, Eaton Humanities, Room 150).  The website describes the book in this way:

“This exhaustively researched and gripping account follows the discovery and propagation of the most commonly stocked and controversial freshwater fish in the United States, the Rainbow Trout. Halverson examines the paradoxes surrounding this prolific fish and reveals a range of characters, from nineteenth-century boosters who believed rainbows could be the saviors of democracy to twenty-first-century biologists who now seek to eradicate them from waters around the globe.”

• Publishers Lunch recently compiled some informative tweets by Arsen Kashkashian, the head buyer at the Boulder Bookstore: 

“Self published books are now accounting for over 1% of our sales. The times sure have changed. Many look like bks from major houses.... We have three, four, five authors coming in almost everyday to get their bks on our shelves. We charge a fee, still they come.”

I wonder who is buying those self-published books—friends of the authors, or people who walk in and see them on the shelf?  Most places that review books don’t review self-published books, so it’s probably hard for those authors to get the word out about their books through conventional means.  Maybe purchasing shelf space at an independent bookseller is the best bang for the self-published author’s buck.

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