Up on the mountain, a few leaves have turned and, if you walk real slowly around the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll catch a whiff of New Mexico’s official aroma of roasting green chile. In other words, fall is in the offing, but still officially a month away. For students, however, summer vacation has ended and they are back in the classroom, hitting the books.
In sympathy—and because cozying up with a stack of books is one of the best cool-weather activities we know—SFR presents its annual back-to-school reading list for grown-ups, in which we recommend a handful of titles across genres from local or local-adjacent authors.
In the 2024 edition, you’ll find an eclectic collection of detective stories, spiritual memoirs and a graphic novel based on a suppressed opera from the 1940s, along with two books that speak to one of the most important issues of our time: the loss of abortion rights. Get ready to turn some pages.
FICTION
The Indians Won
First published in 1970; republished by University of New Mexico Press in March 2024
Earlier this year, the University of New Mexico Press brought a 54-year-old book back into print after several decades of author Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won only being available to readers through hours of secondhand bookstore-browsing or sheer luck.
While Cruz Smith is typically known for his work in crime fiction, this speculative historical fiction novel (one of his earliest published works) draws from his Pueblo roots and reimagines America’s past (and present, as long as you pretend it’s still 1970) based on one question: What if Indigenous people had defeated the settlers?
The book opens at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, and from there postulates a world in which Native tribes across the nation meet and band together as a show of solidarity against colonization in the face of the United States army’s approach following Custer’s defeat. The narrative weaves through the American Indian Wars of the 1870s with this framing, and in each chapter later jumps to 1970 to portray the result: The Indian Nation, a country of Indigenous tribes that takes up the Great Plains and Midwest regions of what we know as the United States.
The “modern-day” US, in this book, is made up of only East and West Coast states, but the Indian Nation’s fear of invasion continues, and for good reason. The US leaders are hungry to seize control of the lands the Indian Nation has been holding onto since defeating the US more than a century ago.
Both the US and the Indian Nation, however, have become nuclear powers post-World War II and are engaged in a cold war. Cruz Smith writes the story as a historian would, detailing how Indigenous Americans would build a nation based in their own communitarian traditions separate from the capitalist system of the US that surrounds its borders, while continuing to advance in technology and play its own role in international politics.
While this novel isn’t heavily committed to individual characters and their own storylines, Cruz Smith includes perspectives from familiar figures in the 1870s—from Crazy Horse to William Tecumseh Sherman—and brand-new fictionalized characters from the Indian Nation and the US that face off in a political arena that threatens the destruction of the land the Indian Nation wants most to protect. (Mo Charnot)
The Arizona Triangle: A Joe Bailen detective novel
Harper, October 2024
At the start of the year, we discovered that award-winning author Kate Christensen—whose work we’ve always loved—had moved to Taos. We talked with her about her most recent novel Welcome Home, Stranger, and learned she had encountered struggles while writing it due to its “sort of dark existential questions, and all the other parallels that it had with my own sort of thorny family.” In the midst of writing, Christensen says she took a break to write a detective novel under a pseudonym. The Arizona Triangle is that detective novel, and it’s a lot of fun.
Detective Justine Bailen, aka Jo, is almost 40 and works for an all-female detective agency in Tucson, Arizona. The book opens in the midst of a stakeout as Jo watches a middle-aged housewife named Tiffani Cortez “getting spectacularly banged by her much younger boyfriend” at the behest of her “not-born-yesterday multimillionaire soon-to-be-ex-husband.” As for the “boy toy,” Jo notes he “seemed to be genuinely enjoying his own performance.” As for her stance: She’s on Tiffani’s side. Initially, Jo may strike detective-fiction fans as reminiscent of Sue Grafton’s sarcastic Alphabet-driven detective Kinsey Millhone, and the comparison has merit. But Christensen, aka Graves, does not stay squarely planted in genre form. Jo embarks on a quest to help find her best childhood friend, from whom she’s been estranged, and who is now missing. In so doing, she also faces her own past—a thematic issue in much of Christensen’s work.
But this is also a propulsive, taut and occasionally anxiety-provoking read, with evocative Arizona desert environs. The author’s interest in the environment—the protagonist in her last novel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist grappling with climate grief—emerges here as well as she writes about the Sonoran Desert’s biodiversity, where “most of the native plants and animals exist to hurt or flat-out kill you.” She also notes the increasing wildfires in the area, and the native flora that have yet to adapt to their ferocity. “How long would it be before we soft western white people, with our air-conditioned retirement developments and strip malls, were forced out by the increasingly dire heat save, fires, and droughts, like the Hohokam before us?” Jo wonders. The Arizona Triangle may have provided Christensen with a break from her novel, but Sydney Graves brings the author’s same perspicacity and wit to this whodunit. (Julia Goldberg)
NONFICTION
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom
By Pam Houston
Torrey House Press, September 2024
In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution generally protects a person’s right to have an abortion—a protection that remained in place until Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. The intervening 49 years, five months and two days happen to correspond almost exactly to the span of Pam Houston’s own reproductive life. Houston writes about this coincidence in Without Exception, her forthcoming book examining the personal and societal implications of government control over reproductive care.
Through personal essays, legal documents, academic studies, song lyrics, poetry and even speculative fiction, Houston examines how the protection of reproductive rights—or lack thereof—has deeply affected the lives of millions in the US, as well as her own life. She reflects on the three abortions she’s had, each fraught with its own anxiety and stigma, but choices she values having been able to make. While motherhood is often spoken of as a gift, Houston’s book captures the corollary to this idea: how motherhood can shatter a person’s self-sovereignty, and how the complex grief of this transformation sends shockwaves through our lives.
The book deftly expresses the intersection of the struggle for reproductive rights with other conflicts of our time. Houston examines the issue from a climate perspective, including the ethical dilemmas of reproduction on a planet in crisis, as well as the intersection of reproductive rights and land stewardship. She also touches on how the overruling of Roe v. Wade threatens queer and transgender rights, though her language sometimes fails to include the identities of all those who can become pregnant. She acknowledges and takes responsibility for her privilege as a white, cisgender woman, for whom abortion was always accessible.
It’s refreshing to read a book that acknowledges the utter bleakness of our time, but expresses with tender thoughtfulness the courage that goes into figuring out how to exist—as artists, as activists, as citizens, as people—despite everything. (Annabella Farmer)
We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe
By Dr. Curtis Boyd, MD and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN
Disruption Books, September 2024
The US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v Wade in June 2022 upended abortion rights and reproductive health care across the United States. In New Mexico, the decision prompted a series of actions by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to safeguard reproductive health care here, which in turn led to significant increases inpeople traveling here for medical care from states in which abortion is restricted or illegal.
While the fraught landscape has become more visible, abortion providers have always faced risks, and their stories have been largely absent from the public discourse.
Dr. Curtis Boyd began providing women with abortions in Texas in 1967 and expanded to Albuquerque a few years later. He continued to provide abortions for 50 years—including in Santa Fe—in the face of every type of threat—from legal ones to death threats. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd started as a nurse in the practice and later provided their clinics’ counseling services, and the connection between Boyd and Halvorson-Boyd is one of the many remarkable parts of their story.
In a rare interview with SFR and New Mexico Political Report in 2017, Curtis Boyd talked about how his own Christianity and spiritual beliefs informed his work and also made it clear he knew the fight to help women would continue following Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016. “We have a long struggle ahead of us,” he says.
In this shared memoir, Boyd and Halvorson-Boyd tell their stories of meeting in the days before abortion and how their co-commitment to women guided decades of providing the procedure. At the risk of hyperbole, their narrative borders on revelatory in its highly intimate look at both their lives as well as the day-to-day work of offering abortion in the United States through three distinct eras of access. It also provides a rare look at patients’ experiences, who gave the authors their permission to do so. Ultimately, Boyd and Halvorson-Boyd’s unshakeable commitment makes the book vital reading for our shaky times.
“Anti-abortion harassment and violence have been an undeniable reality in our lives since the first United States clinic arson in 1975,” Halvorson-Boyd writes, noting that she and Boyd long considered various safety measures they should take. “We had to accept that there are always risks and we cannot control all of them. Abiding by our decision is an act of will guided by a basic principle of mindfulness: we give the object of our focus power in our lives. Curtis and I refuse to give anti-abortion violence that power by focusing on it.” (JG)
Grandmothers’ Wisdom: Living Portrayals from the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers
Synergetic Press, September 2024
Readers will feel an endearing energy followed by a sense of urgency within the first pages of Grandmothers’ Wisdom—the introduction of which serves as both a love letter to the Earth and a wake-up call to the ongoing impacts of global warming and the “defilement” of natural resources by human activity, nodding to the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as one example.
The book features the stories and traditions of 13 grandmothers who are revered keepers of traditional medicine and Indigenous spirituality and ceremonies, accompanied by stunning photography. The diverse voices stretch from the Amazon rainforest to the forests of central Africa and beyond. The women all form part of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, which formed in 2004 to safeguard the planet and envision a sustainable future for the next seven generations.
Grandmother Flordemayo, a Nicaragua native, details her childhood; the machismo culture within her upbringing; her visionary dreams and messages from “the holy ones;” and her move to the United States, among other topics. Her section also references New Mexico, where she eventually landed and established temples on a 40-acre piece of land in Estancia alongside her husband. Flordemayo refers to the Spanish word for Nicaragua’s national flower, the sacuanjoche, which blooms in May—the same month she was born. Her mother used the plant for medicinal purposes, serving as just one example of several sacred plants detailed within the book.
Publishers classified this over 400-page book under cultural studies. Memoir lovers will appreciate the intimate nature of the details the grandmothers share in this nonfiction work, while environmentalists are sure to love the many calls to action and more eco-friendly practices to protect Mother Earth, or as the book calls her, Grandmother Earth.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, the Pueblo of Pojoaque - Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder will host a special event entitled “We Are All Related: Unearthing the Roots of Our Shared Humanity”—a four-day celebration that will feature founding members and special guests—Oct. 24 to Oct. 27. (Evan Chandler)
Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening
Harper One, July 2024
There has never been a better time than now to start meditating: an ancient practice of sitting, focusing on the breath and “simply being.” Easier said than done? Zen master, meditation teacher and poet Henry Shukman of Santa Fe’s Mountain Cloud Zen Center offers an accessible insight into what it means to meditate in his new book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path to Awakening.
On a trip to Ecuador, Shukman had an awakening that allowed him to see how the present moment offers more than people tend to realize. He explores his personal story of how his meditation helped save his life in his 2019 book One Blade of Grass. He started to understand how our fast-paced lives prevent us from slowing down, to live in the present moment and to be more mindful.
In Original Love, Shukman constructs a guided path that can help individuals tap into what is known as “unconditional love.” A kind of love that has no limits. By building mindfulness through meditation, Shukman posits people can alleviate the hate and violence in the world:
“To discover and develop mindfulness is to learn to inhabit and occupy the present moment in ways that can certainly help greatly with stress and anxiety,” he writes. “But it can also do much more. It can awaken us to the richness of experience being granted to us at any moment and open our hearts in gratitude and awe to the incomparable gift of being alive and aware.”
POETRY
Heliotropic
By Doug Bootes
Finishing Line Press, May 2024
In an epigraph to his latest poetry chapbook, Doug Bootes (Saponi Descendant) writes that, “The natural search for light can be referred to as the ‘heliotropic effect,’ which simply means that every living system has a tendency towards light and away from darkness, or a tendency towards that which is life-giving and away from that which endangers life.” This is the principle that guides the reader through his poems, refracting that axiom of light-seeking through the prisms of nature and the human eye.
Born in Peewee Valley, Kentucky, and now living in New Mexico, where he teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Bootes has spent years traveling and working across the US. Between the Gulf Coast and the high desert, Heliotropic limns the people, places and stories he’s encountered over the course of his wanderings.
Bootes’ language is mesmerizing, enveloping his reader in an experience of interiority that is deeply rooted in the land. His poems alternate between aural and narrative privilege, sometimes sweeping the reader away on a current of language, sometimes pausing to offer flashes of autobiography and story with characteristic precision and humor. The book has a restless quality, carrying the reader from the littoral regions of the Southern US to the interstate, to the desert.
Heliotropic explores language, culture and land with a luminous impulse that draws the reader through the book much as the sun draws plants toward its light. He offers lyrical portraits of people and places, beings and times, illuminating histories and memories while examining how they distort. Across scenes grand and mundane, Bootes honors his subjects with specificity and warmth. Light and shadow play through these scenes in different guises, layering meaning with each appearance. Now, as the light begins to change between seasons, Heliotropic offers the perfect meditation. (AF)
GRAPHIC
Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis
By Dave Maass and Patrick Lay
Dark Horse Comics, January 2024
How fitting that Death Strikes writer Dave Maass (a former SFR reporter) was inspired to create his graphic novel with illustrator Patrick Lay some years after discovering a sampler CD of so-called “degenerate music” with cover art by Maus mastermind Art Spiegelman. Though Maass and Lay’s book doesn’t particularly resemble Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning anthropomorphized take on the Holocaust in its visuals, it is a spiritual successor of sorts—an eminently readable exploration of fascism that kind of Trojan Horses real-world peril into the graphic novel format.
Death Strikes is based on Der Kaiser von Atlantis, a suppressed 1943 opera by librettist Peter Kien (also a poet and visual artist) and composer Viktor Ullmann, who were at the time imprisoned in Terezín in what is today the Czech Republic.. The story takes place in the mythic city of Atlantis had it not sunk, though it has descended into a dystopian nightmare under the thumb of a power-mad and self-appointed emperor who declares all-out war: everyone against everyone.
In response, Death himself goes on strike, leading to unthinkable violence without the sweet release of death. Chaos ensues in the streets as we follow a resistance fighter, an Atlantean soldier, Death and Life, the latter of whom reads like the Emcee from Cabaret. Rounding out the cast of characters is Emperor Overall, a sequestered madman who reconciles his atrocities by assigning them calculable values. No one has seen him in years, yet they carry out his orders without question.
Death Strikes also includes contextual essays by Maass and scholar Heidy Zimmerman, from which we learn the provenance of both the graphic novel and the opera upon which it was based, plus sketches by Kien created during the opera’s conceptual stage. And though he and Ullmann reportedly went so far as to cast and rehearse their would-be opera while imprisoned, they never saw it produced in their lifetimes. In fact, it wasn’t until 1975 that Der Kaiser von Atlantis had its world premiere in Holland; it has been performed across the globe numerous times since.
If nothing else, Maass and Lay’s book does what good books do—they teach us things we never knew. Even so, Death Strikes feels shorter than it could have been. Even if it spanned volumes, certain readers would have devoured them all. Maass’ words cut to the quick while transmitting metric tons of character insight, while some of Lay’s illustrations are bone-chilling and gorgeous. Still, Death Strikes’ foundational elements of government gone awry and humankind’s endless propensity for great violence read as relevant now as they ever did. Sad, that, but compelling. (Alex De Vore)