Santa Fe Books
I’m still thinking about my Santa Fe art retreat last month. Which got me thinking about books that take place in Santa Fe and books written by Santa Fe authors. So here are a few more books to add to your TBR pile. I’ve starred the ones I’ve read.
*The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
I mentioned this one on my live with Amy two weeks ago as the best book I read in April. It’s the true story of a Hungarian genius scientist named John von Neumann, and traces his impact on science, math and AI. Told in three parts, I listened to it on audiobook and the weirdest thing happened. When my plane landed in Albuquerque and I got in my rental car and pressed play, the audiobook narrator said, “Part 2: Albuquerque.” It was such crazy timing! And now you know where the second third of the book takes place. This is a fictionalized biography, sharply researched and masterfully written, exploring the darker sides of genius.
*American Ghost: A Family’s Extraordinary History on the Desert Frontier by Hannah Nordhaus
Recommended to me by my friend Amy from The Perks of Being a Podcast Lover, this is memoir about Hannah Nordhaus’s family’s connection to La Posada--"place of rest"-- once a grand Santa Fe mansion and now an allegedly haunted hotel. Of course, I had to go check it out!
I listened to this one on audiobook, also when I was in Santa Fe. Nordhaus’s family history is fascinating as one of the first family’s to settle in the area.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
While I haven’t read this novel, I do love Cather’s short fiction. Claire Messud writes the into in the most recently published version of this novel. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.
The landscape in Santa Fe and the surrounding area is truly a marvel. One day, we drove out Georgia O’Keeffe’s summer home in Ghost Ranch.
I was taking so many photos while I was driving, it became hazardous.
Weekends With O’Keeffe by C.S. Merrill
In 1973 Georgia O'Keeffe employed C. S. Merrill to catalog her library for her estate. Merrill, a poet who was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, was twenty-six years old and O'Keeffe was eighty-five, almost blind, but still painting. Over seven years, Merrill was called upon for secretarial assistance, cooking, and personal care for the artist. Merrill's journals reveal details of the daily life of a genius. The author describes how O'Keeffe stretched the canvas for her twenty-six-foot cloud painting and reports on O'Keeffe's favorite classical music and preferred performers. Merrill provided descriptions of nature when she and the artist went for walks; she read to O'Keeffe from her favorite books and helped keep her space in meticulous order. I am so excited to read this book!
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past--a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world... and will nurture the birth of his soul.
Have you read any of these books? Share your thoughts below. Feel free to add any other Santa Fe or New Mexico writers to this list or titles of books that take place in New Mexico!