80 Books Like Whiskey Tender

Generations of students like me learned of this classic from a classic in her own right, English teacher Betsy Tapia of St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The book is set in eastern New Mexico, outside the more studied Santa Fe and Taos, in a fictionalized version of Pastura, Anaya’s hometown. The story resonated with those of us who knew atole as a favorite dish when ill or who had seen our grandmothers or neighbors’ grandmothers sprinkle dust devils with holy water on dry, windy, spring days.

Written with insight from those like Tapia, the novel captures a place and a time that feels real to me, even if it’s fiction.

By now, McCarthy is well known for his books on the Southwest. Cities of the Plain is painfully overlooked.

I read it in college as a precocious creative writing major and fell in love because the towns mentioned (Belén, where my grandmother was born, as example) were familiar to me and yet I had no idea these nowhere places of my youth were known to anybody else in the world, to say nothing about their value to any artistic form.

Unlike All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain has zero romanticism to it: it’s a contemporary, hard-driven tale of ranching in the badlands of New Mexico. McCarthy focuses on the pumpjacks and the stench of creosote that encapsulate the southern part of the state.

There’s also a gruesomely funny passage about an Oldsmobile and dozens of jackrabbits. 

I first read Baca at a time when, for whatever reason, I hated memoirs. Me-me-oirs, a fiction professor once called them. A Place to Stand changed my mind.

At age twenty-one, Baca was an illiterate prison inmate. He emerged from lockup as a poet—and a damned good one. Born in Santa Fe, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir is, to my mind, a must-read for anybody who intends to visit The City Different: before hitting the slopes, the art galleries, and jewelry stores; before donning your best Pendleton sweater, read A Place to Stand. It’s a compelling and personal look at how life in Santa Fe is for most.

Another jealous-worthy book, this collection of essays explores the fallout from atomic testing.

It goes beyond that. 

My favorite essay in the collection is “Living Room.” The piece centers around a television gifted to the writer after the death of a high school classmate he doesn’t remember. From there, it weaves together the philosophical notion of memory with the more tangible, hard-luck details of Werther’s candies, peach sherbert, a red leather sofa.

The title of the book is spot-on, and any fan of Denis Johnson’s prose will love this collection. 

In the United States, New Mexico is a habitual contender for both poorest and most violent/dangerous.

Stan Hoig’s comprehensive examination of the conquistador expeditions into the region leads one to believe the place never had a chance. Men like Nuno Beltrán de Guzmán and Coronado worked under the guise of spreading the word of God to the New World. 

The reality is much different: the kingdom of Castile had bankrupted itself with their defeat of the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula. What Spain really needed was gold, and the kingdom was willing to do anything to stay solvent. From its inception, what we now know as New Mexico had little time for justice: justice takes time. 

For anybody planning a visit to New Mexico—and its natural beauty is, to my mind, second-to-none—Came Men on Horses provides a pivotal, historical context to its continued milieu.

At first glance, this book of short stories is about Denver gentrification, but the volume is much more – a series of studies of how Native and Mexican women remember and revisit the “lost territory” of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado when they head to the Rocky Mountain metropolis.

I love that rather than look back East or out West when seeking home, the women of Fajardo-Anstine’s work look northward and southward, to the past and to the future. I was not at all surprised to learn that Fajardo-Anstine consulted with Prof. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez for her work. Fonseca-Chávez’s Following the Manito Trail oral history project let me keep listening for similar voices.

Many books about New Mexico describe the region as if it were a place unto itself, distinct from the rest of the nation and the world.

Martínez’s novel follows Central American refugees during the 1970s and 1980s who made their way to the state as a part of the sanctuary movement in which Martínez herself participated. I love the depictions of Albuquerque apartments, which capture the sparse, yearning beauty of relationships formed across barriers of language, culture, and violence. 

A controversial classic – controversial because the book shares sacred Laguna clan stories, classic because the book shares the trauma and the ongoing recovery of indigenous lands and people victimized by World War II and the creation and testing of the atomic bomb.

For me, the book answers the question: how to continue when all appears lost? I turn to it when I need that insight.

This was a wonderful novel that gave me a sense of how cruel the Spanish occupation was in New Mexico in the 1600s. I loved how Anaya adapted Spanish folktales throughout the novel.

The Spanish treatment of indigenous people can be compared to any occupier, even in present times. The main character in the novel is the Governor of New Mexico and his difficulties governing Pueblo Indians and other indigenous tribes who reject the Spanish occupation and the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church. He is a sympathetic character who has just lost his wife and is lonely.

A group of Pueblo Indians are arrested for plotting a rebellion against the Spanish—the punishment is usually harsh: either death or enslavement. One of the conspirators is a fifteen-year-old girl named Serafina, who speaks Spanish well and is a gifted storyteller. She makes a wager with the governor to tell him a… show more.

Old Cold Cannibal is a bit of an outlier in this list, as it doesn’t fully conform to the Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett style of humor/narration or plotting. But it’s a unique book with an amazing voice. I have a soft spot for harsh 1800s white narrators whose doubling down on arrogance and (historically accurate) racism wrap around from being awful to weirdly and unsettlingly charming. Old Cold Cannibal delivers on that 100% and allows it to infuse some humor into what is otherwise a very dark and disturbing narrative that follows a journey across the pre-Civil War U.S. to find and slay a dragon. It’s a rough, but entertaining read.