Skip the Smoke with a Good Book

You know, I read the other day that smoke from the fires has made it all the way out to Nebraska. And back in 2018, smoke from California’s Camp Fire drifted clear out to the East Coast. So instead of looking at a list of outdoorsy activities in this week’s post, I’m instead going to put together a few of my favorite Nevada-themed books and encourage you to pick a few, close the windows and settle in until the air-quality index clears up. Photo at left: Pixabay.

And we do have some really cool classics to choose from. I’ve always been partial to The Ox-Bow Incident because in the house where I grew up, the Western was king. So I knew of The Ox-Bow Incident as a Henry Fonda film long before I was aware of the book from which the movie was adapted. The film came out in 1943, just three years after the novel was published. And the novel was written by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, a Reno-ite who graduated from both Reno High School and UNR and who went on to be the first inductee into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Photo at right: Wikimedia Commons, Twentieth Century-Fox Corp.

But we can go back even further for some worthwhile Nevada reading material. For example, there’s good ol’ Mark Twain’s Roughing It from 1872. This is a fun read about Sam Clemens’ adventures in the West in the 1860s when his brother Orion was the Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and when things settle down a bit you can follow it up with a visit to Virginia City and the old Territorial Enterprise newspaper where Twain worked as a journalist.

From nearly the same time period is Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes in 1883. Above and beyond being notable as the first book published by a Native American woman, it’s also a fascinating look at the land and the people both at the time and for generations back. I’m particularly drawn to Winnemucca’s re-telling of the giant red-haired cannibals who warred with the Paiute in the time of her great-great-great grandparents. You can also enhance your reading of this book with a trip to the Capitol in Carson City to see her statue. Photo at left: Flickr, Architect of the Capitol

If Twain’s and Winnemucca’s travels whet your appetite for more of the Silver State’s back story, you could do much worse than to check out just about anything by Richard Moreno. His books include Nevada Myths and Legends, Mysteries and Legends of Nevada, Nevada Curiosities, A Short History of Reno, A Short History of Carson City and Roadside History of Nevada. Moreno was awarded the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame’s Silver Pen Award in 2007. I got a chance to meet him way back when he was publisher of Nevada Magazine and just can’t express how much I respect his work.

I’m going to wrap this up with a book that I can’t resist including here, if only because of the title. Woodsmoke, Wind and the Peregrine is a collection by Nevada poet Shaun T. Griffin, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2008. I’ll be honest, I haven’t read this one yet, but Griffin is a recipient of the Silver Pen Award, was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2014 and writes some very powerful stuff that has an intense sense of place, so Woodsmoke is on my TBR list.