LWS February Book Club: THEME: THE WILD WEST - Vote Now!!!
Details
Howdy Wineauxs!
We are embarking on a new bookish frontier - THE WILD WEST!!!
Yee-Haw!
The following seven nominees all take place in the Wild West/Gold Rush era. Let's lasso in these books and choose one to discuss and drink wine at the old saloon (aka Mise En Place). Dressing up in some cowgirl/cowboy attire is encouraged, but totally not required. Come as the outlaw you already are!
Choose your MOST WANTED book in the comments below. I've added Amazon Links for further research and uploaded the book covers in photos.
And the following nominees are...
1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry: Book Tok is going crazy over this book. "It change my life, I'll never be the same!" What!? I'm intrigued. Celebrating it's 40th anniversary, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is an epic western of the frontier, a grand novel written about the last defiant wilderness. Journey to the dusty little town of Lonesome Dove, where retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call undertake one last adventure, a perilous cattle drive to the untamed plains of Montana. Along the way, they face danger, adventure, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Richly authentic and beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a story of love, loss, and the unyielding spirit of the American West. Amazon Link
2. Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton - The Wild West meets Jurassic Park? Sonnabitch, I'm in! The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate Americas western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils, while surveilling, deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars. Amazon Link.
3. 'The Rush' by Beth Lewis - In a lawless land stricken with gold fever, the struggle for survival and fortune takes a turn towards murder in this gripping western crime novel. Gold fever has taken him. I believe he means to kill me...
Canada, 1898. The Gold Rush is on in the frozen wilderness of the Yukon. Fortunes are made as quickly as they're lost, and Dawson City has become a lawless settlement. In its midst, three women are trying to find their place on the edge of civilization. When a woman is found murdered, Kate, Martha and Ellen find their lives, fates and fortunes intertwined. But to unmask her killer, they must navigate a desperate land run by dangerous men who will do anything for a glimpse of gold... Amazon Link.
4. Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West by Tom Clavin - (non-fiction) I've had this on my TBR forever. Turns out my ancestors passed through this town and wrote about it in their diaries. Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Amazon Link.
5. Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - (yes, that's two hunters!) Interview with an Indigenous vampire is what one critic called this book, a chilling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones. Amazon Link
6. God's Country by Percival Everett - From the author of "James" our December 2024 LWS read, One of the earliest works anchoring Percival Everett’s illustrious career, God’s Country is by turns funny, shocking, and devastating. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. Unfortunately, he’s a coward. When he sees a band of “Injun impersonators” pillaging his home, he has “half a mind to ride down that hill and say somethin’, but it was just half a mind after all.” It’s 1871, and he’s lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder enlists the help of the best tracker in the West: a Black man named Bubba. Amazon Link.
7. How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang - Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, this electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story. Amazon Link.