February 2011
Interviewed:• Valerie Plame Wilson |
Speaking Volumes
If you are what you read, what do your choices say about who you are? Wolf Schneider asks some noteworthy New Mexicans about their favorite books. Read between the lines...
A former CIA operations officer whose covert identity was betrayed, Valerie Plame Wilson recently saw herself portrayed by Naomi Watts in the thriller Fair Game. Plame Wilson now lives in Santa Fe, and is an author and an advocate for nuclear disarmament.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, by Hampton Sides
Why?
It transported me to another time and place in history.
It was a disappointment to finish!
What quality do you most value in an author?
The ability to put feelings, places, and events into words in which readers lose themselves.
What types of books do you read?
History, biographies, fiction.
What do you avoid?
Science fiction, self-help.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read?
More Tony Hillerman and Michael McGarrity.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
My co-author on an upcoming thriller, Sarah Lovett.
What’s on your nightstand now?
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.
A Santa Fe–based college professor and author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction, Jo-Ann Mapson recently released Solomon’s Oak, about three individuals who, on a ranch one rainy winter, help each other find hope again.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
The Death of Bernadette Lefthand,
by Ron Querry.
Why?
He really understands women,
and is deeply immersed in all of
New Mexico’s overlapping cultures.
What quality do you most value
in an author?
The ability to transport a reader to
a different location with landscape
and character.
What types of books do you read?
Mainstream and literary fiction,
particularly women’s stories.
What do you avoid?
Horror.
What book are you embarrassed
not to have read?
Moby Dick. It’s so big, and they’re going to
kill the whale! I don’t want to read about
killing the whale. I like whales.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
Jim Harrison, and it would probably be a
single-malt whiskey. I’d ask him about how he brings a story together. Or, if I could bring somebody back from the dead, it would be
Truman Capote—or Caroline Knapp,
who wrote Pack of Two, an astonishing book about the relationship between a woman and a dog.
What’s on your nightstand now?
Pictures of You, by Caroline Leavitt. She has a wonderful blog called CarolineLeavittville, where she interviews different writers.
Which New Mexico author
best captures the place?
William deBuys. His take on New Mexico is a beguiling blend of fact and reverence.
Reading between the lines, what do you think all this says about you?
You can probably tell I read too much and don’t do enough housework!
Best known for the memoir Querencia, naturalist, falconer, and author Bodio has lived in Magdalena for 30 years, and most recently published Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia. His writing once prompted Tony Hillerman to comment, "Bodio writes like Pavarotti sings."
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
Fire on the Mountain, by Edward Abbey.
Why?
It’s real history morphing into myth, with something that’s passing away. It’s based on real events: White Sands being established, and a rancher who didn’t want to give up. [Abbey] makes it more mythic than it was, with this real sense of something that was going away, something that we’ve lost. It haunts me.
What quality do you most value in an author?
Passion and precision. That, and telling a story. Something that gets too postmodern and no longer tells a story is a little too rarified for me.
What types of books do you read?
Travel books, Central Asia books, biology books, and novels, from the trashiest to the best.
What do you avoid?
Anything academic that’s not science.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
Ah, that’s easy but arcane. Patrick Leigh Fermor, 96, the Great Brit travel writer
and World War II hero, the guy who walked from Holland to Istanbul in his late teens and is still writing. It would probably have to be red wine.
What’s on your nightstand now?
The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China, by Eric Enno Tamm.
Which New Mexico author best captures the place?
Tony Hillerman evoked Navajo country so simply, and he got the weather. And Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, did the Gila country like nobody else—his evocation of topping out on a horse when the snow melts in the spring in the mountains in the Gila is unparalleled, wonderful stuff. My country!
Now based in Santa Fe, the legendary Dick Stolley is currently senior editorial advisor to Time Inc., after having served as the founding managing editor of People and, for 19 years before that, as a reporter and editor at Life magazine.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather.
Why?
It's amazingly reportorial. She creates this barren territory and then vividly describes the courage and stubbornness of the priest working under the worst possible conditions.
What quality do you most value in an author?
Truth.
What types of books do you read?
Fiction and nonfiction. I just finished Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen.
I read on a Kindle.
What do you avoid?
Science books.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read?
All of Dickens. I’ve read some, but not all.
I also listened to Moby Dick when I was a marathon runner.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
Stieg Larsson, if I could bring him back from the dead.
What’s on your nightstand now?
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, by John Keegan.
Which New Mexico author best captures the place?
Angela Garcia’s new book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande. It’s both a scholarly and brutal description of drug addiction in the Española Valley and why it exists, and the terrible toll that it takes on those communities.
Reading between the lines, what do you think all this says about you?
I think my answers say that I am, first and last, a reporter!
Independent thinker Gregory Lomayesva, Santa Fe’s Hispano-Hopi artist and musician, is currently designing innovative high-voltage, vacuum-tube audio recording equipment.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
Tortilla Chronicles: Growing Up in Santa Fe, by my mom, Marie Romero Cash, of course.
Why?
Santa Fe has become Aspen, for the most part, but this book
actually shows a snapshot of real folks, and what Santa Fe
was before the $5 million home was invented. It’s real, from the heart.
What types of books do you read?
How-to books, books about how things work and why things work.
What do you avoid?
Self-help books; I have two shrinks for that.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read?
Philosophy books. I always hear people quoting them. My feeling is, stop worrying about what some dead dude said and get off your ass and do something, you hippie.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
Stephen Hawking, who knew that black holes emit radiation.
What’s on your nightstand now?
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks.
Reading between the lines, what do you think all this says about you?
I was known as an erratic, love-torn, gun-toting Native American artist who constantly used the F-word, but now, as an electronics designer, I am known for helping musicians around the world have access to high-end recording equipment that was once out of their reach.
Albuquerque-based Rudolfo Anaya, a founder of the contemporary Chicano literature movement, is best known for the novel Bless Me, Ultima and is currently finishing Randy Lopez Goes Home, about a young man who returns to the northern New Mexico village of his birth. “He’s been living with the gringos too long, and he’s afraid he’s lost his real identity,” explains Anaya.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
The Man Who Killed the Deer, by Frank Waters.
Why?
He led me into the Pueblo world. After that, I read more, I attended ceremonials, and I went hunting with Cruz Trujillo up in the Taos Mountains. Frank was very important to me, and later on my wife and I knew him and his wife, Barbara, in Taos. He had a deep sense of spirituality and kindness.
What quality do you most value in an author?
Authors who explore human nature, who take me into a place, culture, and spirituality.
What types of books do you read?
Authors who relate to their own community and landscape.
What do you avoid?
Writers who just use a plot or formula that’s one event after another, and don’t take chances with telling me who they really are, and their inner nature.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read?
So many new writers in New Mexico.
What author would you like to share coffee or a beer with?
Gloria Zamora, who just published Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural New Mexico, a memoir about growing up in the Mora Valley. It’s full of a sense of place and wonderful descriptions. I invited her to coffee with me. I made the coffee, and she brought the cream, get it?
What’s on your nightstand now?
A Gathering of Some of My New Mexico Poems, by Victor di Suvero.
Which New Mexico author best captures the place?
Frank Waters, Denise Chávez, John Nichols, Max Evans. They’re open and honest and tell it like it is, and explore the soul of the people and the place.
Reading between the lines, what do you think all this says about you?
I am very much at one with the place and the people and the history.
The curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe’s Barbara Buhler Lynes is a leading expert on the art of painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and an authority on other American modernists.
What is your favorite New Mexico book?
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, by Hampton Sides.
Why?
His portrayal of Kit Carson tells a much larger and nuanced history of the West. I’m a historian, and loved this book, as it shed new light on so many aspects of history.
What quality do you most value in an author?
The strength of the idea and the integrity of how words are used.
What types of books do you read?
All different kinds of books.
What do you avoid?
Science fiction.
What’s on your nightstand now?
Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, by Dave Hickey.
Which New Mexico author best captures the place?
Tony Hillerman, Rudolfo Anaya, and Lucy Moore, for her terrific book Into the Canyon: Seven Years in Navajo Country.
Wolf Schneider’s favorite New Mexico books include Stephen Bodio’s Querencia; Blue Rodeo, by Jo-Ann Mapson; The Sound of the Trees, by Robert Gatewood; and The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. She blogs at www.wolfschneiderusa.com.
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