I love this blog so much. Do you have anything to go with Georgia O'Keeffe's Deer's Skull with Pedernal or March Avery's Condors?
Thank you <3 And I love these! My first thought was Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. I liked its calm, pensive atmosphere, and the vivid descriptions, particularly in all the passages about Father Latour travelling across his immense, sandy diocese on his mule. Someone on goodreads commented that this book made them feel “like I have just returned from a New Mexico all gold and orange and green and baking in stark sunlight as I ride my mule towards shelter behind cool cloister walls”.
In a very different spirit: Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. This one is pretty horrifying. Don’t read it during a heat wave...
Nothing soft here.
This world of spikes and crags was as alien to them as if they’d suddenly awakened on Mars. They had seen cowboys cut open cacti to find water in the movies, but they didn’t know what cactus among the many before them might hold some hope. [...] Thousands of travelers went into the desert, and piles of human bones revealed where many of them fell. One writer [...] tells of a pair of old bullet casings found out there. They were jammed together, and when pried apart, an aged piece of paper curled out. On the paper, someone had written “Was it worth it?” [...]
In many ancient religious texts, fallen angels were bound and buried beneath a desert known only as Desolation. This could be the place.
I haven’t read it yet, but Ki Longfellow’s Walks Away Woman is on my to-read list and it might fit as well, it’s about a housewife from Arizona who walks out into the Sonoran desert to die—I was tempted by a goodreads review that says: “You can find any number of books about men matching their wits against nature. [...] I can't think of any book where a woman matches her wits against nature. And certainly not a normal American soap opera watching, pill popping, aging housewife kind of woman. It's a simple tale and it isn't. To outline it is to spoil the absolute delight in following this woman [...] as she tries to die, and then, of course, tries not to die.”
