72 books like Half Broke

Tory Bilski hooked me with her first line. I searched riding trips sites by the end of the paragraph. Wild Horses of the Summer Sun is a crafted odyssey. The book gifts us with Icelandic horses, foreign travel exploration, and the human (and herd) dynamic of a group of women who crave to “be Iceland.”

Tory is a writer in all that the craft implies. Her storytelling speaks to the explorer in us. She guides us around each mystical curve and through a physical (and emotional) blinding fog. She swims us across a (gulp) deep lake. We encounter “Tippi Hedren-esk” killer birds and truculent bulls. We hunger for the “gifts of the earth” meals and well-earned, decadent desserts. Ancient Nordic Sagas of trolls, ghosts and a fatal love affair spice the travelogue.

Bernice tells us a story. Her clean, quiet narrative rides us with her. Bernice was soft spoken, unpretentious, and steadily courageous. A long-time, long distance, trail boss told me he was humbled after sitting on an Adventure Riding panel with Bernice.

Bernice lived and wrote the partnership she had with her horses. Her book is a last gift to those of us who dream of horse adventure.

Horse People is an oldie but a goodie. It is a canter through Central Park... being thrown onto the hood of a taxi... his horse startled on Columbus and Ninth then trying to back through the door of the White Tower hamburger shop. It is riding lessons on Staten Island, and close-your-eyes-and-hope-for-the-best at the Break Your Neck Fox Hunt. Korda’s story is honest—an equestrian smile. My ego was salved when I read some activities on horseback scared Korda too. The quality writing takes us over each jump.

Timmons’s little treasure book is “Nuggets of truth for people who love horses... no matter what” (Bonnie Timmons quote). Hold Your Horses is a laugh at ourselves and the horses we love. We are exposed on her pages. Our goofs, gaffs, and trials are not easily explained to those who don’t kiss horse faces. Timmons’ book is a smile, a cringe, and an “I am not alone.” No arduous tome, each page of this little book is a quick elbow in our equine-loving ribs.

It’s so tough to choose just one novel from Phyllis Whitney’s voluminous stack.

She is quite arguably the queen of the gothic suspense genre. With this pick published in 1974, I am highlighting my very first read by her.

Why do I love it? It rocked my world and, to this day, draws me right into its web.

With all her books, she depicts unique settings that allow for “armchair travel”. This one is set in what was a completely exotic location to my younger self, the American Southwest.

I also learned about the element of suspense from this novel mixed together with gothic details. The mask and how it fits into this mystery is so chilling that I have never forgotten it.

Hundreds of pages into this book is a passage about the detonation of an atomic bomb which you could read and enjoy ten times and yet never catch the historical moment playing out before you. The Crossing is full of these layered, quiet chords that make you question what else you’re missing. No one makes me feel the profoundness of loss that our planet is experiencing more than McCarthy. Already we have lost landscapes and species, yes, but also individual creatures with their own wants and hurts and personalities. McCarthy’s deliberate but gorgeous writing makes you pause and dwell on that loss. In his own words, “Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.”

I read Death Comes for the Archbishop when I was fifteen. It was my first encounter with literary prose that was not assigned by a teacher, and it changed my life for the better by giving me a better understanding of myself and the human drama. I thought at the time: This is the best book I ever read. I re-read the novel in 2017 and thought: This is the best book I ever read. There’s no sex in it, but it’s a love story between two men. Cather’s novel has guided my work as a writer for more than sixty-five years.

Bill Gastner is the sort of detective you’d expect to find working the mean streets of an inner city: a rumpled overweight insomniac addicted to coffee and cigarettes. Instead his beat is the Chihuahan Desert of a fictitious county on the border between New and Old Mexico. In Heartshot, Undersheriff Gastner must solve multiple murders related to the illegal drug trade, including the loss of a fellow officer. The killer turns out to be somebody nearly as surprising and dangerous as the place where Gastner finds him. In his first book in the Posadas County series, author Havill skillfully brings to life both the rewards and challenges of life in a harsh yet beautiful place, where the people of two cultures are trying to figure out ways to live with one another.

The Sea of Grass is a short novel, standard in length for the time in which it was published (1936), close in time to other short classics such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is written in first person, and in some respects, it suggests the influence of The Great Gatsby, another short masterpiece some ten years earlier, with an observer narrator, an elegiac tone, an evocative prose style, and interesting figurative language. This novel, like many, draws upon the range war (nesters versus the cattle empire) for its premise, but it becomes a very interesting exploration of human nature and the inevitable passing of time. 

Charnas steps away from the idea of vampires as supernatural creatures. Her protagonist, Dr. Edward Weyland is a natural creature who must feed on blood to survive. He's not always presented as a "good guy" but I still found myself rooting for him as he moved through the story, trying to understand who and what he truly is. This was also one of the first novels I read where the vampire wasn't fabulously wealthy. Instead, he had to make a living as an anthropology professor. His background as a professor also made his quest for self-understanding feel authentic and relatable.