Love Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks? Readers share 69 books like Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks...

By H. Schoolcraft,

Here are 69 books that Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks fans have personally recommended if you like Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

It may be pure fiction, but Harington’s saga of the remote community of Stay More (home, of course, to the Stay Morons) is still the best, most entertaining history of the Ozarks in existence. Beneath the postmodern devices and 1970s-era subversiveness, Harington’s abiding love for the Ozarks and its people shines through. From the backcountry dialect to the intricacies of a century and a half of regional history, it remains – for my money – the best thing ever written about the Ozarks.

By Donald Harington,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader's imagination. The Ingledew saga-which follows six generations of 'Stay Morons' through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving-is the heart of Harington's jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year's ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.


Book cover of The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

If you want to understand the Ozarks, you need to understand the generations of people who leapfrogged from Appalachia to the Ozarks – and sometimes on to the Texas hill country. This underappreciated little book by a top-notch geographer uses a variety of cultural markers to explore the roots and branches of Upland Southerners. It’s a rare thing for a scholar to do, and Jordan-Bychkov did it efficiently and expertly.

By Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Upland South as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Upland South is a regional band of natural beauty that runs from Virginia and North Carolina west through Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and their bordering states. This book explores the region's character through an analysis of its traditional cultural landscape.


Book cover of Give Us a Kiss

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

Woodrell is best known for the ominous, lyrical Winter’s Bone, but I’m such a fan that my favorite Woodrell novel is always the most recent one I’ve re-read. So here’s Give Us a Kiss, his first foray into the wild and rural Ozarks of West Table and Howl County. The novel is also a hard-charging, nuanced look into the life of a mostly unsuccessful writer facing an inner struggle over just how far, if at all, he should get above his raising. It’s a concern for anyone caught between different worlds, and we are fortunate that the autobiographical sinews between author and protagonist were severed before Doyle Redmond spun out of control.

By Daniel Woodrell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Give Us a Kiss as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place." And now Doyle Redmond, thirty-five-year-old nowhere writer, has crossed the line between imagination and real live trouble. On the lam in his soon-to-be ex-wife's Volvo, he's running a family errand back in his boyhood home of West Table, Missouri -- the heart of the red-dirt Ozarks. The law wants his big brother, Smoke, on a felony warrant, and Doyle's supposed to talk him into giving up. But Smoke is hunkered down in the hills with his partner, Big Annie, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Niagra, making other plans: they're about to…


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

It is doubtful that anyone has been more associated with an American region than Vance Randolph is with the Ozarks. Ornery and darkly romantic, Randolph was always attracted to people on the margins. Few were more marginal than the Ozarkers in the early twentieth century. While we must take a lot of Randolph’s “nonfiction” with a dose of salt, The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, was the first book-length documentary take on the region and its people. It set the stage for generations of Ozarks observations to come. 

By Vance Randolph,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Ozarks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described "hack writer," he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph's first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph's interests - in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and…


Book cover of The Language of Sycamores

M. Jean Pike Author Of The Little Things

From my list on family relationships with strong mother figures.

Why am I passionate about this?

I lost my mother unexpectedly when I was a young mother myself. Oh, how I missed the gentle wisdom that had guided me my whole life! As I journeyed through the various stages of life, there was so much I wanted to ask her. She would be in her eighties now, but in my mind, she is and will always be fifty-seven. Gone now, but I still feel the influence of her kindness, wisdom, and compassion in my life and decisions. I’m drawn to stories about families and the far-reaching influence a mother has on her daughters’ lives. Though I mostly write romance, many of my novels contain older women who've had such an influence.

M.'s book list on family relationships with strong mother figures

M. Jean Pike Why did M. love this book?

This book is my favorite in Lisa Wingate’s Tending Roses series.

I could so relate to Karen Sommerfield and her struggles. Karen’s life is falling apart. The passion in her marriage has cooled, she is unable to have the children she longs for, and on the same day she receives frightening news from her doctor and is let go from a company she put her whole heart and soul into.

On impulse, she returns to her grandmother’s farm in the Ozarks to try and regroup. Right away the old tensions resurface between her and her sister, who seems to have it all together, and Karen feels returning may have been a mistake.

But then she begins to hear her grandmother’s wisdom whispering in the century-old sycamore trees and finds the courage to examine her heart and reconstruct her life.

I loved that Grandma Rose’s influence lived on in her granddaughters…

By Lisa Wingate,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Language of Sycamores as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When a woman’s whole life falls apart, she finds refuge in the home she left behind in this touching novel in the Tending Roses series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours.

Karen Sommerfield has been hiding from the big questions of her life—the emotional distance in her marriage, her inability to have children, and her bout with cancer. Getting lost in her high-powered career provides the sense of purpose she yearns for. Until the day she’s downsized out of her job and the doctor tells her the…


Book cover of With

Kevin Brockmeier Author Of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

From my list on ghosts.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.

Kevin's book list on ghosts

Kevin Brockmeier Why did Kevin love this book?

Harington was one of the great unheralded—or at least under heralded—novelists of the last fifty years, bursting with stories and whole populations of flawlessly captured human voices, and With was one of his highest achievements. It follows the fortunes of a kidnapped girl in the Arkansas Ozarks who befriends the woods’ menagerie of animals, as well as the ghost (or, as Harington would style it, the “in-habit”) of a twelve-year-old boy whose body did not die but moved away and abandoned him. Recommended if you like your ghosts warm-hearted and aching for home.

By Donald Harington,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked With as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.


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Book cover of We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

We Had Fun and Nobody Died by Amy T. Waldman,

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…

Book cover of The Ballad of Dani and Eli

S.C. Megale Author Of This Is Not a Love Scene: A Novel

From my list on with some serious ass-kicking.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them. 

S.C.'s book list on with some serious ass-kicking

S.C. Megale Why did S.C. love this book?

This author has a talent for using just a hint of magic to flirt with the reader in an otherwise rural, modern, realistic environment. Okay, okay, there may not be machine guns of ass-kicking in this novel, but there is an ass-kicking female lead who renders an Oscar-worthy performance of compelling the story forward. If you want a feisty book with a little less guts spilled (maybe…), this is my recommendation. Although I read this book long ago, I’m always drawn back into it the second I reopen to page one, like a tsunami of nostalgia wrapped in a sheet of music. Maybe on a pillow of bear fur. (Seriously, just read it).

By Nicholas Bruner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Ballad of Dani and Eli as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Dani’s met two new friends this summer: bad boy Eli, and a big black bear. She doesn’t know which one is more dangerous….

Dani Moser is a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of being a blues guitarist and singer like her hero, Janis Joplin. When her dad takes Dani and her annoying little brother to his hometown for the summer—a tiny little town in the Arkansas Ozarks—she thinks she’s in for the most boring summer of her life.


She didn’t expect she would meet a small-town bad boy named Eli, and join his bluegrass band. She didn’t expect she’d get in…


Book cover of Grave Sight

Cat Gilbert Author Of Brain Storm

From my list on thrillers and mysteries with psychic twists.

Why am I passionate about this?

My grandmother had what we in the South call the sight. I have it as well—that sense of foreboding. Of knowing what will happen next. Some call it a premonition, others Deja vu. Whatever you call it, I think it’s something we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. Empathy, telepathy, telekinesis…the list is endless. There’s no proof that psychic abilities exist, but there’s no proof that they don’t, either. I find the concept fascinating, so when I started writing, it was a natural fit for me to combine my love for thrillers and mysteries with the added twist of psychic ability. I hope you love it too.

Cat's book list on thrillers and mysteries with psychic twists

Cat Gilbert Why did Cat love this book?

I have to say it—Charlaine Harris can write a good story. I read all the Stackhouse books, but it was when I found her Harper Connelly series that I was truly hooked. This book has all the elements I love: a complex female protagonist, good supporting characters, and a unique psychic ability.

Combine all that with great writing, and it doesn’t get any better. I read this book and then quickly flew through the rest of the series. This was the first book I’d read featuring a psychic twist, and discovering this new genre opened the door to my writing journey.

By Charlaine Harris,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Grave Sight as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Harper Connelly had a lucky escape when she was hit by lightning: she didn't die. But sometimes she wishes she had died, because the lightning strike left her with an unusual talent: she can find dead people - and that's not always comfortable. Everyone wants to know how she does it: it's a little like hearing a bee droning inside her head, or maybe the pop of a Geiger counter, a persistent, irregular noise that increases in strength as she gets closer. It's almost electric: a buzzing all through her body, and the fresher the corpse, the more intense the…


Book cover of Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

Nicholas Mee Author Of Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes

From my list on when contemplating the risks of nuclear technology.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always had a passion to engage with the deepest questions of existence, from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to string theory and cosmology. My desire to understand is driven purely by curiosity, and my aim in writing about these topics is to make the wonders of the universe as widely accessible as possible. But scientific knowledge and the advance of technology also has a potentially darker side. It is vital for the future of humanity that science is widely understood so that democratic informed decisions can be made to safeguard against its misuse, and this was the motivation for recommending my list of books.

Nicholas' book list on when contemplating the risks of nuclear technology

Nicholas Mee Why did Nicholas love this book?

James Mahaffey is an American physicist who worked in the nuclear industry for many years.

Atomic Accidents is his engaging account of what happens when something goes badly wrong. What I particularly like is that it is written from the perspective of someone who completely understands the science and who is also well informed by his first-hand experience of working with nuclear technology.

Although Mahaffey is clearly a supporter of nuclear research and the nuclear industry, the book presents an objective balanced picture, acknowledging the risks of nuclear technology, but placing the scale of those risks into context. The book is full of interesting stories and offers some reassurance that the nuclear industry is able to learn from the mistakes of the past.

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Book cover of Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

Secret St. Augustine by Elizabeth Randall,

A look at the wild, unknown, wacky world of overlooked symbols, emblems, sites, and events in America's oldest ancient city.

Book cover of Where the Red Fern Grows

J. C. Eyler Author Of Paths of Prophecy

From my list on leaky eyes.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always loved dark, thought-provoking tear-jerkers, the way they challenge my mind and elicit powerful emotions. Maybe it’s because I grew up in an age when men couldn’t cry or show emotions. Maybe it’s because I lived such a happy-go-lucky childhood, hiking through woods and catching lizards and turtles, that I grew curious about the darker aspects of life. It could be how I cope with having fought for two years on the front lines of combat and why I found myself in a philosopher’s classroom, studying ethics. All I know is that my heart craves powerful, dark stories that make my eyes leak.

J.'s book list on leaky eyes

J. C. Eyler Why did J. love this book?

I read it in the 5th grade, and it set the bar for the type of story I yearn to read. It’s such a heartwarming story up until it rips open the heart. It helped me through a difficult loss in my youth.

I found myself walking beside the main character and his two dogs, enduring their cold hunts and sobbing over his loss. 

By Wilson Rawls,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked Where the Red Fern Grows as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 8, 9, 10, and 11.

What is this book about?

Read the beloved classic that captures the powerful bond between man and man’s best friend. This edition also includes a special note to readers from Newbery Medal winner and Printz Honor winner Clare Vanderpool.
 
Billy has long dreamt of owning not one, but two, dogs. So when he’s finally able to save up enough money for two pups to call his own—Old Dan and Little Ann—he’s ecstatic. It doesn’t matter that times are tough; together they’ll roam the hills of the Ozarks.

Soon Billy and his hounds become the finest hunting team in the valley. Stories of their great achievements…


Book cover of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
Book cover of The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region
Book cover of Give Us a Kiss

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Interested in the Ozarks, Missouri, and Arkansas?

The Ozarks 19 books
Missouri 41 books
Arkansas 29 books