32 books like The Great Lone Land

I loved this book enough to read it twice. In fact, felt compelled to read it twice because of Connell’s amazing portrayal of Custer and dozens of other figures, both American and Native American, both well-known and obscure.

The battle of the Little Bighorn lasted only a few hours but had an amazing impact, and Connell tells the story with remarkable originality.     

There are many reasons to love this book, and the subtitle says it all. This book is A History, A Story, And A Memory Of The Last Plains Frontier.

That last frontier was an arid, desolate corner of southwestern Saskatchewan where his American parents tried homesteading between 1914 and 1920 when Stegner was a child. The family returned to the U.S., but Stegner re-visited this land of his youth in the early 1950s and wrote one of the best accounts of the last frontier in the North American West.   

Paul Kane was a Toronto-born artist who travelled from Toronto all the way to present-day Portland, Oregon, between 1845 and 1848. As the title suggests, Paul Kane was keenly interested in the indigenous peoples of the North American West. His book, published in 1859 and re-issued in 1925 and again in 1968, provided 19th-century readers with fascinating portraits, in paint and words, of dozens of Indigenous peoples.

The book is no less compelling for contemporary readers who are interested in the loss of the world and the lives of 19th-century Indigenous nations.     

 I love doing historical research, and nothing is more exciting than examining primary sources in which you can read the words of historical figures, either written or spoken. This is one such book.

The University of Calgary scholar Barbara Belyea has produced this annotated volume of David Thompson’s daily record of his exploration of the mighty, 1,200-mile-long Columbia River, which rises in southeastern British Columbia and drains into the Pacific Ocean near present-day Astoria, Oregon.   

This is a book of poetry written by one of Winnipeg’s many Indigenous authors.

I love the poems—their economical lines and vivid imagery—but the poems also don’t shy away from some ugly truths about Winnipeg: Namely, the centuries of racism that have devastated the Indigenous people who gathered for thousands of years where the city’s two rivers meet—the Red and the Assiniboine. The same racism that contributed to the death of the poet’s brother and led the police to dismiss his disappearance for months as simply being due to drunkenness.

Vermette’s poems tackle these hard truths and challenge the reader not to look away. This book of poetry helped me see that not everything about Winnipeg is the way we’d like it to be. 

I love books that make me feel like I’m living in another time period—and this book, set in Winnipeg in 1913—does that in spades. In fact, speaking of “spades,” Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, is surely one of the inspirations for this mystery novel’s protagonist, Sam Klein, a hard-nosed detective.

The novel’s author, Allan Levine, is a historian, and the vivid details he pulls into the plot target all of our senses (including smell—Winnipeg’s streets weren’t paved in 1913, and horses were still more common than cars!). Levine also draws upon the prejudices of the era—Sam Klein isn’t accepted by the city’s elite because he’s Jewish—and he paints a compelling portrait of the city’s gritty neighborhoods and corrupt city politics. 

What I adore about this book—which Carol Shields wrote a few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries—is how it mingles the quotidian and the fanciful and the fantastic.

The quotidian takes the form of the very ordinary details in the life of the titular protagonist’s middle-aged life: The small things that Larry frets about, his ordinary conversations in Winnipeg coffee shops, his very relatable miscommunications, and even his fairly typical penis (there’s an entire chapter called “Larry’s Penis”).

Then there are the fanciful touches—for example, Larry makes garden labyrinths for a living (not a run-of-the-mill profession), and streets that don’t intersect in the real Winnipeg do intersect in the novel.

As for the fantastic, the novel ends with Larry having a vision of how his life might have gone in a happier alternative reality. 

Straight up, Dungeons and Dragons players pulled into the fantasy world they were playing the game in! Considering I was playing D&D multiple times a week when I found these books (and this book includes the first three of the series, The Sleeping Dragon, The Sword and Chain, and The Silver Crown), I was entranced! Then the author did a few things I’d never thought of. He brought in a guy in a wheelchair who entered a body of his character who could walk. He also later introduced gunpowder, and guns that used magic to fire bullets. The ideas were new and fresh to my teenage mind, and I was fascinated!

I love history—not just historical fiction but actual history books—and this book skillfully weaves together an abundance of intriguing facts and true stories from that city’s history.

Why 1912? Because in that year, Winnipeg was one of the most important cities in North America, largely because it was (and is) located in the very center of the continent, which led to it developing the biggest rail yard in the world.

As we learn from this book, luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Charles Dickens, Harry Houdini, and many more passed through this thriving city. But that changed in 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, and suddenly, goods were shipped from one ocean to another through that waterway instead of through Winnipeg. In terms of commerce, Winnipeg never fully recovered. 

I really love this study because it provides a crystal-clear example of how colonialism and dispossession have worked in Canada from the legal, cultural, political, and social angles. It also delves into the topic of the histories we, as a country, choose to remember and those we choose to forget, as well as the issue of who is forgotten in the process.