The most recommended books about ranches

Annie Proulx is a genius with character, and she’s obsessed with how hard humans work to uphold their myths of identity and achievement even when the odds are stacked against them. Close Range is the best of her three very good story collections about the West. It’s famous, and rightly so, for the trail-blazing tale of cowboy queerness "Brokeback Mountain". But each story is taut with observation and image. “The Mud Below,” “The Half-Skinned Steer”—there’s more than one American classic in this book. Some Westerners aren’t fans of Proulx, but I am. She doesn’t pull her punches about what it’s really like to ranch, rodeo, fantasize about retirement, or care for family in a place with no safety net, extreme weather, and no neighbors around the corner.

McGuane sure kicked it off for me in terms of seeing a way to write new fiction. Story is not a priority in his world rather observation of characters battling the odds of surviving each day. The reader wants to be like some of the characters and run to the hills from others but the sense of humor, dirt under the fingernails of these singular people we’ll never meet, relationships we’ll never be in, and locations such as Livingston, Montana or Key West, Florida we won’t spend much time in, draws me to McGuane’s page. McGuane, who wrote scripts for Missouri Breaks and Rancho Deluxe, writes like a filmmaker – the smells, the weather, the alcohol, the drugs – the reader is in the scene, the sun on your neck, the dust in the air, the sound of the ice-cold creek. McGuane is a travel agent.

In the western territories in 1870, very few authors choose a woman rancher as the heroine. But this author did. She built a strong female rancher full of personality that embodied the complexities of a real woman. I found Cheyenne very relatable. Sometimes she struggled with the balance of being tough and feeling emotion—just like I do in my technology career. I loved experiencing the danger, mayhem, and even the sweet romance right along with Cheyenne. This book has a permanent home in my library, along with the entire series. I loved it that much.

Whispering Creek Ranch, in Texas, is the kind of ranch I’d love to own. It’s filled with Thoroughbred horses, cowboys, and hope. I enjoyed how Meg Cole deals with her father’s massive empire after he unexpectedly passes away. The handsome cowboy who fights to keep the horse part of the place as he falls for his boss is my favorite character. He’s firm and dedicated to a vision she can’t see. He’s also the anchor for his siblings – one of them being a rebellious younger sister. This story is filled with grief, humor, and healing.   

This book is the perfect example of a great Western. A stern, courageous lawman, tougher than forged steel. A young sidekick by his side. A beautiful woman in town that everyone wants.

Put those elements onto the page and then throw into it a cruel, evil rancher, who’s already killed the city marshal and one of his deputies. What do you end up with? A kick-ass Western.

MacFarland Ranch has something for everyone. It’s a working cattle ranch, a breeding farm, and offers guest cabins in scenic Paradise Valley, Montana. At the lodge there are high-end cabins, though Wade’s fixer-upper would do me just fine, and plenty of options to keep guests busy all vacation. I wanted to work the cattle, wait for foals, and just sit on my porch and take in the beautiful vistas on a relaxing evening. You can really feel the love in the family-run business as each sibling has their part to do and Wade and his guest lodge is the perfect introduction to the ranch, taking the reader from guest to one of the family. I’ve got book two already and will be waiting for book 3 to arrive later this year.

This classic novel is, if you think about it, absolutely about refugees – or to be specific, economic migrants, or more specifically, and because they travel within one country (the United States), they are IDPs – Internally Displaced Persons.

So many possible labels – put simply, they are the Dispossessed. Of Mice and Men is a story, set during the American Depression, of two migrant workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who travel from job to job, sustained by their devotion to one another and by Lenny’s dream of owning a farm and looking after rabbits on it.

The book is a fierce railing against injustice and a tribute to friendship. It is also as moving now as it was when first published in 1937.

This book is a must-read for any fan of cowgirls, rodeo, or female athletes. LeCompte’s history of cowgirls whom she identifies as “America’s first successful professional women athletes” is one of excitiment equivalanet to live competition. Through the description of early rodeo when women competed with men, performed for presidents and royalty as well as for crowds in the thousands we learn of their athletic talent, their personal sacrifice, and determination to pursue their own careers. They became stars and sometimes won annual earnings that surpassed the men. This thoroughly researched history describes women in rodeo from the mid-1800s to 1992 when Charmayne James Rodman and Scamper set a new world record for earnings in a single event. This book is as exciting as any professional sport.

This book is an irresistible thriller about Grace Evans, an overworked New Yorker who rents an Airbnb on a ranch in the middle of Wyoming for some rest and relaxation and stumbles upon an intriguing rancher and townsfolk with secrets to keep.

The sexual attraction between Grace and Calvin Wells, the handsome rancher, kept me turning the pages. I never saw the shocking twist coming at the end. It made me think twice about booking a vacation rental in a remote area without cell service!

I devoured this novel in a few days, making it a good choice for a quick beach read.   

I knew just about from the first page that ‘The Buckskin,’ as they call it, is a place I’d like to go. Just reminiscing about family vacations there had me wanting more. In book one, with Lucy, we get to see the ranch from her artist’s perspective and I could picture her sitting in the corner of the stall sketching the horses and I wanted to join her. The property is so well drawn out for the reader that it is easy to wander down the snow-line paths between the cabins and the dining hall, and sneak around to the bunkhouse for a bonfire. Even in the dead of winter, the atmosphere is so warm and inviting I’ve already signed up for another visit. Thank goodness there are ten books in this series!

I highly recommend this book to every parent. It is filled with gentle, practical wisdom in the setting of a frontier family. The father takes the time to teach through everyday experience and vivid analogies. We use his analogy of the “character house” all the time in our family. The mother has her own quiet strength, which the author shows more in the following books of the series. The book is also filled with the high energy and pranks of children, and the adventures of growing up on a ranch. A lovely true story, though be warned, you will cry at the end.

Louise S. O'Connor, a fifth-generation descendant of an early settler of Texas has always loved the stories of the "old timers,” the cowboys and hands who worked the ranch where she grew up. O’Connor spent seventeen years collecting oral histories about ranch life on the Coastal Bend and compiled those stories into Cryin' for Daylight. Though published in 1989, the language of O’Connor’s isolated, rural, mostly elderly subjects rings with 19th Century authenticity.

I treasure O’Connor’s labor of love for its emphasis on the tragically neglected black cowboys. One such cowboy supplied the title by swearing, “We loved to work cattle so much, we’d just be sittin’ around cryin’ for daylight to come.”

The man who may have killed Detective Mattie Cobb’s father is found dead in his cell. A string of clues leads to deadly narcotics and a missing baby. Mattie and her K-9 partner Robo must journey into the mountains to find the infant’s killer. And Robo just became father to a litter of pups. What I love best about this series is Mattie’s relationship with Robo. To learn more about Mattie’s buried past, I recommend reading Mizushima’s books from the beginning. These characters –both human and K-9—will stay in your heart long after you’re through reading.

What a terrific book to learn about the cowboy’s way of life! All things related to the western lifestyle are described. There is detailed information from A-to-Z, plus a short poem using each letter for younger readers and listeners. Examples are chuck wagon, lariat, and rodeo. I think this book is so informative with its focus on western culture and western history.  

Sometimes it takes dust, drought, and desperation for us to realize what we’re capable of changing. Landscape has the power to alter us and for Rachel it both whittles away and fortifies. The wrath of nature is a tangible presence in her story, though we come to realize the hostile land and searing sky pale in comparison to the silent destruction wrought by the person in whom she has placed her life’s trust. Weisgarber’s ability to slow time down to the painful passing of seconds draws me in every time. 

Valdez is a humble and quiet Hispanic living in a Texas border town in the 1870s. When a hand riding with the most powerful rancher in the valley inadvertently kills a man, Valdez assumes responsibility of asking the rancher to pay a remittance to the widow. For his trouble he’s beaten almost to death. When he recovers Valdez becomes again the man he was in his youth, a US Army scout and sets out to destroy the rancher.  He kills one of the ranches thugs with a shot at 1,000 yards.  

Valdez is finally captured by the rancher’s hands. The foreman looks at Valdez’s rifle and, knowing what he’s seeing, asks, “Buffalo hunter?” Valdez responds, “No, Apache.” The foreman asks, “When?” Valdez’s response marks him as a man who has learned and earned wisdom. “Before I knew better.”

If you wonder why this book has stayed with me for so many years, read… show more.

This book delights me. It makes me laugh, it inspires me, and it makes me wish I could have met Elinore Pruitt Stewart. Even though her life certainly wasn't easy, she never lost her hope, her joy, her faith, or her sense of humor.

Stewart wrote these letters to a friend, detailing her successes and failures as a woman homesteader, and hoping to encourage other women to try forging their own lives on the frontier. Wanting to build a better life for herself and her daughter, this widow headed off into the plains of Wyoming, where she took a job keeping house for a rancher while also claiming her own homestead. Her accounts of her new life are funny, moving, and encouraging by turn.

This book contains two stories that intertwine: that of a girl who has lost her mother, and a mustang mare struggling to keep her foal safe. I like how the mare is portrayed as intelligent and brave, just as the girl is. Both living beings are important characters in the plot, which is wonderful. The prose is skillful and beautiful, and suits competent, older middle-grade readers who will be transported into the wild landscape. 

I’m pretty sure this was the first story about gay guys that I ever read. I had a book of Annie Proulx’s short stories I’d been meaning to read and stumbled across this particular one by accident. I only saw the film a long time later and that bowled me over too. The story is beautifully written, though find it so sad to read (and watch). Individuals struggling to come to terms with the way they feel is the essence of so many romances and this opened the door to all those that followed. She’s a brilliant writer.

For more than three decades, since it won the National Book Award for Fiction, this classic has been sitting unread on my shelf – out a woefully-misconstrued fear that I would find it abstruse, even “precious.”

How abysmally, embarassingly wrong I have been – and how thrilled I am to commend this elegaic, landscape-driven prose poem to everyone who loves an impeccably-constructed masterpiece, its violence transcendant, its young protagonist, John Grady Cole, stoic and enduring, its spirit of place on the Southwest frontier tipping into Mexico replete with beauty and tragedy.