Read Your Way Around Denver

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

When I was 13 and visiting family in Vermont, my cousin Geordie handed me a copy of a Louis L’Amour western, one of the paperbacks sold in truck stops across the country. The snow was falling slowly on leafless maples and I read all morning. I was fired by images of aspen forests and rimrock and mesas, of elk stepping into high meadows. I can’t remember the title — the man wrote more than 100 pulp novels, mostly in his bathtub — but I remember the cover: a cowboy on horseback splashing across a creek, leading a packhorse. He was wearing a six-gun and looking over his shoulder with a hard, desperate expression, and I thought, “I want to do that: I want to be desperate and hard and unbeholden, and drift the high lonesome on horseback.” Years later, when I finally got to Paonia, Colo., I bought a horse and borrowed a packhorse and rode to Wyoming. I wore a cowboy hat that made me look like a mushroom. The trip took a month. The power of fiction.

Denver has always been a transit point to the Greater Rockies and the territories farther west, and much of its literature is about the flow of people whose imaginations, like mine, were ignited by myths of unbridled freedom and tales of riches — of gold and silver, buffalo, valleys rich with grass. Of trackless mountains where a person might shed the past and get lost and remake himself. Much has also been written about the ones who were crushed or exploited by these waves of seekers: The past has a way of reasserting itself, and nobody sleeps that well in a place where avidity has collided with limited resources and the people who already lived there.

What all of these narratives share is the landscape, which in any Colorado story is the most compelling character.

What should I read before I go?

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s luminous contemporary fiction spans generations of Coloradans and is rooted in her Chicana and Indigenous heritage. Her novel, “Woman of Light,” and her short story collection, “Sabrina & Corina,” are tender, often delicate and entertaining as they ride on a current of fury over decades of oppression, racism and sexual violence. Connection to the land and to family is a constant source of strength in these narratives: Many of them are set in Denver — when you get here, you’ll recognize the locales — and the layering of suffering, past and present, is powerful.

“The Meadow” is soft-spoken but just as passionate. In a memoir that might be read as a poem, James Galvin writes with unsentimental intimacy about a homestead in the foothills northwest of the city, and crafts an ode to a particular spot as powerful as Annie Dillard’s exploration of Tinker Creek.

And then Kent Haruf’s classic novel “Plainsong” will have you pondering the lure of the open grasslands east of Denver. In a fictional small town on the plains, a high school girl gets pregnant and is booted from her home by her mother. She is taken in by two old bachelor brother ranchers who have plenty of experience with cows, but are baffled in every way by a human female. The novel feels like a necessary reminder that simple kindness may redeem us.