Do you have big reading list plans for 2023? You could start local with these local authors. Whether you’re in the mood for something immersive or a sci-fi thriller, you don’t have to look far to find something worth your time.
Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge by Ted Conover
Immersion journalist (and erstwhile Aurora Sentinel scribe, according to one interview) Ted Conover has worked at the Sing Sing prison, ridden the rails with hobos and followed coyotes across the U.S.-Mexico border for some of his previous books. For his most recent, he spent the past several years living on-and-off in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, first as a renter and eventually as a homeowner (a Denver native, he now spends the rest of his time in New York City).
Conover says he was initially spurred to spend more time in the Valley by the 2016 election, which he, along with pundits across the nation, was confident Donald Trump wouldn’t win. But this book, luckily, is more than another drive-by of rural America seeking to explain “Trump country” to everyone else. Conover never really answers his original question of why Donald Trump won, but he shows that there are as many answers for why someone would choose to live off the grid in the San Luis Valley as there are people doing it. Freedom and economic hardship, however, are two of the main ones. With some of the lowest land prices in the nation, many people are drawn to the region for the opportunity to become homeowners in one of the few places they can afford to do so.
Cheap Land Colorado details both the romantic and difficult parts of living such an existence, and discusses the lives of many of his neighbors at length, who include a gay man, one of the region’s few Black residents, antigovernment conspiracy theorists, a large homeschool family whose father is battling cancer and many others. Conover’s book only briefly touches on the events of 2020, and an entire separate book could probably be written about how the pandemic and protests for racial justice affected the valley. Some of the most interesting sections involve his reporting on how the valley became a place where people flocked to buy land, sight unseen, despite it being such an unforgiving place to live. Whether Conover’s book is proof of the American dream’s survival or its demise is up to the reader.
Season of Restorations by Thomas DeConna
Local author Thomas DeConna spent decades as an English teacher. Now retired, he’s arrived on the literary scene with his first novel, the intergenerational story Season of Restorations. While novels about different generations of a family aren’t all too uncommon, they usually focus on women. DeConna gives us the male perspective with his novel, which follows Franklin Bowman, son George and grandson Jack.
The three converge on Frank’s house in New Jersey (DeConna’s birthplace as well) to help assist him as he braces for his impending death. It’s an uncomfortable reunion at first. All three men are wrestling with their own issues and struggle to understand one another’s viewpoints or talk openly. Frank doesn’t know how to broach the subject of some of the secrets of his past, or how to connect with his son after decades of emotional repression. George is struggling to adjust both to retirement after many years as a teacher and to the recent death of his wife. Jack is struggling with a sense of direction and feels judged by his father, who is troubled by the fact that he lost both his job and a family inheritance. As the days and weeks pass, they each have their own revelations. DeConna also goes backwards in time to explore Frank’s difficult childhood and checkered past, much of which is unknown by his progeny.
DeConna’s novel is moving without being saccharine. It doesn’t glaze over the difficult parts of aging and while some side characters feel a touch one-note, he doesn’t pull any punches about the flaws of any of his protagonists and the ways they’ve hurt each other over the years. Parts of the novel will be all too familiar for those who have witnessed the decline or death of an elderly relative, or who have a strained relationship with a family member of a different generation. DeConna handles these themes with grace, making sure of a rotating third-person perspective to show each character’s different perspectives on the same situation. Season of Restorations is a poignant reminder that we never truly know everything about the people closest to us — but that it’s also never too late to turn over a new leaf.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch
Bestselling author Blake Crouch has returned with another trippy sci-fi thriller in Upgrade, his latest novel. Based in Colorado, Crouch has written a dozen novels but gained serious acclaim in 2019 with the publication of Recursion, a mind-bending sci-fi detective story about what it’s like to live with memories from more than one reality. Upgrade is his first book since then, and while it’s not quite as riveting, it doesn’t disappoint either. While some of Crouch’s previous novels explored classics of the genre such as time travel and the multiverse, Upgrade explores something a bit more close to home — the brave new frontier of human DNA editing.
The story starts in Denver as agent Logan Ramsay of the Gene Protection Agency cases a house with his partner. Due to a massive catastrophe caused by gene editing of plants (that Ramsay has a secret personal connection to), gene editing has become a federal crime and there has been a severe crackdown on scientific research — of which Ramsay is one of the enforcers. At the house, the duo don’t find any culprits but Ramsay is exposed to a virus and placed under quarantine (that part, at least, is relatable). But instead of getting sick, Ramsay starts to get better…and better. At everything. His DNA has been illegally manipulated, making him essentially superhuman. But by who? And why?
While some of the plot points in Upgrade are pretty far-fetched, many of the themes it wrestles with are all too familiar. Crouch extrapolates a future based on our current trajectory that minus some exaggerations doesn’t feel too far afield. It’s also the second blockbuster sci-fi book in two years — following the release of Kazuo Ishigurio’s Klara and the Sun in 2021 — to muse about the perils and promise of human gene enhancement. While it seems far-fetched, this is already becoming a reality thanks to CRISPR technology pioneered by scientists at Berkeley and MIT (a great nonfiction book about this is The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson). Upgrade is fiction, and a fun read at that, but its ideas are worth taking seriously.