GeoKIT 2021 (all year): North America

Welcome to the yearlong GeoKIT for North America. For this challenge, we are considering North America to include Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Some maps show Greenland also, but we are limiting it to the three countries.

Hope to put a map here.

This challenge includes both fiction and nonfiction with these places as the setting. Since there are so many choices about what to read, I am going to comment on some authors who are not white.

Please remember to include reading that you are doing with this specific challenge in mind on the wiki. Probably many of us will be doing the majority of our reading about these countries or by Canadian or American authors so please do not post all of your reading there. (I will probably post only selected Canadian and Mexican reading on the wiki.)

Unfortunately, as I was making the lists, sometimes the touchstones were working and other times not. They had to be working when I completed any list in order to have the links work,

Black authors. Of course, there are numerous black authors. Only a sample is given here, along with a few of their works.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): Their Eyes Were Watching God; Dust Tracks on a Road
Langston Hughes (1902-1967): Collected Poetry
Richard Wright (1906-1960): Native Son, Black Boy
James Baldwin (1924-1987): Go Tell It on a Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Fire Next Time

Maya Angelou (1928-2014): I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings, The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
Toni Morrison (1931-2019): The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved
Amiri Baraka (earlier LeRoi Jones) (1934-2014): Dutchman
Alice Walker (1944-): The Color Purple, In Search of our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Jacqueline Woodson (1963-): Another Brooklyn, Brown Girl Dreaming
Colson Whitehead (1969-): The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys
Roxane Gay (1974-): Bad Feminist, Difficult Women
Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975-): Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer

Touchstones were not working when I created this list.

Native American authors. Only a sample is given here, along with a few of their works.

N. Scott Momaday (1934-): House Made of Dawn (novel, 1969 winner of Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), The Way to Rainy Mountain (folklore)
Joy Harjo (1951-), Current U.S. Poet Laureate: In Mad Love and War, How We Became Human
Louise Erdrich (1954-): Love Medicine, The Beet Queen
Tommy Orange (1982-): There There about urban Native Americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writers_from_peoples_indigenous_to_the_Ame... includes authors who are Alaskan Native, American Indian, First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, as defined by the citizens of these Indigenous nations and tribes.

This is a very long alphabetical list. Although it includes more than North America, many of the authors are from North America. Each author is identified by location or tribe. Clicking on the author's name describes where the author is from.

Chicano authors: This list of authors is taken from the website "Ten Essential Authors of Chicano Literature"
https://earlybirdbooks.com/10-essential-authors-of-chicano-literature

Luis J. Rodríguez: Always Running
Michael Nava: The Little Death
Rudolfo Anaya: Bless Me, Ultima
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa: Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Mario Alberto Zambrano: Lotería (did not find the correct link)
Luís Alberto Urrea: The Hummingbird's Daughter
Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
John Francisco Rechy: The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez
Benjamin Alire Saenz: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Another website is https://hiplatina.com/chicana-writers-you-should-know/ which lists and gives brief information about 20 Chicana (women) writers.

Mexican authors: This list is taken from the website, "11 of the Best Mexican Authors to Read Right Now" https://bookriot.com/11-mexican-authors-to-read-right-now/

Carmen Boullosa: Leaving Tabasco, Before
Ana Castillo: Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me -- actually a Mexican-American; I found overlap between the two.
Rosario Castellanos: The Book of Lamentations
Laura Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate, La Malinche (did not find correct touchstone), Pierced by the Sun
Guadalupe Nettel: Natural Histories, The Body Where I Was Born
Mario Bellatin: Jacob the Mutant (experimental fiction)
Cristina Rivera-Garza: No One Will See Me Cry
Yuri Herrera: Kingdom Cons, The Transmigration of Bodies, Signs Preceding the End of the World
Daniel Saldaña París: Among Strange Victims
Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole, I'll Sell You a Dog, Quesadillas
Valeria Luiselli: The Story of My Teeth, Faces in the Crowd, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

There are other short lists of Mexican authors.
A very long list appears at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_writers

Touchstones not working when I made this list.

I was only planning to include the categories mentioned above when I decided I probably should also include experiences of Asian Americans. However, there is a big difference in that they are from Asia rather than another part of North America. When looking for Asian American literature for this challenge, a reader must be careful to find books which mostly take place in the United States. A number of works listed under Asia American authors/literature actually are set mostly in Asia, which would be part of the reading for the Asia challenge.

Here are a few which occur mainly in America.

Chinese American experience:
Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior
Lisa See: Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, On Gold Mountain which is a biography covering 100 years of her family; most of Lisa See's books are set in Asia
Amy Tan: Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter's Daughter

Descendants from India:
Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake(novel); I'm not sure but her collections of short stories: Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth might take place on both continents.

Japanese American experience:
Julie Otsuka: When the Emperor Was Devine, Buddha in the Attic

Korean American experience:
Min Jin Lee: Free Food for Millionaires; her very popular book Pachinko is set in Asia. and thus does not qualify for the North American challenge.

Although I've given a lot of "special" lists, the challenge is for any book set in North America. There are numerous books on numerous topics -- both fiction and non-fiction -- from which to select.

Thank you so much for putting these lists up!

Sacred Wilderness by Susan Power is on my list for fiction by Native Americans. (I believe her ancestry is Métis.) (touchstones not working.)

The Asian American authors that come to mind easily are Maxine Hong Kingston & Amy Tan. I'm sure there are others. And I liked A thousand beginnings and endings, a collection of myth/fantasy stories by Asian American authors edited by Ellen Oh.

Obasan by Joy Kogawa is fiction about the internement of Japanese Canadians during World War II.

Nice job, Sally! I will probably read The Plague of Doves by Louise Edrich

Looking good!

I've added a link to this thread from the wiki.

>9 spiralsheep: Thanks.

An Asian-American suggestion: Typical American by Gish Jen

I just ordered a copy of Mona in the Promised Land from Betterworld Books.

I do read an awful lot from the USA, so I'm looking forward to increasing my Canadian and Mexican reading

My first GeoKIT read was Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, an Antiguan-American author, which is a collection of her pieces for The New Yorker magazine's Talk of the Town column from 1974-83.

My GeoKIT entry for North America was a humorous cozy mystery, Dead Red Heart, which has been on my shelf since 2014.

🇺🇸 The Way You Look Tonight (by Bella Andre) - I indulged in a Friday night Romance! This about a PI who retreats to a family cottage by the lake in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. After way too many cases involving cheating spouses, he's burnt out and cynical. At the lake, he runs into a childhood friend who has grown into a very attractive woman who yearns to break out of her goody-two-shoes style of living. Though there's instant attraction, his distrust nearly torpedoes the relationship. Graphic sex, but not particularly wild or kinky as sort of advertised (within the context of the story) and, lots of repetitive phrasing throughout. The author does evoke the clear, fish lakes and the Douglas firs indigenous to the area but outside of naming the place as being in the Cascade Mountains, it could just as easily have been Oregon that she was describing. Overall, just "meh."

Pulling from my TBR box, I have Richard Wright's Black Boy and Uncle Tom's Children, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The goal will be to read at least one of these.

Ooh, and I just found The Milagro Beanfield War in the TBR box, which I started ages ago and just couldn't get into. Maybe this time I will fare better.

I've just finished J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. I had mixed feelings about it, but it's undeniably really well-written.

I've read a few set in North America so far.

Kim's Convenience by Ins Choi - Canada
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott - USA
The Price of Paradise by Susana Lopez Rubio - Cuba

I've got three to add to the list tonight (finished/read them over the weekend):

🇺🇸 Solutions and Other Problems (by Allie Brosh) - Mostly in Bend, OR but also a little bit in Colorado (USA);
🇺🇸 Preacher Book One (by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon) - Mostly in Texas; but a couple of issues just over the border in Louisiana (USA)
🇺🇸 This Wild (This Is series; by Natasha Madison) - New York City, New York (USA)

I just finished Border Songs by Jim Lynch which is about the very open border between Canada and the U.S. Set in and around Blaine, Washington, Border Songs is a wry, tongue-in-cheek look at our differences and similarities.

I recently finished Kindred by Octavia Butler, with scenes in southern California and Maryland.

>22 justchris: That was my first Butler book, and her best, I think!

I read Spell on Wheels Volume 2: Just to Get to You, by Kate Leth and Megan Levens, which is a fantasy comic set in contemporary US about three "witches", each with a specific power, on a road trip. 3.5*

I wouldn't usually count fantasy fiction but this is a road trip featuring well-known locations in the US.

I just finished the Penguin Little Black Classics edition of The Constitution of the United States, so that is my first GeoKIT entry.

>23 Tess_W: My first was Parable of the Talents, soon followed by Parable of the Sower. Definitely the wrong order to read them. I found Sower to be a bit of a let-down or anticlimax after the events in Talents. Rereading Sower alone this year for a book club made me appreciate it much more, especially when taking into account others' reactions to it, especially the violence, which I thought rather mild, especially compared to Talents.

Kindred kinda reminds me of statistics--something I avoided for years until I simply couldn't avoid it anymore, then found I loved it. Well, not all ducks know to love water (at least until they actually get wet).

I read How to Pronounce Knife, a short story collection about Lao refugees in Canada.

🇺🇸 I read Dream with Me (The O' Callaghans #1; by Kristen Proby) which is also #13 in the With Me in Seattle series. Set in Washington state, the author describes a couple of places in Seattle which really do exist (e.g. Red Mill Burger) and describes the Coast; but as for the city itself, not much.

I've had Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God on my TBR shelf for several years, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye as well. And I've been looking for Octavia Butler - I've heard that Kindred is her best work, or at least the best one to start with reading her work.

Thanks for these great suggestions and categories!

>29 threadnsong: I thought Their Eyes Were Watching God was amazing! And I am looking forward to The Bluest Eye at some point this year. I don't know that Kindred is Butler's best work, but it is certainly very different from her other writing, and very memorable. I suspect most people might say that Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are her best work--certainly they've been described as prescient, especially in recent years.

🇺🇸 In the afterword of So Cold the River (by Michael Koryta; narrated by Robert Petkoff), the author talks of how West Baden, Indiana inspired the story. Koryta worked and explored the area for a couple of years. The horror/thriller takes place in at the West Baden Hotel & Casino as well as in the surrounding countryside. MK also incorporates a bit of history from the Prohibition Era and, features a local tourist attraction, the local waters-- some bottled as "Pluto Water".

Huh. I'm reading Color of Law, and I guess it fits this category!

🇺🇸 The Good Girl (by Mary Kubica; narrated by Lindy Nettleton, Johnny Heller, Tom Taylorson and Andi Arndt). - This is a thriller set in Chicago, IL where Mia and her family live and from where Mia is kidnapped and; Northern Minnesota where the cabin in which she is held is located. The Chicago scenes were predominantly in an upper middle-class neighborhood where Mia's parents live and, two down-scale apartments-- one where Mia actually lives while the other is where her one-night stand takes place. The sections set in Minnesota are where Mia is held-- a hunter's cabin in the woods. The shifting of the seasons from late Fall into Winter are an integral part of the story.

🇺🇸 Dirty Husband (Dirty Rich #3; by Crystal Kaswell) - This is bascially a re-telling of Fifty Shades of Gray (by E. L. James) set in NYC. The author talks a bit about the night skies which, while devoid of stars because of the city lights, are a unique shade of blue. It's funny because while never thinking about it before, as soon as Kaswell mentioned it, I knew immediately what she was talking about!

>33 Tanya-dogearedcopy: I loved The Good Girl

I finished The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris, another US entry. My review can be found here in my thread for those interested.

>30 justchris: You were so right about Their Eyes were Watching God! I finished it this weekend and was just blown away by its power and story.

It is a foundational book of feminist thought, the book so often mentioned as inspiring more recent authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. And the two voices Hurston uses in it are both full of lyricism and honesty: both Hurston as narrator and the Southern speech of the African-American characters.

I had no idea what to expect from this book, nor even that it had been out of print for decades since its publication, until I read the forward and afterword. Its rediscovery was revolutionary and I am grateful my copy was a much-loved and often-read one.

I spread it over a couple of months but just finished A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Excellent, highly recommended.

>37 VivienneR: I'm listening to A Promised Land on audio. I too am taking a long time to read it as I don't commute anywhere these days. I do enjoy his voice in my ear and have great admiration for his writing.

I am not going to list all my American reads as I am trying to visit almost all 50 states in my reading this year. However, if I do read something of special interest, I will add it here. For instance, I am currently reading a book by a native Hawaiian: Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn.

I fulfilled my Canadian read with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. She is Canadian, and the book is set partly in Toronto and on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. A great deal of it also takes place in the United States.

>39 sturlington: I agree not to list all of your U.S. reading here, only one's of special note. In the suggestions in >1 sallylou61: I stated: "Please remember to include reading that you are doing with this specific challenge in mind on the wiki. Probably many of us will be doing the majority of our reading about these countries or by Canadian or American authors so please do not post all of your reading there."

I have included Algonquin Sunset by Rick Revelle here as this historical fiction story is set in the 14th century and shows how the various tribes of Eastern Indians lived with a detailed look at their culture, religion and war-making.

>36 threadnsong: Glad you enjoyed Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece as much as I did.

Your comment about this high point of American literature being out of print for so long reminds me of this conversation between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks at The New School back in 2013: https://livestream.com/thenewschool/blackfemalevoices. bell hooks talks about the importance of having control of her works so she could ensure they remained available, rather than white male executives making decisions about her back catalog. And Melissa Harris-Perry talks about her television show ultimately being at the whim of the white male executives of MSNBC. And sure enough, her show was shut down in 2016.

I read Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I decided to include it for North America because it featured Navaho mythology which makes it unique to North America.

I read Little Night / Nochecita by Mexican / USian author Yuyi Morales, which is a resplendently illustrated bilingual English / Spanish children's book about Mother Sky playing hide and seek with her daughter Little Night while they get Little Night bathed, dressed, fed, and ready to go. 4*

GeoKIT: North America (Mexico / US)

I read The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, about the Dust Bowl.

For April:

🇺🇸 How to get Lucky (by Lauren Blakely and Joe Arden) - Los Angeles, CA, USA
🇺🇸 Agent to the Stars (by John Scalzi; narrated by Wil Wheaton) - Hollywood, CA, USA
🇺🇸 The Dating Itinerary (by Brooke Williams - St. Louis, MO, USA

I read The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, by Laura Lee Gulledge, which is a semi-autobiographical exploration of depression and anxiety in comics form, aimed at young adults. I love Gulledge's art, and the stories in her three books so far have all been well-meaning. This one also includes tips on self-care. 4*

GeoKIT: North America (US)

>1 sallylou61: It seems Greenland has been specifically excluded from Europe and from North America. I've just received a book set in Greenland, so I don't know where to put it when I get round to it.

>48 Robertgreaves: In the original planning discussion it was decided to allow readers to choose the category for liminal books, so Greenland is part of Denmark and partially culturally European it also has a history of belonging to a circumpolar people the Inuit and of Polar exploration (and a geology book would place it in North America). Similarly, arctic regions in the US, Canada, Russia, etc, could all be seen as part of their continent/country or as Polar depending on the focus of the book.

>49 spiralsheep: I'd forgotten we had a Polar thread

I read Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles, 1943, which is a batshit novel about terrible people and their alternately batshit and terrible lives. Bowles appears to be trying to render the banal as interesting and the interesting as banal, which didn't work for me. But this doesn't mean I didn't enjoy reading the book. So 3.5 for fun and 2.5 for style = 3*

GeoKIT: North America and Central America (US and USians in Panama)

I read E. L. Doctorow's novel The March as part of this year's challenge. Growing up in Atlanta and with a family that spent many generations in Savannah, the history of Sherman's March to the Sea was part of my upbringing.

Doctorow did a masterful job bringing so many areas of this military campaign to the printed page, including newly freed slaves, the newly devastated plantation owners, a military doctor, and a photographer. Plus the bits of characters who come onstage for a moment and then act their part while influencing main characters' lives.

Oh, and I gave it 4****.

>52 threadnsong: I live just a few miles from the boyhood home (and museum) of Sherman, where he is a local hero. However, there have been attempts to destroy the property and have his home razed in this cancel culture. I taught with a friend who was from Sumter, SC, and when his family heard that he was teaching at "General Sherman High School" they disowned him and did not speak to him for over 20 years, until he retired.

Putting it on my WL!

For May:
🇺🇸 Forking Around (Hot Cakes #2; by Erin Nicholas) - Iowa
🇺🇸 Version Control (by Dexter Palmer) - Princeton, New Jersey

I read Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest, by A. Lee Martinez, which is a comedy fantasy novel about two teens on a road trip across Enchanted America. There are a lot of familiar jokes and one liners in this but Martinez delivers them well. 3.5*

Quote

"My name is Waechter. Neil Waechter. National Questing Bureau." He held up a badge. He didn't flash it, but allowed them a good long look at it.

"What's that?" asked Helen.

"Your tax dollars at work. We're a small agency. Not very well known. We were the ones to throw Hitler's cursed ring into the fires of Mt. Heidelstein. We were the people who harvested and planted the last seed of the dying yax imix che tree to finally end the dust bowl. We found the magic arrow that ended General Sherman's rampage before he could gather enough sacrifices to... well, perhaps I've said too much." He smiled.

GeoKIT: North America (US, sort of....)

I finished Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right which was excellent (review on my thread), a 5* read.

I read Curses! by Aaron Elkins, a cozy mystery with a solid anthropological bent set in a Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. 3*

I read Alone in the Wild by Kelley Armstrong set in Yukon Territory, Canada.

I didn't realize this was part of a series and would have been better starting at the beginning. The setting is a small hidden community in the Yukon, off the grid, and protected from detection. People there seek sanctuary for various reasons. When Detective Casey Duncan and her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, enjoy a weekend camping trip Casey found a murdered woman holding a very young baby, still alive. They go on to search for the family of the baby. I've enjoyed other books by Armstrong but this one didn't live up to expectations, probably because I jumped in at at the fifth book in the series.

I listened to The Only Good Indians (by Stephen Graham Jones; narrated by Shaun Taylor Corbett) which is primarily set on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, USA. Four Blackfeet poach a small heard of elk and are haunted by an avenging spirit until things come to a head ten years later... A bit graphic in places (TW for descriptive harm to humans, dogs, the elk); but you can feel the tension and fear.

COMPLETED The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies, most of which takes place in Canada, and which amongst a lot else gives an overview of social change in Canada in the course of the 20th century.

Completed Murder by an Aristocrat by Mignon G. Eberhart, first published in 1932. It's by a US author, set in the US.

Finished Toward the Midnight Sun by Eoin Dempsey which took place in the Yukon Territory.

Two classic US Had I But Knowns: Melora by Mignon G. Eberhart and The Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Three more for North America (USA):

🇺🇸 The Parable of the Sower (Earthseed #1; by Octavia Butler) - California, USA
🇺🇸 Wild Night (Wilder Irish #10; by Mari Carr) - Baltimore, MD USA
🇺🇸 Property of the Mountain Men (Montana Mountain Men #1; by Gemma Weir) - Montana, USA

Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again, set in Maine.

The Crystal Drop by Monica Hughes (Alberta, Canada)

At one time I worked at the provincial museum of Alberta and some time afterwards this book was recommended to me because it mentions Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site, one of the museums in the network. Naturally, I had to read it. That was in the mid-90s. I enjoyed it at that time and this summer when we began to experience some of the drought and heatwave conditions Hughes wrote about, I decided to read it again.

Published in 1993, the story is set in 2011 in Alberta where a teenage girl and her younger brother are orphaned when their mother died in childbirth. They have no other family except an uncle near the British Columbia border. Climate change has brought many changes, drought, heat, lack of services. The farm is desolate and they have been living on gophers and weeds. After burying their mother and the baby in the dust of the river bed they have no option but to set off on foot to find their uncle. One of the first places they come to is a strange and beautiful building that has been taken over by four young men from the Peigan tribe. Although threatening and scary, they help to some extent and provide some information about what turns out to be a famous museum. The pair continue their risky journey, were attacked by survivalists and spent a frightening night surrounded by hungry coyotes, among other near-death experiences. What was shocking but completely believable was that rich and poor were further apart than ever. The rich had green landscapes, unlimited clear water thanks to river damming, and were prepared to protect that vigorously from the poor who had nothing.

This YA book is important because it describes what can happen if we continue to abuse the planet. Setting the story in 2011 may have seemed like a possibility in 1993 but fortunately we've been given a grace period and Hughes' landscape is still in the future. When I read it in the 90s it seemed unlikely to happen in my lifetime but since experiencing the 2021 heat dome of western Canada it was more believable and I enjoyed it even more. Highly recommended.

I have finished Edith Wharton's Summer and loved every word of it.

I read The Pioneers by David McCullough. This was a super history of the Northwest Territory, specifically the Ohio River Valley (Marietta). 379 pages 4 stars

I have completed The Devil Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea. This very gifted writer turns his attention to the southern border of the United States and the problems with illegal border crossings.

I read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which was a journalistic investigation into the death of Christopher McCandless from exposure in the Alaska wilderness.