The Ultimate Santa Fe Reading List: The Best Books About (and from) Santa Fe You’ll Love

If you’re craving a deeper connection to Santa Fe—or just looking for the perfect summer read—this episode of The Real Santa Fe podcast is your guide. Join Bunny as she dives into her favorite books about, set in, and written by authors from Santa Fe. From local legends like Anne Hillerman and Michael McGarrity to gripping historical memoirs, cultural deep-dives, and cherished childhood classics, this is your literary love letter to the City Different.

Whether you're curled up in the mountains, headed to Chama, or just daydreaming about New Mexico from afar, you’ll walk away with a stack of must-reads—and maybe even a new favorite author. Bunny shares personal stories, author connections, and a lifelong passion for books that reveal the soul of the Southwest.

📚 Featured books include:

• The Shadow of the Solstice by Anne Hillerman
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
• Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg
• Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford
  ...and many more!

Grab your iced tea, iced coffee, or a margarita, find a shady porch, and get ready to fall in love with Santa Fe—one page at a time.

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Original Music by: Kene Terry

Transcript

Bunny (00:07.833)
Today's podcast is all about one of my favorite subjects, which is books that are written in or about Santa Fe. And I'm including, so this is a broad spectrum because I'm also gonna include books that are written by Santa Fe authors that may not necessarily be set here, but I think need some recognition. And the reason I decided to do this podcast at this time is that it's summertime. And for a lot of you, I know that means traveling,

getting on airplanes where you're going to be reading your Kindle or hopefully sitting on the porch of a house in the mountain, which we're going to do in a couple of weeks when we go to Chama and stay at Corcans Lodge. This is the time of year when you ought to be able to sit down with a great book. It's also important if you're going to be visiting Santa Fe that you have a frame of reference. And if you'll take the time and read a couple of books about Santa Fe, if you've never visited here,

it's going to make a big difference in how you perceive the city and I, and if you live here, if you've been here all your life, I hope that I mentioned a few books that you never ever thought of. So I'm sitting here at my desk. have all of these books piled up because I've, I've got quite the collection. You're going to have to excuse me though. Sometimes I'm going to mention a book that I don't have in hand because I read a lot of my books on Kindle. So I wanted to start first with a few,

obvious Santa Fe authors that I know you're going to want to get to know better. And one of them was just recently on the podcast and we talked about her newest book, but Anne Hillerman. Anne Hillerman is one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite people. And if you follow Anne and if you're a fan of Toni Hillerman, you know that she has continued her father's series about

In particular, three Navajo policemen that set on the Navajo reservation. But Anne, I know, has a house in Santa Fe and her dad started out as the, I mean, when they first came to Santa Fe, he was the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican. He also worked at UNM and was incredibly prolific. And so is Anne. Every time I call her and say, could we get together? Could we go to lunch? She's like, well, you know, I have a deadline. I'm working on another book.

Johanna Medina (02:35.721)
If you are a fan of Dark Winds and you've been watching that series on Netflix, then you're going to be excited to know that that series is based on Anne's books. This is her most recent book, The Shadow of the Solstice, and the it says at the bottom a Leap Horn She and Manuelito novel. It's really mostly about Bernadette Manuelito and

Her strong female character, she is Navajo. It's very true to Navajo traditions. And I think Anne's brilliant. My suggestion would be that you pick up the very first Tony Hillerman novel, which I believe was written in the 80s. If you like mysteries, start there, go through the entire series and then know that Anne picks up where her dad left off after he passed away.

her I think she's written seven this may be number eight but you got if you have if you're say you're a teacher and you have a seasonal job and you've got the entire summer this is a good summer to dedicate to the Tony and Anne Hillerman series and Santa Fe is mentioned in those books it is not the central

location because most of them are set on the Navajo reservation which is up in the Four Corners area. I gotta tell you though if you like mysteries Anne is somebody to follow. Another great mystery writer who lives in Santa Fe and who wrote an entire series set in Santa Fe with the main character being a Santa Fe sheriff is Michael McGarrity. Michael McGarrity wrote a series

of books that were all about Kevin Kearney and I want to, I actually kept some notes here so I would get it right, but Kevin Kearney is a guy, the crime novels in the Kevin Kearney series are set all over New Mexico. You need to start with Tula Rosa which is actually set down in the south central part of the state, but the majority of the later, mysteries in the Kevin Kearney series are all set in Santa Fe and Michael McGarrity has a very clear local voice and he's often sort of humorous and a little sarcastic about Santa Fe style and how we live in Santa Fe but I can guarantee you you're going to enjoy them I would say

Some of them are a little graphic in terms of crime, but I gotta tell you, the good guy always wins, even at the moment that you think he's gonna end up in a shallow grave up in the forest. So pick up the Michael McGarrity books and try those this summer. Another favorite Santa Fe author is Doug Preston. He has graciously been on the podcast. I perhaps...
more than once. This is my copy of Lost City of the Monkey Gods and Doug signed it. Actually he signed it to my husband Toby with warm regards. This... Doug is also incredibly prolific. He has written dozens of books. I wish I knew the exact number but he's written some non-fiction. This is a piece of non-fiction

He wrote The Monster of Florence with a former Italian police officer, great book about an unsolved murder crime in Florence, Italy. He also writes a series of mysteries with, hang on just a second. I wanna get this name right, Lincoln Child.

the Doug Preston and Lincoln Child. And once we had dinner with Doug and he said, well, you know, I write a chapter and then Lincoln writes a chapter and then I write a chapter and then Lincoln writes a chapter. And he said, I got stuck recently with the romance chapter, which was a terrible thing for me to have to write. And I tried to pass it off to Lincoln and we eventually got it done, but it was the hardest work we've ever done. So pick up any book that has Doug Preston's name on it.

Bunny (07:17.284)
Another writer in Santa Fe that I love is Hampton Sides. He wrote, he's written a number of amazing books. The one that you probably want to read before you come to Santa Fe is Blood and Thunder. The primary character in that book is Kit Carson, who is a controversial figure, but Hampton Sides does a great job.

of giving us a well-rounded picture of Kit Carson as a human who cared that he was doing a good job, but who really struggled with the fact that he was illiterate and so had to follow the directives of a lot of rather unscrupulous commanders during the time of conquest in the United States. But Blood and Thunder, one of the best books

that is around and in Santa Fe and talks a lot about Kit Carson and that rather difficult time in our history is amazing. Pick up any book that has Hampton Sides. I've written a book, I mean, I'm sorry, I've read a book by Hampton Sides that is about a doomed trip to the Arctic.

in the 1800s and when I was in a book club that assigned this book I thought, I gonna, do I want to read this book? It just sounds so grim. One of my favorite books ever and part of that is because Hampton Sides is such an accomplished researcher and writer. You're not going to want to miss it. Let's talk about history for a minute. If you really want to know what it was like,

for somebody to leave Independence, Missouri and come over the Santa Fe Trail in the 1840s, then the Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico is a great book to pick up. It's the diary of, and there's some controversy about this, but it's the diary of somebody who is believed to be the first Anglo female to come down the Santa Fe Trail, Susan Shelby McLaughlin.

Bunny (09:43.122)
It's over two years, 1846 and 1847. She was 18 years old and had been a bride for less than eight months. And she set out with her husband who was a veteran Santa Fe trader and came in a wagon across Missouri and Kansas and the corner of Colorado into New Mexico and then traveled through the state and down in Chichua with Mexico.

There are a lot of things that happen. She loses a child on the trip. There are Indian scares. They worry about water all the time. I can't believe that people made that trip. And I also can't believe that she had a written record of every single day on the trip.

Susan Shelby McLaughlin is a great piece of history. Also, there's some literary history. One of my favorite books ever is Willa Cather, Death Comes Free for the Archbishop. And it is this really beautiful poetic novel about the French Catholic mission, was Archbishop Lamy.

Lamy, Lame, however you want to say it. This goes over, I mean, this is a controversy that goes on and on in Santa Fe is how to pronounce Bishop Lamy's name. But it's a fictionalized account, beautifully written. And in that book for the Archbishop, Santa Fe is really a very spiritual but a very literal destination.

Bunny (11:43.324)
Frank Waters wrote a book called The Woman at Ottawa Crossing. And Ottawa Crossing is a crossing of the Rio Grande on the way to Los Alamos. And this is based on a real woman who ran a tea house near Los Alamos at the Ottawa Crossing. But it talks about that period of time when the Manhattan Project was going on and

when the woman at Ottowee Crossing was, knew all of the major players during the Manhattan Project and was friends with Oppenheimer. Great book. You're going to like it. There's one that is a piece of fiction that maybe it was set in Taos, maybe it was set in

Santa Fe, John Nichols, the Milagro Beanfield work, which also was made into a movie and produced by Robert Redford. It's technically set in a fictional town, but it's a satire of northern New Mexico land and water rights battles. And it's indispensable if you want to know a little bit about what it could be like to be a local here.

A woman named Edith Warner wrote a great book. It's a memoir and it's called In the Shadow of Los Alamos, which is only for those of you who don't know, only 45 minutes north of Santa Fe. And it's a really, it's a beautifully written poignant memoir that really captures the cultural crossroads between Pueblo communities, the wartime scientists and what it was like to live in Santa Fe during that period of time. There's also, this is a piece of nonfiction, so it goes along with Frank Waters' book, The Woman at Ottowee Crossing, and that's a book that's written by Peggy Ponchurch. It's one of my favorite books called The House at Ottowee Bridge. I found this in one of the little libraries around town that was in a neighborhood, and it is...

Bunny (14:07.266)
also about the woman who lived at Ottowe Bridge and it is a historical memoir that's all about life just outside Santa Fe during the building of the atomic bomb. Chris Wilson, this is a complete shift. We're going to talk about art and architecture, but Chris Wilson, who is somebody I met when I was in graduate school at UNM, wrote a book called The Myth of Santa Fe and it's a meticulously researched book about how Santa Fe got the look that it has now because it didn't always look like this. mean, every building downtown was not stucco or adobe. A lot of how Santa Fe looked before, right after the turn of the 20th century was it looked like a lot of Western towns. You know, it had wooden facades on some of the buildings and a group of people between 1900 and 1910 as I recall. I've read Chris's book twice and I can't remember every single thing about it but you're gonna like this if you're more of a non-fiction fan and you want to know what was the evolution of the protection of the look that Santa Fe has now. It's a really deep dive into how Santa Fe created that look.

and the city's pretty deliberate reinvention for tourism and heritage marketing. mean, was, it was a deliberate reinvention. If you're interested in memoirs and personal essays, another, this is a book that I've had, I think since before I had kids or at least a very for a very, long time. And when I go through this book, it's earmarked and it's crinkled and it has watermarks from me soaking in the tub and reading this book. But that's Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg. And Natalie Goldberg now lives in Santa Fe. She originally came to Taos and lived in a commune there and

Bunny (16:29.562)
This book, along with writing down the bones and wild mind, was instrumental in teaching me how to find my voice and how to be a better writer and how to also get the connection between the spiritual and the creative. So, Long Quiet Highway is a book you can pick up and read at any time, I mean, at any point.

You can read the first two chapters, then you can go to the end. It's it is. Man, I don't I got it. I'm just going to read what's on the back because it's so much easier than me trying to describe how this was. But says Natalie Goldberg takes us on her own wonderful journey of awakening from the profound sleep of a suburban childhood. And from the high school classroom where she first listened to the rain to her 15 years as a student of Zim.

Buddhism, she captures both the moments of illumination and the long discipline of daily practice, the hilarity of error and the grief of our resistance to change. this is a book that I think everyone should read at least once because I've read it probably, I don't know, 20 times. And that brings me to

couple of others that might be surprising, but one of the funnest books to have in your house is the place names of New Mexico. Robert Julian went for years, went through all the documents that exist, everything that he could find and wrote a book. if you

You know, if you live somewhere in New Mexico and you're curious about why the name is what it is, you can pick this up and take a look. And Santa Fe, as we know, is the city of Holy Faith. There's a long, long entry here about it, but Don Pedro de Peralta, who came after Don Juan de Oñate,

Bunny (18:58.45)
He moved the colony's capital from up near Espanola down to Santa Fe in the 1600s. he called this the, he named Santa Fe la Via Real de Santa Fe or the Royal Town of Santa Fe. And for nearly a central.

century it was the only officially established settlement of Spanish colonists in New Mexico. So if you're looking for a fun gift for somebody who lives in New Mexico, pick up the place names of New Mexico and if you're curious to know what your town's name means, send me a message. I'll look it up for you. So that's for fun. All the you've got mysteries.

So you have mysteries, you have memoir, you have some works of fiction, you have Santa Fe authors that you can follow. I thought I couldn't do this without mentioning another Santa Fe author, which is me. I wrote a book called Life Saving Gratitude, which was all about how gratitude helped me beat stage four cancer. If you'd like a copy, feel free to come by our office at 211 East Palace in Santa Fe, or you can find it

on Amazon and that we will have a link to the majority of these books in the show notes so that you can get online and order them for yourself. And finally, finally, I want to tell you my favorite book about New Mexico that I've heard from many people that the locals believe was written about Santa Fe and that is Red Sky at Morning.

For those of you who are watching this on YouTube, you can see that my copy is an old pocketbook, an old Penguin pocket fiction book. It is beat up. I've had this book since I was a child. My brothers read it before me. It is, there are copy stains and this is like one of my most prized possessions. I love Red Sky at Morning and it is a book.

Bunny (21:19.448)
all about a young man named Jim Bob Buell, whose father leaves Georgia, it leaves the South during World War II to go and build ships and sends his son and his wife to Santa Fe to a home that they bought here when he was a child, when Jim Bob was a child. And this is all about Jim Bob being an outsider.

in Santa Fe while missing his father while creating a life here. And it's poignant, it's beautiful, it's hilarious, it is...

What can I say? It's just one of my favorite books. So find a copy of Red Sky at Morning. Don't watch the movie, but spend a summer afternoon reading this fun book. That's all I've got for now. I think I've spent enough time talking about books. I'm dying to know what you love. Send me some messages. Let me know what your favorite books are about Santa Fe or about where you live, because I think there's magic.

Some of my favorite memories are being a young child. My dad used to come in from the field at about three o'clock in the afternoon because they were going to work until dark and my dad and my brothers would come in for a glass of tea and we would all in my family, everybody would sit down with a book. Usually my brothers were reading something like Red Sky at Morning or a Lewis Lamour book and

have that everybody would have a glass of iced tea and we would sit and they would read for 15 minutes. And I would sit in this, in the rocking chair with, and I was like eight or nine years old reading my own books. And I thought, what is better on a summer afternoon or even early in the morning when you wake up in bed and you know you don't have to go to school than to pull up a book off of the bedside table and just read for an hour. What a gift, what a cool thing. And what, what a...

Bunny (23:31.216)
What a gift to give your kids. Quiet time on a summer afternoon reading. So have an amazing summer. Let me know if you pick up any of these books and enjoy them and let me know if I missed somebody. And thanks for checking in. If you're liking what you're seeing on the Real Santa Fe Podcast, we would love for you to write a review or share this podcast with your friends. We'll see you next week. Thanks.