Reading Alaska

[Writers Plot]

posted by jet-lagged Jeanne, home about six hours

Our three-week trip to Alaska, culminating in the wonderful Bouchercon event in Anchorage, has come to an end. A lot of feelings and thoughts are burbling in my mind and I'm not ready to write my final words on the Last Frontier.

Last week's hand-wringing post lamented my inability to capture the grandure, the characters, and the experience that is Alaska. In lieu of my deathless prose, I offer a selection of other authors who have written wonderfully about their state. Herewith, a real mixed bag.

I begin by recommending anything ever written by Dana Stabenow, cochair of the Bouchercon and an Alaskan who has lived the experiences she writes about. (Well, maybe not the murders, but...) It doesn't get more real than that. Of her novels, I would start with the Kate Shugak series, about a Native Alaskan private eye. Read them in order, from A Cold Day for Murder. As with any great series, the characters develop over time, and Dana's people are real to me. Another favorite mystery author from Alaska is Sue Henry, whose first novel about dog musher Jessie Arnold, Murder on the Iditarod Trail, won a number of awards. (Coincidentally, a signed mint first edition of that book drew the highest bid at the Bouchercon auction, over $1000.)

Author John Straley has written several mysteries set in Alaska, including the intriguingly named The Woman Who Married a Bear, set in the southeast coastal Tlingit native culture. Popular young adult author Gary Paulsen has also run the grueling Iditarod dog race and lived to write about it; Winterdance is one of his books about the experience.

Alaska journalist and humorist Mike Doogan, a long-time columnist for the Anchorage newspapers, has moved on. He now writes mystery novels, Lost Angel and Capitol Offense. The latter title casts a jaded light on his current service in the state legislature.

One of my favorite books about the state is Looking for Alaska, Peter Jenkins' memoir of his family's sojourn in Seward. Jon Krakauer wrote the fascinating and tragic Into the Wild years before Sean Penn turned it into a current movie. A couple of years ago I enjoyed and admired an audiobook called The Cruelest Miles, the story of the heroic race to take diphtheria serum to Nome to prevent an epidemic. That feat is commemorated today in the Iditarod race, which is a marathon, whereas the original was a relay. Highly recommended, the book was written by Gay and Laney Salisbury, and the audio was narrated by Barrett Whitener.

I personally haven't yet read John McPhee's Coming into the Country, but "real" Alaskans recommend it as the quintessential Alaska book.

Many of the Bouchercon panels featured Alaskan crimefighters--police, CSI types, and so forth. Learning of several true crime books about the state and its ...interesting...residents, I snapped them up at the book dealers' tables. Two were by Tom Brennan: Murder at 40 Below:True Crime Stories from Alaska and Cold Crime: How Police Detectives Solved Alaska's Most Sensational Cases. I was especially riveted by the story of a murder at a place called Mendeltna Lodge--where my husband and I had just had a great breakfast and been delighted with the charm of the log cabin, its crackling fireplace and "real Alaska" feel.

To read on the trip home, I picked up a paperback by Bob Bell titled Oh No! We're Gonna Die: Humorous Tales of Close Calls in the Alaska Wilderness. Bell reports that Alaska has a bunch of ways to sort the savvy from the commonsense-challenged: climate, weather, wilderness, and critters. Bell and his friends have confronted all of that and more--and lived to tell the tales.

These books are almost as good as a trip to Alaska itself--but cheaper and without any grizzly bear encounters.