Rocky Mountain Lit

In which we stuff our suitcases full of books

Other people bring home from vacation T-shirts, shells, Christmas ornaments, shot glasses, local crafts, key rings, maps, jewelry, statuettes, postcards, magnets…

We bring home books.

Yes, yes, I know some of you love to read on a Kindle, which packs much more easily, but I don’t like the disorientation of not knowing where I am in an e-book and how hard it is to flip back and forth when I want to revisit something. And it’s just not fun to buy e-books the way it is to buy them from a bookstore. Paper books it must be! Even on vacation.

But first, you need some reading for the plane, with some to spare in case, God forbid, you don’t find a good bookstore right away. So, we took off from Bradley International Airport in Hartford en route to Colorado a few weeks ago with several books already in tow for a nearly three-week vacation. That requires some reading material, right?!

When we lived in Denver 20-plus years ago, the marvelous, multi-leveled Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek was our go-to bookstore. We could easily spend an entire afternoon there, wandering the sections and the floors, tucking into various corners, bumping into friends, drinking coffee. It was a happy hub for the city’s readers. Sadly, that store is closed now, but the downtown store is still open, as are numerous satellites. The Tattered Cover is one of those great indie bookstores that’s alive and kicking.

So, of course, it was one of the places we wanted to visit when we returned to Colorado to visit old friends and old haunts. We planned to spend most of our time in the mountains and not much in town, and as it turned out, we never made it into downtown Denver at all! But on one of our first afternoons in Littleton, we visited the Tattered Cover at Aspen Grove. It’s not as big and bustling as the Cherry Creek store was, but it was fun nevertheless to browse the shelves, where I found at least a dozen books I wanted. I bought only one—Tracy Flick Can’t Win—and recorded the titles of the rest for later, including:

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh (I’m still and always in search of good humor)

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen

The Questions That Matter Most by Jane Smiley

Joan by Katherine J. Chen

My husband bought The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier.

That dramatic sky you see above gave way to a classic Denver hail storm just a few minutes after we left, and we desperately tried to squeeze our rental car under a gas station canopy along with half a dozen other cars, praying it wouldn’t be damaged. When it was over and we got back to “home base,” our friend Alison climbed up to inspect her roof and gutters as steam rose from the hot surfaces. All was well.

This was mostly a vacation for hiking and biking and being up in the mountains—not for book shopping. But as you know by now, my husband and I are both suckers for a bookstore. We made three more stops at them during our three-week journey.

From Littleton, we drove over the Continental Divide to the tourist town of Glenwood Springs for a soak in the natural mineral springs and a float trip down the Colorado River before heading south off the beaten path to the tiny mining and farming town of Paonia. Its main drag, Grand Avenue, looks just like you’d imagine an old Colorado mine and farming town to look.

Paonia’s storefronts included a few restaurants—Nido served up amazing tacos and tamales—as well as gift shops, a radio station, a community center, a real estate office… But Paonia Books, unfortunately, was closed for our entire three-day visit.

However, its window display offered some intriguing suggestions:

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, by Anumpam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, by Christopher Miller

Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair, by June Gervais

Mother Ocean Father Nation, by Nishant Batsha

Before we leave Paonia, I also want to give a shout-out to the Bross Hotel, a pretty 1906 inn with foodie breakfasts, and the Storm Cellar winery, where every sip in our tasting was gorgeous. Our real reason for staying in Paonia, though, was its proximity to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, where we spent a day hiking seven miles to the top of Green Mountain and back as well as exploring the rim road on the quiet North Rim, where we enjoyed friendly conversations with almost everyone we met—fewer than 20 other people on a blazing hot Monday.

On our way back to Littleton, we passed through the artsy town of Salida and, of course, made a stop at Salida Books, a small, catch-all store with books in the window, books in crates, books resting on an old printing press, as well as a melange of other prizes: postcards, baseball cards, ski patrol mugs. Here, I picked up a used copy of Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, and my husband chose a new copy of the Pulitzer Prize winner Trust—one of the books I’d browsed at the Tattered Cover. Farther down the street, we also bought a straw hat, plus some ice cream, which we ate while we sat on the rocks at the edge of the Arkansas River, watching tubers, rafters, SUPers, boogie boarders, and waders float, splash and play.

After a couple of remote work days in Littleton (working helped us to extend the vacation), we headed up to the ski town of Winter Park, just over Berthoud Pass, for 10 days of outdoor adventures, along with some more work and, of course, reading. We spent an hour one afternoon at Mountain Shire Books & Gifts in the Cooper Creek shopping center while a gentle rain glossed the brick patio below, and thunder and lightning foretold a chilly breeze that eventually drove the shopkeeper to close the door. Mountain Shire was the perfect cozy place to hide out during that requisite afternoon storm. This great little bookstore, which had somewhat undersold itself online, pleasantly surprised us. It offered Colorado topics and writers up front, including a dozen interesting titles about extraordinary women of the west—a doctor, a pair of schoolteachers, a sharpshooter—followed by a small but perfectly curated stock of new fiction, nonfiction, and kids’ books as well as journals, adult coloring books, maps and guides, puzzles, and more.

Here, I bought George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which I had once tried listening to before I realized it’s more of a book to study than a book to gallop through. My husband bought Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I also added to my list for the future:

Horizon by Barry Lopez

Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas

The English Teacher by Lily King

In every bookstore, I also found Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which I hope will be out soon in paperback. I keep thinking I might like to read David Copperfield first, though that would require quite a time commitment.

In addition to the five books we’d already brought from home to read, we had now purchased six more. (And eight bottles of wine, which for some reason—no doubt having to do with arcane state laws—could not be shipped to Connecticut.)

As we packed to go home, we swapped out and rearranged, weighing the bigger suitcase on the bathroom scale several times to make sure we wouldn’t have to pay an overage fee. We’d managed to drink all but one of our bottles of wine by then, with a little help from our friends, but the books! Mon Dieu! In the end, we abandoned the four that we’d read, passing them on in order to make the weight cut-off.

I read the first 100 pages of Trust on the plane. I’ll let you know soon what I’m thinking about it—just one of the souvenirs that traveled home with us from the Rockies.