A Utah Summer Reading List
Ten scholars share their favorite books about the Beehive State
It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on.
–Terry Tempest Williams
I did not grow up in Utah and I no longer live there, but like many Mormons of the diaspora, the homeland looms large in my imagination. It may be nothing more than misplaced nostalgia for a place that has never been my own, but now and again I return to Terry Tempest Williams, Wallace Stegner, and Levi Peterson, and am reminded of the depth and texture of lands haunted by aridity, ambition, and faith. In the spirit of that reutrn, I’ve compiled a set of book recommendations from individuals whose acquiantance with Utah is far deeper than my own. My hope is that this rich summer reading list will both chasten and inspire us in our efforts to achieve a promised land.
Happy summer reading!
– Zach
Life writing—diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and family histories, published and unpublished—is a prominent part of LDS letters. Women are well represented in this tradition. Indeed, most of the best-known Mormon and post-Mormon memoirists (e.g., Annie Clark Tanner, Juanita Brooks, Terry Tempest Williams, Joanna Brooks, Tara Westover) are women. My favorite book in this category is The Latter Days: A Memoir (2016) by Judith Freeman. Freeman’s account of coming of age in mid-century LDS monoculture has the sense of place and period detail of a good history, plus the pacing and structure of a good novel. I can think of no better evocation of a time (the Sixties) and a place (Utah) that rarely go together in literary consciousness. The Latter Days can be read in conversation with Freeman’s semi-autobiographical novel The Chinchilla Farm (1989) and its semi-sequel MacArthur Park (2021). They comprise a bravura trio of life writing at different stages of an author’s life.
Taunalyn Ford (global women’s history specialist, Church History Department)
My vote would be Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. I read it for my Intro to Mormon studies class at Claremont Graduate University and it completely changed the way I saw the mountains and lakes of Utah and introduced me to the study of memory. Jared Farmer’s talent for storytelling mixed with history, geography, anthropology, sociology, and academic creativity wowed and inspired me. (My ADHD brain loves multidisciplinary work!) Mostly it disrupted my assumptions about the landscape and people on either side of the I-15 corridor that I have constantly traveled throughout my life.
George Handley (professor of comparative literature, Brigham Young University)
If you want something literary, I would recommend Charles Inouye’s Zion Earth Zen Sky, which is a memoir about growing up in Gunnison and Inouye’s later life outside of Utah. It captures beautifully the tenderness of small town life in Utah, the travails and challenges of a convert Japanese American family, and a man’s journey of faith as he integrates his Mormonism with his lifelong interest in Japan and Buddhism. It becomes a very global book in the end and provides a roadmap for how Mormonism might successfully become more truly global and more connected to the earth.
Colleen McDannell (McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies, University of Utah)
You might want to look at my colleague Paul Reeve’s new book—This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford, 2024). It unwinds the complicated ways that Latter-day Saints understood slavery—their own and that of others. It also is an unvarnished look at racism on the nineteenth-century frontier. Three people worked on the book, which is unusual for scholarly publications in the humanities.
Ben Park (associate professor of history, Sam Houston State University)
Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008). This gorgeously written history of the Utah land and the people who have inhabited it is a masterclass in research, narrative, and criticism. It somehow centers both the physical landscape that was colonized as well as the humanity of the colonizers. I wish all Utahns could engage this important story and reflect on the “footprints” we all leave.
W. Paul Reeve (Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies, University of Utah)
I recommend Richard E. Turley and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath (Oxford, 2023). I thought I was done being shocked by the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I teach it every year in my Utah History class at the University of Utah. Vengeance is Mine, however, shocked me. It is the first book length treatment of the massacre that focuses on its aftermath. In some ways the coverup and post massacre justifications are just a chilling as the violence itself. Turley and Brown offer us new details about the massacre as well as the protracted struggled that ensued to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Phillip Snyder (emeritus professor of English, Brigham Young University)
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) by Terry Tempest Williams is a hybrid tour de force of a book written with clarity and compassion about the natural, social, familial, and political environment of Utah in the latter half of the twentieth century, told within a very personal and ethical frame. It ranks with American classics like Thoreau’s Walden, Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.
Makayla Steiner (associate professor of English, Brigham Young University)
Darlene Young’s Homespun and Angel Feathers is a book that celebrates a place and its people with confidence, but not ego. Her poems about life as a Mormon woman, at once witty and tender, offer a gentle corrective to the often incomplete and occasionally unfair portrayals of Utah’s most prominent religious faith. This is especially true in my favorite poem in the book, “Utah Mormon,” wherein Young acknowledges the perceived oddities of her Mormon heritage (“Half of me / fears you see me as wacko; / half of me knows you don't / see me at all”) while claiming the blessings of its spiritual and material value. “I am my people," she writes, “bonneted, / ancient, dusty as sage, / but tangy . . . Mormon / is the horizontal of the flinty earth, / the vertical of spires. Every year / a camp-out; every year the farm. / We can't escape the land / but it is never an end.” I’m not sure any other Utah writer has captured the place and its people so truly.
Kylie Turley (adjunct professor of English, Brigham Young University)
Josephine Spencer’s The Senator from Utah and Other Tales of the Wasatch (1895)—it’s available on both Google Books and the By Common Consent blog for free. This book challenges those who feel sure that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its communal doctrine (United Order) was different from or even antithetical to socialism and communism. Spencer, who was the society editor at the Deseret News, did not shock her original readers nearly as much as she will shock modern readers with its title story. The tale is bound to surprise readers with its tale of a workers’ uprising and the murderous response by upper-class political leadership. The other stories included in the book are not as wildly imaginative, but Spencer’s intermixing of church doctrines and socialist political theories make the challenge of old-fashioned language and sentimental plots worth the trouble.
Miranda Wilcox (associate professor of English, Brigham Young University)
Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah by Katherine Kitterman and Rebekah Ryan Clark (Deseret Book, 2019) features the culminating research of the Better Days 2020 project. This book tells a fascinating and largely forgotten story about women exercising equal suffrage in Utah for fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 prohibiting gender-based voting restrictions in the United States. This multi-media timeline features expertly curated period photographs, multiple documents, vivid quotations, and accessible narration. Readers get to know the Utah women and men fighting for the right to vote and be elected to public office in their own words, and they learn about the cultural and historical forces at play in Utah between 1867 and 1920.
Thank your for these recommendations. I can't wait to read them!