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Anchorage Daily News book reviewers Nancy Lord and David James present, in no particular order, the 2024 works that they found most memorable and meaningful. Their lists include poetry, graphic art, books about fishing, nature and history as well as two different works by author Michael Engelhard.
Nancy Lord’s favorites of 2024
This last year was again a bounteous one for books of all kinds related to Alaska. Of the two dozen I reviewed in this column, I’ve chosen a few of my personal favorites to highlight at year’s end. Choices are hard, and many good books (including a number of memoirs) regrettably fell off my list. I encourage readers to visit independent bookstores for other recommendations and genres that most appeal to them. It’s a good time to seek some bibliotherapy for escape, comfort, reassurance, empathy-building and any of the other reasons we turn to books.
Fiction
What is it about commercial fishing and fishermen that leads to excellent storytelling? As it happens, all four of my top fiction favorites this year launch from their authors’ at-sea experiences into imaginative literary waters. Each of the first three is set in a different part of the state and in a different decade, presenting something of an historical timeline.
“The Curve of Equal Time” by Thomas McGuire; Boreal Books, 2024; 192 pages; $16.95
Thomas McGuire, author of the 2019 award-winning novel “Steller’s Orchid,” returned this year with a new novel of matching excellence. A longtime Alaskan, McGuire has applied his 30 years of commercial fishing to a story part mystery, part crime, and entirely true to Alaska life.
Early on, a woman deckhand disappears from a seine boat. There are hints of drug use and violence, but fish need to be caught and few others in the fleet seem particularly unnerved. The season continues with plenty of fishing drama as well as the development of relationships among the crews, on their boats and in town, often in bars and often involving alcohol. The well-drawn characters are realistic, diverse, and as fascinating as any we might meet in either literature or real life. McGuire is especially skilled at capturing the realities of women working in the fleet at the time in which the novel is set, the 1970s. And, yes, the mystery of the lost woman unfolds.
Overall, McGuire’s writing is as precise and lyrical as any of our best contemporary novelists. It’s also consistently knowing and intelligent about technologies, geography and the natural world, the motives and desires of human beings, and even literary and cultural references. McGuire’s depictions of Southeast Alaska, the world of commercial fishing, and human behaviors are perfectly rendered, page after page.
“The Snow Fell Off the Mountain” by Dan Strickland; Palmetto Publishing, 2024; 305 pages; $17.99
Set in the summer of 1980 in and around the fictional town of Coroglen (a barely disguised Cordova), this debut novel features two young salmon fishermen plus a young woman/love interest who works on a tender. There’s also a charming older immigrant, an eccentric hermit, two brutal villains and a pair of heroic dogs. The action surrounds the small-boat drift gillnet fishery and involves drug running, martial arts, boats burned and sunk, a tsunami warning and multiple murders.
While the action is fast and furious, Strickland is especially skilled at evoking both the halcyon days and joys of salmon fishing and the terrors of crossing bars and breakers and fighting through storms. He’s thoroughly adept at recreating a time in the fishing industry before cellphones, refrigerated seawater, fish pumps for offloading fish and sophisticated electronics.
Alaska readers may particularly enjoy the portrait of a town where residents leave their keys in their trucks at the harbor for others to borrow, the whole community enjoys potlucks with multiple fish and venison dishes, newspapers circulate with local news, and naked saunas are a chief source of relaxation. At least in this novel, fishermen fished long and hard but also took time off to go hiking, to listen to birds and admire the views. Some of Strickland’s most lyrical writing captures such moments.
“The North Line” by Matt Riordan; Hyperion Avenue, 2024; 313 pages; $27.99
In the first pages of this debut novel about a greenhorn’s Bristol Bay fishing season, the young man pushes a skiff off the beach and ends up in the water himself. He’s warned by his crewmates that he “broke the cardinal rule. You don’t ever go in the water.” Like the narrative principle known as “Chekhov’s gun,” this loaded gun returns at the end of the novel in a dramatic fashion, but not as a reader might have imagined.
Riordan is a superb storyteller, and “The North Line” is an all-engrossing, never-dull depiction of Alaska’s “wild west” and those drawn to it. Sentence by sentence, Riordan’s dazzling language will transport readers into a world both challenging and packed with beauty and possibility.
The storyline, filled with true-to-life details of time (1991) and place is absolutely compelling, but the plot is not the point here. The main character, Adam, is a complicated young man who’s not sure who he is or wants to be; he’s already made some bad choices and continues to be tested. Readers will sympathize with him one minute and want to shake sense into him in the next. The other characters are equally complicated — well beyond stereotypes of “fishermen.” While they eat Spam straight out of cans and tell gruesome stories with a lot of what is referred to as “adult language,” they’re also well-skilled in all the ways that keep boats afloat and gear fishing.
Dutch Harbor, as most Alaskans know, is a celebrated, almost mythic place of commercial fishing drama, wicked weather, great natural beauty, bar fights, historical consequence, global diversity and small-town insularity. D. MacNeill Parker, well-acquainted with the town and the commercial fishing industry, has delivered an absorbing debut crime mystery that’s rich in convincing details and almost entirely believable in its story. The specific details of life in Dutch Harbor, on fishing boats, and even in an animal clinic are what makes “Death in Dutch Harbor” rise above so many in the crime mystery genre. The story switches among several viewpoint characters, and one of the most vivid scenes takes place on a crab boat in a horrific storm with waves that break out the wheelhouse windows.
The story begins with a mysterious death, and Maureen, the town’s veterinarian, is asked to help with forensics. Maureen is clearly well-liked in her community, capable and smart except in some of her decision-making. All of the women here, in fact, are strong characters — the wildlife biologist, the officer who writes amusing police reports for the newspaper, the Native woman who runs a shipping company, the friend who always shows up when needed.
While each chapter usually ends with some action that encourages readers to quickly turn the page and read on, several chapters begin in an unusual way, opening with factual, historical information. One chapter discusses Alaska place names. Another begins with a description of the town, the origin of its name, and its relationship to the original community of Unalaska. Each of these short sections pauses the action and adds context for readers who may want to learn more about the “real” Alaska. There’s also plenty of “real” Alaska in story lines that involve conflicts between fishermen and sea lions, fishermen and environmentalists, and environmentalists and the oil industry.
Nonfiction
Michael Engelhard, a longtime outdoor instructor and wilderness guide as well as a cultural anthropologist and writer, spent two months in the summer of 2012 solo-crossing Alaska’s Brooks Range. From the Canadian border he trekked over mountains and across tundra for 48 days and 600 miles. Near the headwaters of the Noatak River he switched to a rowing canoe for the last 400 miles to the coast.
“Arctic Traverse,” written with a decade’s reflective retrospective, is not by any means a guidebook or a journal-like travelogue of day-to-day movements. It is, instead, an exceedingly well-crafted work that combines travel with natural history, anthropology and cultural concerns, literary references, philosophy, personal history, science, linguistics and humor. By intertwining details from the journey with his significant knowledge of the region from both guiding and anthropological work and with impressive observational skills, research and insight, Engelhard has fashioned a text that should appeal to multitudes of readers.
Engelhard is absolutely an advocate for wild places, generously quoting conservation forebears as well as Gwich’in and Inupiat elders and others he has known. He shows the magnificence of the country he traverses without much editorializing, but in his final pages, a postscript from the present time, he addresses the carbon pollution that’s visibly warming the north, the accelerating extinction of species and the role we all play in harming the Earth.
Poetry
Poetry needs some love, so here are two very different books that, each in its own way, recognize loss and celebrate truth, beauty and resilience.
“Absent Here” by Bret Shepard; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024; 80 pages; $18
Bret Shepard’s achingly beautiful collection of poems, winner of the prestigious Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is informed throughout by his childhood growing up in villages on Alaska’s North Slope. His poems are infused with landscape imagery and a sense of loss. The words “absence” and “desire” appear again and again. Shepard’s work deserves recognition both for its elegant fierceness and its contributions to understanding the place each of us holds in the world.
X’unei Lance Twitchell’s first poetry book presents creative work drawn from his years of contemplating his life as an Indigenous man, his knowledge of the Lingit language and his advocacy for Native language revitalization, and his deep-felt considerations of cultural losses and resilience. “Gagaan X’usyee” includes poems in both Lingit (formerly Tlingit) and English, not in translation on facing pages but with Lingit alone capable of speaking about our world.
David James’ favorites of 2024
My list of books was abbreviated this year. I took an extended break for a trip to Ireland, a hip replacement and a badly needed mental health rest after nearly a quarter-century of writing reviews. I had a sizable pile when I temporarily pulled the plug, and a fair number remain to be covered. What follows is the best of what I did get to.
“Seasons of Want and Plenty” by Kris Farmen; Blazo House, 2023; three volumes, $16.99 each.
Fairbanks author Kris Farmen, who I’ve repeatedly described as perhaps Alaska’s most underrated writer, and who has never disappointed me, delivered a trilogy of interlinked novels set in the waning days of Russian America and the immediate aftermath of the U.S. takeover of the region. The era is insufficiently explored in our literature, and Russia’s presence in Western Alaska all but ignored. Stepping into this breach, Farmen tells the story of Ivan Lukin, a mixed Native and Russian midlevel employee of the Russian American Company stationed on the western coastline. Each book — “Fireweed,” Signals” and “Meridian” — is a stand-alone novel, with broader plot lines running through them all. Lukin, at home on the land but not in the roughshod world of corporate fur trading, thrice goes traveling widely through lands largely unknown to Europeans of the time. Along the way he is pursued by the demon Zia, a never-aging young girl murdered by her father, who seeks to kill him. Magical realism underlies these books, but Farmen primarily devotes his efforts to detailing the land and environment of the setting and reconstructing a forgotten time. Having now published six novels and a novella, he keeps improving with each one. Hopefully this trilogy will raise his profile to the level he deserves. By far my favorite books of the year.
Beyond those, the remaining books fall in no particular order of favorites.
Michael Engelhard is the other Fairbanks author who published three books this year. In his case, accounts of his travels over land and water. “What the River Knows” gathers essays of place in Alaskan wild lands, ranging from just beyond our doorsteps riding a bike in winter in Fairbanks and wandering near Nome, to such far-flung locales as the outer reaches of Resurrection Bay, the Koyukuk River and, especially, his beloved Arctic. A close observer of the ways of nature and of how our industrial lifestyle is re-carving our world, he establishes himself here as one of Alaska’s foremost voices for lands, waters, plants and animals that cannot advocate for themselves.
Combining words and watercolors, David Norwell recounts his kayak journey from Victoria Island to the Inside Passage, offering observations on nature and culture, philosophical musings, and his on-again off-again relationship with his girlfriend. It’s a wonderful account of an adventure that commenced a decade ago, and a story filled with the ambition and occasional disenchantments of being young and fully encountering the ambiguities of life. Written with sufficient hindsight for Norwell to peer deeply into his experiences and what they taught him, the aptly named “A Complex Coast” is a literary and visual treat that fully inhabits its title.
Along with Hild Peters, Mary Ehrlander demonstrates her usual meticulous research and attention to details in this history of physician Clifton Burke and his wife, teacher Clara Burke, who oversaw and operated St. Stephen’s Mission in Fort Yukon for 28 years, beginning in 1910. Under the tutelage of the titanic Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, they absorbed his regard for Alaska Native culture and his wish to defend it. Beyond, of course, converting Natives to Christianity. But they did the latter through service, not coercion. Owing to its nature, their work inevitably brought dramatic changes to the region, both good and bad. But the Burkes, who were paid a pittance, ran their “Hospital & Haven” out of genuine devotion and remain highly regarded to this day.
Ethnographer Craig Mishler, with help from Native Elder Kenneth Drizhuu Frank, covers the same region in “Crooked on the Stretcher Board,” an extensive exploration of the history, customs, folklore, language and much more of the Gwich’in people who inhabit the northeastern corner of Alaska and extend deep into Canada’s Arctic and subarctic. Among other topics, Mishler provides accounts of individual lives, includes stories from oral traditions, discusses the intricacies of language and attends potlatches in this account that, despite its length and academic leanings, is more than sufficiently lively and animated for lay readers.
In 1991, a year when the Cold War was winding down and hope and optimism prevailed, an exhibition sled dog race took mushers from Nome north to Wales along the Alaska coast, then, after an airplane flight across the Bering Sea, south along Russia’s parallel side from Uelen to Anadyr. Helen Hegener, in typical fashion, fills “The Hope ‘91 Sled Dog Race” with personal reminiscences of participants and extensive illustrations, bringing her story to life. In our present era of increasing darkness, it’s a reminder that, shorn of the ambitions of power-hungry political leaders, people living normal lives are kind and good and, if left to their own devices, will reach out to each other in friendship.
I seem to have been all but stuck in northern Alaska this year, but this entertaining tale of an almost comically failed gold rush to the Koyukuk River in 1898 follows 80 stampeders on a fruitless search for riches during the peak of the Klondike era was too much fun. They returned emptyhanded two years later, but learned a lot about that region of Alaska in the doing. With “The Voyage of the Alaska Union,” Alaska’s best known entertainer, Mr. Whitekeys, proves himself an able storyteller, willing to include the good, bad and culturally insensitive aspects of a largely overlooked chapter in Alaska’s history. Hopefully he’ll be motivated to find another obscure historical event to share with readers.
“The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club” by Dan L. Walker; Pen & Primer, 2023; 224 pages; $14.99
In “The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club,” Dan Walker concluded his trilogy of young adult novels about Sam Barger. Now living in Anchorage in 1969, in this volume, the responsibilities of adulthood invade his life. His pregnant girlfriend has been sent by her parents out of the state, and Sam embarks on a journey south to reunite with her. It’s a classic road trip novel and a coming-of-age story about a young man struggling with his personal crises against the backdrop of the broader world. Especially the Vietnam War.
Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver are blending Ahtna culture and storytelling with manga-inspired art in the graphic novel series “Chickaloonies,” and this second volume takes it up several notches from its fun but more lighthearted predecessor. Ice creatures and giant insects are among the travails besieging Palmer, and it falls to lead characters Moji and Yelly, fueled with traditional lore, to save the day. The richly colored action-packed visuals in this book offer surprises on every page, and the story captivates from its opening. Though primarily aimed at kids, this is fine reading for adults as well.
And on that visual note, two books that weren’t subjects of review but that I wrote about elsewhere deserve mention.
“Forever on the Run With Dad” by Duke Russell; self-published, 2024; 32 pages; $20
Longtime Anchorage artist Duke Russell has recently stepped into the graphic novel business with an ongoing series of autobiographical comics. While his first, “My Paper Route,” was a vignette about his 14th summer, “Forever on the Run With Dad,” is a whole different animal. This one covers his years growing up in the sporadic care of his father, a man forever seeking and failing to find success in the next town over the horizon. It’s a classically American story of dashed ambitions, perpetual movement and a difficult childhood spent tied to a parent who couldn’t quite make it as an adult. Though new to memoir writing and comic creation, Russell’s skills as an artist and storyteller come together in this slim but deeply moving story that perfectly demonstrates the possibilities of sequential art, and how carefully combining single-page scenes can offer a much broader story. The final moment finds Russell arriving with his dad in Alaska, and he promises more to come.
“Spawn Till You Die: The Fin Art of Ray Troll” by Ray Troll; Clover Press, 2023; 234 pages; $59.95
And lastly, Alaska’s favorite artist Ray Troll has unleashed a retrospective of his perpetually brilliant work onto the world. With its title coming from his most famous cartoon, “Spawn Till You Die” gathers together over 200 of Troll’s colorful paintings filled with text and visual puns, fish and fossil jokes, sly commentary, and endless details that require long periods of looking at to fully absorb. For Troll fans and those new to his madcap world, it’s a must-have. And since he shows no signs of slowing down at age 70, it’s unlikely to be his last retrospective.
Despite reviewing fewer than my standard number of books this year, there was no shortage of gems. As mentioned above, I did have a sizable pile before taking that break. For those authors whose books I have and still haven’t gotten to, reviews are forthcoming. And for the many who have asked me to consider their work, my apologies. I’ve been refusing submissions since May and it’s unlikely I will take any new ones before April at the earliest. I need to catch up first. Keep reading and writing.