Western Reads

WESTERN READS

BY AARON DOWNEY

As fall arrives and nights get longer and cooler, you might find yourself under a wide-open western sky, maybe around a campfire, with a sea of stars above. Consider this astronomy fact: In about 4.8 billion years, when our sun has expended its fuel, it will collapse into a white dwarf star about the size of Earth. Because of its reduction in size but not mass, it will be insanely dense. The amount of white dwarf material that you could fit in a matchbox would weigh 275 tons! Boom. Mind blown. More fun stuff like that can be learned in Sidney C. Wolff’s, The Boundless Universe: Astronomy in the New Age of Discovery.

Dusk in my neighborhood is alive with furry little guys flying around, and I welcome them because they are cute and they eat mosquitos. The excellent, fact-filled bat primer, the Stokes Beginner’s Guide to Bats, by Kim Williams, Rob Mies, and Donald and Lillian Stokes, says a single bat can eat 1,200 mosquitos per hour! Plus, they are strong pollinators and eat bugs that damage crops. Unfairly, bats get a bad rap.

The creepy things that populate Spooky Campfire Tales by S. E. Schlosser sure earn their awful reputations. These retellings of classic hauntings, bone-chilling strangeness, and supernatural folklore will have your loved ones trembling around the campfire.

You know what else goes bump in the night? Me, when I’m looking for a midnight snack. Hmm, maybe I have some leftover southwestern corn fritters from The New Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook by Ellen Brown. This is a collectible read with 150 recipes for America’s favorite pan. It’s a well-conceived book, even down to how the texture of the dust jacket feels like a cast-iron pan.

Here’s something else you can put in your cast-iron to help spice up the cooler nights: chile peppers. The Complete Chile Pepper Book: A Gardener’s Guide to Choosing, Growing, Preserving, and Cooking, by Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland, is a comprehensive guide with everything you need to know about chiles, including recipes. Once you get hooked, you can find even more excellent recipes in the slim, affordable Chile Aphrodisia by Amy Reiley and Annette Tomei.

Fall is definitely my favorite time of year. I hope you enjoy your cooler season of reading time and pumpkin-flavored everything!

Aaron Downey has worked in the publishing industry for eighteen years, five of them as the managing editor at Rio Nuevo Publishers, a division of Treasure Chest Books. Rio Nuevo Publishers creates compelling, visually exciting, award-winning books about the people, places, and things that make the West so distinctive. Visit us at www.rionuevo.com