In New Mexico color saturates the natural world and cultural landscape. From Tierra Amarilla and Red River to Pena Blanca, White Sands, Red Rocks Canyon and Silver City, our place names reflect the many desert and mountain shades. New Mexico celebrations add community color -- from the Gathering of Nations in April to the many fiestas and festivals in summer and fall and finally to the luminaria glowing each December. Artists -- native-born and from far-away places – have long been drawn here to record our state’s kaleidoscope of people, places and experiences in their books, poems, songs, dances and paintings.
I had this vivid mix in mind when putting together a Color My World reading list for Summer 2025. The list uses book titles with a color or the word “color” as a starting point to explore the New Mexico State Library Southwest collection. With almost 2,400 books that fit the criteria, there was a wide range of choices including memoirs, environmental histories, murder mysteries, poetry collections, art books, academic treatises and more. I chose from paperbacks, pamphlets and even rare books by artists, explorers and gold hunters.
I found a few other odd and interesting collection statistics about color in book titles as I looked over the list. Though visual artists might be the first to mind, poetry collections and non-fiction actually had the most titles that included a color. Gold and red were most common with both nearly doubling the next closest cluster -- silver, green, turquoise and blue. That gold was the most common might be expected as there are many books on the gold rush and the myths and tales surrounding its discovery. Finally, pink and yellow outranked black and, rainbow unfortunately came in last.
You can borrow the books on this list from the NM State Library directly through interlibrary loan. Many of them are also available as e-books or audiobooks in NM Reads, an online platform that is free to all New Mexico residents. Happy reading and please reach out with any questions or suggestions.
Images in Silver: Albuquerque Museum Photo Archives Collection - Glenn Fye, Ed.
Many historical images and the story of the founding of the Albuquerque Museum Photo Archives are packed into this small volume. Beginning in 1977 ten years after the museum’s founding, Curator of History Byron Johnson began an effort “to save the visual record of the community… the people, architecture, public and private institutions, the urban landscape, daily life and important events.” Though black and white, the resulting collection is as vivid as the lives and stories of the people it displays.
Silver and Stone - Mark Bahti
Mark Bahti, owner of Bahti Indian Arts, is a second-generation art dealer, researcher and author on Native American art. Deeply engaged in his subject, Bahti interviewed over 47 artists from all over the Southwest centering their lives and experiences in this beautifully photographed collection.
The World of Flower Blue: Pop Chalee: An artistic biography - Margaret Cesa
Pop Chalee was an artist and cultural icon in the early twentieth century who trained in painting at the Santa Fe Indian School. Her paintings, jewelry, textile designs and murals can be found in museums across the country. Margaret Cesa, the author of this biography, spent years talking with Chalee, recording her stories and weaving them into a beautifully rendered book of this engaging and influential native artist.
Becoming White Clay - B. Sunday Eiselt
The Jicarilla Apache were the last tribe to be placed into a reservation system evading US government strictures longer than other larger and seemingly more powerful native peoples. Eiselt uses an interdisciplinary frame to explore the tribe’s history of adaptation and survivance from its beginnings as part of the Athapaskan migration to their eventual settlement in the early 20th century.
Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves - Art T. Burton
Burton chronicles both the life and the legend of a celebrated peace officer in the Indian Territories of the late 1800s. Reeves was born in Arkansas as a slave and escaped west during the American Civil War. He was renowned as a highly skilled detective, marksman, tracker and lawman who played a pivotal role in peacekeeping at a very violent time in United States history.
Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest - Marit Munson
This interdisciplinary study establishes the cultural importance of color to all societies and explores its role in ancient Puebloan communities. Noting that “we are not accustomed to imaging the past in color in part because it is often depicted in black and white,” the essays in this collection revitalize our conceptions of the ancient Southwestern United States bringing scholarship and nuance to the archaeological record.
A Green Band in a Parched and Burning Land - Deni J. Seymour
Seymour includes recent fieldwork, rereads the traditional archeological record and includes consultation from modern tribe members to rewrite the history of a significant, lesser-studied branch of the Sovaipuri O’Odham, a River O’Odham tribe from Southern Arizona.
Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of Popular Culture - Toby Smith
Smith reports on the role of Roswell, New Mexico as the world-wide epicenter of all things alien in this well researched and humorous book. He examines how the event changed life in the small town itself as well as its far-reaching impact on popular culture worldwide particularly in science fiction, tv and movies.
Red Light Women of the Rocky Mountains - Jan MacKell
Written in a conversational and engaging style, this book brings alive the stories of well- and lesser-known women who inhabited the famed brothels and bordellos of the western United States. With solid research and astute commentary, MacKell makes plain the complex social conditions leading women to and keeping them in prostitution during this transitional time and place.
Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse
The first in Rebecca Roanhorse’s multi-award-winning fantasy trilogy, Between Earth and Sky, Black Sun introduces readers to a new epic world that references pre-Columbian American cultures. Seen through the eyes of four main characters, the story continues in the sequels Fevered Star and Mirrored Heavens.
Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy - W. Michael Farmer
This haunting tale of revenge and special powers begins in 1865 with the escape of the Mescalero Apache from Bosque Redondo. Yellow Boy is five when he flees with his family to the Guadalupe Mountains. As he grows to adulthood, becomes a warrior and travels the Southwest, he grows increasingly gifted at riflery, a skill he uses to avenge his family. His journeys bring him into contact with important historical figures including Apache warriors Cadete, Victorio, and Juh.
The Nirvana Blues - John Nichols
Nichols uses the last book in his New Mexican Trilogy to continue his exploration of cultural changes in the northern parts of the state in the 1970s and 1980s. Finding both comedy and tragedy in his character’s actions, the truths about human nature that he lays bare and considers remain resonant today.
Red Water - Judith Freeman
Freeman’s historical novel is narrated by three sister wives of John D. Lee, a member of Brigham Young’s inner circle. The chaos of the Mormon frontier journey and the difficult work of creating new settlements are seen through the eyes of three very different characters. The narrative journeys of the women frame deeper reflections on the meaning of love and faith.
Silver Canyon - Louis L’Amour
This 1956 novel is a classic L’Amour western about Matt Brennan, a gunfighter who tries to settle down for love. Instead, Brennan becomes embroiled in a longstanding feud between ranchers for control of a small town and land. Written with characteristic attention to place, the book is set just over the northern New Mexico border in San Juan County, Utah.
Red, Green, or Murder - Steven F. Havill
This serial follows the careers of two law enforcement agents, former Sheriff Bill Gastner, and current undersheriff Estell Reyes-Guzman, as they unravel two mysterious deaths in their New Mexico cattle ranching community. It is the tenth book in the 27-book series.
Aimee & David Thurlo
The husband-and-wife team of Aimee and David Thurlo wrote more than 75 mysteries. Of the 17 books in the Ella Clah series, five have colorful titles. Protaganist Ella Clah is a former FBI agent and a special investigator for the Navajo Police Department who now works on the Navajo nation. The books are best read in order and luckily the first in the series is Blackening Song. Other colorful titles in this series include: Red Mesa - #6; White Thunder – # 10; Turquoise Girl - #12; and Black Thunder - #16.
Judith Van Giesen
Van Giessen wrote two mystery series both set in New Mexico and centered on female amateur detectives. Neither series needs to be read in order. Neil Hamel, the protagonist of the first series, is an Albuquerque based lawyer. In Parrot Blues, Hamel is hired to track both a missing wife and a missing indigo macaw pulling her into the dangerous world of rare bird smuggling. In The Stolen Blue, we meet Claire Reynier, an archivist and librarian with a habit of stumbling into mysteries as she travels the state searching for rare books for the University of New Mexico’s collections. The Stolen Blue is the first in the Reynier series and is an absorbing, quick read.
Horizontal Yellow - Dan Flores
Flores, a history professor originally from Texas, borrows the Navajo term for the Southwest as the title for mediations on the recent environmental history of the greater southwest. His writing is evocative and complex weaving together environmentalism, American history and his own memories of travelling and living in the Southwest.
Hot, Dry, Color Garden - Nan Sterman
Sterman, a garden writer and experienced horticulturist, shares 150 beautiful plants that add vibrant color to Southwest gardens. The book contains a gallery of photographs and general advice on structuring and maintaining low water gardens.
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert - Terry Tempest Williams
This slim volume celebrates the desert’s beauty most specifically the dramatic and stark landscape of Monument Valley. Williams combines her own essays with passages from other writers to evoke the region’s history of human use and its vulnerability to overuse. It is a celebration of the spirituality one can find in nature and a plea to preserve such special places.
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Mediations on Landscape, Art and Spirit - Ellen Meloy
Like this list, Meloy uses color, specifically turquoise, as a central theme in this stream of consciousness memoir. At turns humorous, sensual, exhilarating and fact-filled, this anthology is a thought-provoking book that gets better with each read.
Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert - Amber McCrary
Diné poet, Amber McCrary, contrasts her origins in the northern high desert with her developing relationships in the Sonoran desert through the lens of plants in each region. McCrary’s metaphoric identity shifts from the title’s blue corn, a plant which has sustained the Diné people, to the ancient Saguro cactus which stand as witness to the changing environment around them. McCrary also weaves resonant and current coming-of-age stories into these poems.
Black Hollyhock, First Light - Judyth Hill
Judyth Hill is a renowned poet, writer and former influential and literary resident of New Mexico. This collection of poetry, Hill’s seventh of nine, uses the seasons as a prism to explore human experience. She starts and ends the cycle with spring, emphasizing the beauty and hopefulness of life as in this stanza from Quite Contrary. “You are greening up:/Minty shoots brave the bluster, the crazy transient hail/Of March’s odd and earnest advancement./I too, am coming I hope forward.”
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Letter: 50 Poems for 50 Years - Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is considered a national treasure and leading voice in poetry for the entire country. Fortunately, she chose a colorful title for a 2022 compilation published to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The poems in this volume are deeply affecting and universal stories of love, grief and hope that also reflect Harjo’s indigenous experience and perspective.
The Green Glass Sea & White Sands, Red Menace - Ellen Klages
This pair of young adult historical fiction books explores themes drawn from New Mexican experience that are also universal. Set around World War II, the books’ main character Dewey Kerrigan, moves first to the new town of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, then to White Sands as work on missiles continues to occupy her scientific parents. The Green Glass Sea won the 2007 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
