Customer Reviews

The Sound of Mountain Water

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I am the lone voice crying in the Wilderness here I guess. This was the first book by Stegner that I ever read (on advice from Edward Abbey) and I love this book. It is one of the finest books of essays I've read. I've read it several times and It doesn't grow stale.

I've lived most of my adult life in the mountain west, spending much time in the "woods" (climbing mountains, hiking, descending the rivers in kayaks, kayaking on the coast and inlets, skiing the mountains on X-country gear in winter), and I've read many books of essays, biographies, histories, and travel writing (broadly defined) and I own a large library of them. I would never let my library lack this book.

The essays in this book express Stegner's detailed knowledge of and love for the American West, especially the Colorado Plateau. His descriptions and expositions are, as always, wonderful. His writing is impeccable and also a joy to read.

If you prefer novels to non-fiction, you may prefer Stegner's novels. However, if you like non-fiction or are interested in the West or the Colorado Plateau, I think you will enjoy this book very much. (I don't own this edition; but rather an earlier paperback edition.) Enjoy.

Stegner's series of short essays trap the essence of what it means to live and write in the West like lightning in a bottle. The "west" he lived in and wrote for was roughly the area west of the 100th meridian where dry-land farming is problematic to the western edge of the Great Basin. (California and Oregon didn't really count as "western" to Stegner; they were "west of the west," as in the title of Mark Arax' book which, as an aside, is well-worth reading.)

I own a hardbound edition of this book. The paperback was a gift for a friend and intended as a short-cut for writing him a "Wallace Stegner Writer's Workshop Reading List." Essentially all the works that Stegner used as reference material in his creative writing classes at Stanford appear in Mountain Water. But the book contexts those reference materials in the landscape of Western American writing in ways that make sense to me despite their mix-and-match of genres that both defies and defines truly "western" writers.

I had this book recommended to me by someone who I really respect intellectually and since I was very moved by "Big Rock Candy Mountain" by Stegner I looked forward with great anticipation to "The Sound of Mountain Water". The Introduction was great. The first narrative, "The Rediscovery of America: 1946", was about an area very familiar to me from my travels and so I enjoyed that story. The rest of the first part of the book talked about the West, Utah and Arizona (Havasu Falls, where I have also been.)

The second part of the book (except for the first story which is about Stegner growing up in Salt Lake City) is concerned with literary criticism about Western Writers and Writing. And after the second selection of the second part, "Born A Square", I stopped reading the book and am going to try and return it.

There are so many good books waiting to be read I didn't feel the last 100 pages was worth reading--and I rarely do this, I almost always finish a book.

Stick with his novels!!

Oh, what do we have here?
Oh, it's a cute, little, cute book.
Why, it's a collection of essays by noted writer Wallace Stegner!
Oh, how adorable!
Hmmm. I don't know, what can I say about another bunch of essays by Wallace Stegner? The thought of writing about them just kind of depresses me. I mean, the book is fine, for what it is, but it's not that exciting. It's another nature writer writing about the West, another collection of essays, and another book that just kind of IS. It's not great, it's not bad, it just is.
You might like its essay on southern Utah's Glen Canyon filling with water (Lake Powell) after the construction of Glen Canyon Dam. That's nice, and good enough that it's been reprinted many times in many books because of its statement that Lake Powell's Escalante Arm--where the Escalante River used to be--should be banned to powerboats.
Or, you might like its account of the trading posts and Navajo Rodeo near Lees Ferry in northern Arizona, or the account of hiking and rafting the San Juan River, but the essay on the billboards of New Mexico is just kind of dumb, and several others just didn't do much for me.
Read it if you want to. You'll find some good things in it, especially if you're a Western historian or obsessed with Glen Canyon, but don't expect anything too wonderful.
Expect papercuts.