Caroline Tracey‘s debut book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatrual History, follows the writer and geographer across four continents as she documents the beauty and alarming decline of the world’s salt lakes, from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the remnants of the Aral Sea. Blending travel writing, environmental reporting, and memoir, Tracey explores the people, ecosystems, and histories tied to these fragile waters while reflecting on her own journey toward queer love and a sense of home in a world shaped by ecological change.
We asked Tracey to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
My mom recently mailed me a book I loved as a kid called Sign Language Fun that is illustrated with Sesame Street Characters. There’s an amazing page where the Cookie Monster goes to the library and they teach you to sign to ask whether they have books about cookies. I also loved Tommy DePaola’s Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey, which are both really touching.
What book helped you through puberty?
I’m Wide Awake it’s Morning, the Bright Eyes album, came out when I was fourteen and I remember listening to it every night before falling asleep. I also read and re-read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and had it on CD too, so that I could listen to it before I fell asleep too. I had forgotten about that until I came across the CDs recently.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
I don’t have strong regrets about that time period. It was really voracious for me. I was on a search for beauty and a search for How to Live in a very big, teenage way. I had access to an amazing library and I spent a ton of time browsing—I remember taking a look at everything from W.H. Auden to Frantz Fanon. With Fanon, I specifically remember finding The Wretched of the Earth and reading the first few pages and thinking, “This anti-colonial resistance stuff seems like a huge deal, but if it were really important, wouldn’t I have been taught about it?” So in some ways I wish my education and upbringing had gotten beyond Euro- and U.S.-centric ideas of culture and history sooner. But life is long, and I’ve continued to have my mind blown again and again as an adult learning new things.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago; Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo; Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (which is both Woolfian and Rulfian); James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I actually just went through my shelves trying to answer this question. I write about finding Wallace Stegner’s The American West as Living Space in high school and how important it was to me to see such thoughtful and incisive reflections on the region I had grown up in. I also read Joan Didion for the first time in high school and her books Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Where I Was From all became influences on me. Mary Austin’s The Ford, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, and William Vollmann’s Imperial were big inspirations to start driving around and writing about what I saw. When I started writing the essays that became Salt Lakes, back in 2014, I was reading Heroines by Kate Zambreno. Later, Jazmina Barrera’s Cuaderno de Faros (On Lighthouses) was helpful for thinking about orienting a book around a single object.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’ve always wanted to get to do an interview that asks me this! It’s perfect to be answering this questions today, February 27th, because one of my treats at the end of each month is making a stack of books that I want to read during the following month. I try to read one book in Spanish each month, and up next is Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs that Precede the End of the World). I teach a class called Contemporary Mexican Literature at a continuing education center for retirees here in Tucson, and we’re reading the Herrera together. I’ve read it in English before but this will be the first time in Spanish.
There are two queer novels, Brideshead Revisited and Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’s Farewell to the Sea. The Arenas is also a re-read, actually, which is something I’ve been trying to do more of, so that I can learn more deeply from the books I like.
For new books, I have Sophie Pinkham’s The Oak and the Larch, which as an environmental humanities-type nerd and former Russian major I am very excited about, and Jazmine Ulloa’s book El Paso, out March 3. I also try to read one book of poetry each month, and for that I have Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s new book My Perfect Cognate. The Herrera, Ulloa, and Scenters-Zapico all have an El Paso connection, curiously; that was unplanned.