When the editor asked me to write a monthly book review column for the Guide magazine, I thought: Who me? and Why? It isn’t that I don’t read a lot. I do. However, I’ve always been the type of person who shied away from the crowd, even if I couldn’t see them. Perhaps that’s not exactly true. There was a time when I thought it would be great to see my name in print; that is, if my name were Samuel Beckett, Cesar Vallejo or Lauren Groff.

Which brings me to the first book I’d like to recommend: The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. This highly-readable novel appealed to my literary side, but it wildly excited my local history-loving side as well. Without giving away the plot, it’s a great book about monsters, murders and bastards. I stole those last four words from Stephen King, but as I always say, if you’re going to steal words, take from the very accomplished and work your way down. Which, oddly, leads me back to Lauren Groff’s book, in which the main character, an archaeology professor named Willie Upton, returns to her childhood home of Templeton, New York and starts routing around in her ancestral garden, only to learn that there are as many weeds as there are flowers. The real fun of the novel for this history-loving reader is its oblique references to Cooperstown, aka Templeton, NY, home of the Farmer’s Museum, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the New York Historical Society. It is also the Town that William Cooper built. Cooper, a man of humble origins, became a wealthy land owner and U.S. congressman in the heart of what was then primeval wilderness. However, as my wise mother used to say, be kind to those you meet on the way up because they’re the same ones you’ll meet on the way down. So it was with the rise and fall of high-handed William Cooper, whose life ended in political disgrace.

Just as William Cooper’s son, James Fenimore Cooper, struggled in his fiction to come to terms with his father’s failure, so too does Lauren Groff’s fictional heroine, Willie Upton struggle to come to terms with her own young life and the lives that came before her. The Monsters of Templeton is a superb first novel. I encourage those who love to read to experience it, book club members to recommend it, and those who also love regional history to also read Alan Taylor’s excellent work of non-fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winning, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.

Fast forward from Cooper’s century to the next and treat yourself to a profusely illustrated tome about the “old wooden hotels of the Northern Catskill Mountains in New York State,” One Hundred Years on Resort Ridge: The Legendary Mountain Hotels of the Northern Catskill Mountains by railroad historian John Ham. Not meant to be a history of the hotel business in the Catskills from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, it is nonetheless a comprehensive pictorial review of the era of the grand and lesser-grand hotels. Most visitors to the Catskill High Peaks have heard the sad story of the burning of the Catskill Mountain House, one of America’s first destination hotels, but don’t have a clue what the darn thing looked like. Visiting the site of the Mountain House in Haines Falls is like discovering that you’ve lost a filling: The thing that held it together is still there, but the thing itself is gone. A goofy metaphor, to be sure, but you get the picture. And just in case you don’t, let me explain that while the ground that this grand hotel was perched on is still there, and the names of hotel visitors who are long gone are still etched into the rocks nearby, and Natty Bumppo’s even grander sweeping vistas (about as grand as “all creation”) are still as grand as ever (it is only we who have changed). Now we have Ham’s book to fill in that hole and a lot of others as well. For me, it was great to see old photographs of the Rip Van Winkle Tavern, enticing early travelers on the stagecoach through Palenville to tip their glass to one of the world’s most famous sleepers; the once-proud Kipp House in Lexington, now a vacant lot, albeit, one with lots of pretty maple trees; and the familiar Windham Arms ca. 1948 between incarnations as the early homestead of Colonel James Robertson and the contemporary Winwood Hotel.

Almost as if conceived as a companion piece to John Ham’s pictorial review of the old boarding houses, Roy Davis’ new book, Crest Park: A Catskill Mountain Memoir, is a nostalgic look at growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in the mountain town of Windham, NY. Told through the eyes of someone who obviously loves his hometown, Davis recounts growing up as the son of a large loving family whose roots are buried deep in Windham soil. The author’s direct male lineage starts with Thomas Munson, who arrived on the shores of North America in 1630 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ten generations later, Roy Davis was born in Windham, NY to William Davis and Harriett Munson. He wasn’t the first Munson to settle in town. Jarius Munson and his wife, Anna Hart-Munson, and their six children set west into the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains in 1800, eventually becoming some of Windham’s earliest settlers. Somewhere along the way, a later generation of Munsons built Crest Park in 1899, a boarding house on South Street in Windham. Eventually, Roy’s parents ran Crest Park in the halcyon years of the 1950s and 60s. Davis remembers these years vividly and describes them lovingly: Opening Crest Park to summer guests, lemonade on the big wraparound porch, weekly card parties, delicious smells from the huge hotel kitchen, maple syruping with family and friends, sledding down snow-covered mountains and bidding the summer guests goodbye. Davis has given us a glimpse of an America not-so-long-past and definitely not forgotten.