Pennsylvania

3M suggested (a year ago): "There are some Pulitzers that are set in these states, but I have no idea if the setting is integral to the book." One she named was Rabbit at Rest by John Updike.

In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.

Bonnie added: "Some may prefer to read a series of books in the order published, but I think I'd be more interested in the older Rabbit than the young Rabbit playing basketball or the young married Rabbit cheating on his wife. I think I could relate better to an older man. And this may be the best in the series because, after all, it was Rabbit at Rest that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991."

Virginia

Teddy Rose suggested (way back in February): "VA: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp." Teddy's review.

Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Wisconsin

Laurie suggests: "WI: Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz. My review is here."

Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the story of her family in careful doses, as anxious to hide from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of that night.

Ruth, haunted by her own memory of that fateful night, grows up under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, until the heartrending truth is uncovered. Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novel shows her compassion and a unique understanding of the American landscape and the people who live on it.

Stately Knowledge

Tricia, a teacher educator at the University of Richmond, has a blog post that may interest you. Stately Knowledge lists a number of books about ALL the states, including one about a 50-car train followed by a caboose representing Washington, D.C. In her post Tricia links to another blog:

Mrs. McGowan's 50 States Book List has children's books for the states, but be aware the list includes authors FROM the states as well as books ABOUT the states. Mrs. McGowan links to another blog:

Carol Hurst's The State We're In lists state books for older children. She lists only one book per state, but because I've read some of these books and other books by some of the authors, this looks like an excellent list. I see no reason not to include books from this list in your reading around the states, since basically the protagonists of the books are simply a bit younger than in books for adults. The decision, of course, is all yours.

Texas

R-Lo said, "Actually, one suggestion I have for Texas that I think is really great is John Phillip Santos' National Book Award finalist, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. A review of this can be found on my blog."

Part treasury of the elders, part elegy, part personal odyssey, part Book of the Dead, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation is an immigration tale and a haunting family story. John Phillip Santos brings to life a pageant of unforgettable family figures: from Madrina -- touched with epilepsy and prophecy ever since, as a girl, she saw a dying soul leave its body -- to Teofilo, who was kidnapped as an infant and raised by the Kikapu Indians of northern Mexico. And he searches for answers to the mystery surrounding his grandfather's suicide in San Antonio in 1939. Combining lyrical prose, magic realism, and haunting confession into an unforgettable voice, Santos weaves together Mexican mythology and the history of Texas to create the story of how the soul of one Mexican family was passed down, and sometimes nearly lost, across borders and decades, into the present.

Wyoming

Sharon said, "I just finished Open Season by C.J. box. It was set in Wyoming. Here's my review."

"When a high-powered bullet hits living flesh, it makes a distinctive -pow-WHOP- sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance." And so it begins for Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden who, with the shot of a rifle, is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but also the life and family he loves. C. J. Box knows the wilderness and he knows how to create a wonderfully authentic, vividly alive sense of place. He has created a memorable new hero: a man who is full of failings, but strong and honorable.

Kentucky

Sharon said, "I just finished reading a book set in Kentucky, Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio. I put a review here.

Rural Kentucky in the 1950s is not an easy place to grow up in, and it's especially hard for 10-year-old Icy Sparks, a bright, curious child who is orphaned and living with her grandparents. Life becomes even more difficult for Icy when the violent tics and uncontrollable cursing begin. Try as she might, her secrets -- those croaks, jerks, and spasms -- keep slipping out. Her teachers think she's willful, her friends call her the "Frog Child." Exiled from the schoolroom, she spends time in a children's asylum where she learns about being different and teaches her doctors even more. Eventually, Icy finds solace in the company of an obese woman who knows what it's like to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community.

Louisiana

Jill said, "Here's another Louisiana book -- a fantastic look at antebellum slave-holding and marriage and its effect on the people living in this immoral system. (But I bet you already know about this book!)" No, this is new to me, but it looks good. Here's Jill's review of Property by Valerie Martin."

Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion, Property, which won the Orange Prize, takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction: the voice of a woman slaveholder. Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, self-absorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride, bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husband's mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams -- an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.

Missouri

Jill said, "I just finished another Tom Sawyer companion novel -- this one about Becky Thatcher. It's called Becky : The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher by Lenore Hart (my review)."

Becky Thatcher wants to set the record straight. She was never the weeping ninny Mark Twain made her out to be in his famous novel. She knew Samuel Clemens before he was “Mark Twain,” when he was a wide-eyed dreamer who never could get his facts straight. Yes, she was Tom’s childhood sweetheart, but the true story of their love, and the dark secret that tore it apart, never made it into Twain’s novel.

Now married to Tom’s cousin Sid Hopkins, Becky has children of her own to protect while the men of Missouri are off fighting their “un-Civil” War. But when tragedy strikes at home, Becky embarks on a phenomenal quest to find her husband and save her family -- a life journey that takes her from the Mississippi River’s steamboats to Ozark rebel camps, from Nevada’s silver mines to the gilded streets of San Francisco.

Time and again, stubborn but levelheaded Becky must reconcile her independent spirit and thirst for adventure with the era’s narrow notions of marriage and motherhood. As she seeks to find a compromise between fulfillment and security, she also grapples with ghosts of her past. Can she forgive herself, or be forgiven, for the lies she’s told to the men she’s loved? Will she ever forget the maddening, sweet-talking, irresponsible Tom Sawyer, the boy who stole her heart as a little girl? And when she is old, and Huck and Tom and Twain only memories, whose shadow will still lie beside her?

Texas

Jill said, "My Texas book is The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block (review). This was a GREAT book - highly recommended."

In Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory. Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family’s farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. As a young man, he believed himself to be “the one person too many”; now he is all that remains. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage “Master of Nothingness” –- a prime specimen of that gangly, pimple-rashed, too-smart breed of adolescent that vanishes in a puff of sarcasm at the slightest threat of human contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Seth sets out on a quest to find her lost relatives and to conduct an “empirical investigation” that will uncover the truth of her genetic history. Though neither knows of the other’s existence, Abel and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of a mythical place called Isidora, a fantasy world free from the sorrows of remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost.