Book It: The Five Best Literary Events This Week

Maybe it’s just that it’s January, and everyone’s thinking about the outdoors — which is only sometimes a place we want to be without freezing off our…best intentions. But nonetheless, a lot of the literary events this week have to do with being outside: protesting the current political and social climate, or exploring various aspects of the natural world.

Whatever the reason, it’s probably a good month to read about the world outside rather than, you know, to actually go out there. Here are the five (indoor) literary events you might consider attending this week:

Donate Your Women’s March Signage
Western History and Genealogy Department
Through January 27
Central Denver Public Library
10 West 14th Avenue Parkway
If you participated in the Women’s March on Denver last week, the Denver Public Library wants you to help record the signs, the buttons, the banners and the various paraphernalia carried that day. Donate your items so they can be memorialized in the library's archives.

Gavin Ehringer, Leaving the Wild
Wednesday, January 24, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Award-winning journalist Gavin Ehringer comes to the Tattered Cover Colfax to discuss and sign his new book Leaving the Wild: The Unnatural History of Dogs, Cats, Cows, and Horses. The book deals with the benefits and pitfalls of the domestication of animals that altered the course of human history — including a Denver cat show that exhibited nude cats. Come to find out if that was a high or low point in the history of the species.

Lily Williams, If Sharks Disappeared
Thursday, January 25, 4 p.m.
BookBar
4280 Tennyson Street
Join BookBar in welcoming Lilly Williams and her book If Sharks Disappeared, a Kirkus Review-honored Best Book of 2017. Come for the reading and the strong message about protecting ocean wildlife and the oceans themselves; stay for the half-price wine.

Annette McGivney, Pure Land
Friday, January 26, 7 p.m.
Feral Mountain Co.
4320 Tennyson Street
Annette McGivney’s new book, Pure Land, has been favorably compared to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge by no less than Outdoor magazine. So what better place to celebrate such a pedigree than at Denver’s newest outdoor gear shop, Feral Mountain Co.? Other than the wilderness, I mean. Put on your hiking boots and c’mon out — you won’t really need the boots, but everyone else will be wearing them.

Ian Neligh, Gold!
Update: This event has been moved to Saturday, January 27, 7 p.m.
Tattered Cover LoDo
1628 16th Street
Ian Neligh explores the history and drama of gold mining yesterday and today in Gold!: Madness, Murder, and Mayhem in the Colorado Rockies. Neligh will discuss and sign copies of the book, which traces the story of an unusual subculture in the Colorado mountains that is “fueled by a delicate balance of hope, greed, and loss.” And also, one can presume, gold.

Looking for more to do? Go to the Westword calendar online.