I was asked by Michele Filgate to contribute to an omnibus round-up of favorite books of the year at Salon.com, which I treated as another rooftop from which to shout about Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn. So, hear ye:

“Battleborn,” by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead)

I felt like I was hiking up the side of a mountain while reading “Battleborn,” seduced by its moment-by-moment gifts and vistas such that the breath-shortening effects of altitude stole up on me. Her sentences can be mesmerizing in the way of mineral patterns, but in her characters the lava is very much alive, palpable in their longings for companionship, self-understanding, dignity. And just when we’ve acclimated ourselves to her craggy contemporary West, she gives us the novella “The Diggings,” akin to Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” in the ease and visionary verve with which it transports us utterly to another era.

I could’ve gone on and on about this book, but suffice it to say that it is a book I’ll be rereading for years to come. More excitement: she’s coming to read at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where I teach, in April.