Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. A 1927 novel built around the historical Archbishop Lamy, the French cleric who tried — with little success — to bring Roman Catholic order to the Hispanic and Pueblo Catholicism of nineteenth-century New Mexico. The slow, observed prose and the spare descriptions of the New Mexican landscape are foundational. Read it before walking into the Cathedral Basilica.
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols. A 1974 comic novel of land, water, and Hispanic-Anglo conflict in a fictional northern New Mexico village. Funny, angry, and the best fictional portrait of how Hispano New Mexicans see their own history.
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. A coming-of-age novel set in 1940s eastern New Mexico, anchored in curanderismo (folk medicine) and the Catholic-pagan layered religion of the rural Hispano communities. A staple of New Mexican high schools.
Anything by Tony Hillerman. The Navajo detective novels (A Thief of Time, Dance Hall of the Dead) are set across the Navajo and Hopi reservations west of here, but they capture the high-desert New Mexico atmosphere better than any travel book.