Books: June/July

Some books I read:

1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: This is a YA novel by one of my favorite authors about a nerdy Native kid leaving the reservation and going to a white kids' school in town. And it's kind of hilarious because the big fancy white kid school has like 200 students. That gave me some great flashbacks of high school. But it was very cute and sweet and enlightening. It's kind of a Young Adult, Native version of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Highly recommended.

2. The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis: I first read this when I was 15 or 16 and would stay summers with my aunt in Westchester, NY. My late uncle had worked for Scholastic (he invented the book fair; how bitchin' is that?) and my aunt still has a bunch of stock and gets crazy discounts. I think I read more real, good, modern literature on those trips than I ever have. It's a bit older, having been originally published in 1941, though you'd never know it. It's a really timeless book; it could've been written five years ago or two hundred years ago, a skill I envy. Martin Guerre is based on a true story of the life of Bertrande du Rols and her marriage to Guerre in the backdrop of 16th century France, during the rise of the Protestant Reformation. They are married off to each other in their early teens and, after the birth of their first child, Martin runs away from home for making an agricultural accounting error. He promises Bertrande he will come home in a few days or weeks. Instead he is gone for almost ten years before returning, Odysseus. Gradually Bertrande begins to suspect, in the coming years, that he is not her husband at all, but a stranger assuming Martin's identity. This book explores why it took Bertrande so long to come forward with her accusation (another child is born to her before she puts Martin on trial) and what, after so long, convinced her almost beyond doubt that he wasn't Martin. Even though she was also convinced that having slept side by side with a stranger for so long and never having come forward was a death sentence for him and a sentence to Hell for her.


3. The newest Sookie Stackhouse book, by Charlaine Harris: I do not remember this book's name, or what it is about. But I do remember that SPOILERS Sookie gets together with Eric, finally. So basically this book reminded me that Sookie has terrible taste in men. I liked Alcide the best. Also on the show True Blood he is handsome and looks like he is a musician in a band I would listen to. He would play the banjo, like the Avett Brothers. Why do I read this series?

4. 1491 by Charles C. Mann: A book about pre-Columbian Amerindian civilizations. A fairly peppy read, despite the kind of scary subject matter. It's in no way comprehensive, mostly concentrating on the big 3 of Meso and South American Indians: The Inca, the Mayans and the Aztecs (and even explaining why those names we learned for them growing up are all wrong.) But it contained some startling revelations, like the fact that when Pizarro and his men found Cuzco, they were most likely looking at the largest city they had ever seen, or that any European had seen. In the notes at the end of the book, Mann notes that it broke his heart to have to cut out a chapter on the American West, but he recommended a book called One Vast Winter Count, which I bought and am slowly chipping away it. It's...comprehensive.

5. Klondike: Phil Jourdan wrote this. It's funny. It's a noir detective story. It took me two sittings to read. It has a man named Hugo Slavia who is a surgeon and quotes philosophy. And a detective named Abe Klondike who is always suspecting that things are starting to become uncool.

In other news, I'm going back to Chicago again in about 10 days with the baby and his mother. I will probably spend too much money on books again, after I just recovered from all the damn crap I bought there in May.

A dude I love: Sherman Alexie

When I was in high school, my friend Will gave me a book that I've since grown to love, called Reservation Blues. The motivation was, I think, that I had given him a mix CD with a Robert Johnson song on it. Reservation Blues is the story of a couple of down-and-out Spokane reservation Indians who receive a magical guitar from Robert Johnson and form a blues band. They travel around the Pacific Northwest and learn, you know, stuff about life.

I immediately loved Sherman Alexie, both for his work and his amazingly outspoken public persona. His book of short stories, Ten Little Indians, is also one of my favorites, and my mother has spoken highly of his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Alexie keeps a pretty cool website, www.shermanalexie.com, which contains his blog and some general biographical info.

He made news recently for denouncing digital versions of books, as you can see in this clip of him on the Colbert Report:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/257719/december-01-2009/sherman-alexie

...where he says that none of his books are available for digital download. He points out, and rightly so, that we should all be paranoid of having our entire lives (like text messages, what we're reading, who our friends are, etc) all on one device that anyone with half a brain could hack. "I'm an Indian. I have plenty of reasons to fear the government."

Alexie also apparently is a great public speaker, and I'd like to see him in person someday. His speeches are a combination of stand-up, social commentary, and literary critcism. Speaking at Cornell last year, he spoke about the unacknowledged genocide of American Indians. "He demanded an acknowledgment of the genocide that wiped out entire tribes of people. 'Where is our roomful of moccasins?' asked Alexie, referring to the Holocaust Museum’s powerful room full of shoes that illustrates the thousands of lives lost in Nazi extermination camps."

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/41972527.html <<--Full article here

More than anything, Alexie writes eloquently about poverty, isolation, ruralism, and post 9/11 attitudes towards "brown people" that few other American others could ever hope to touch.

He's a cool dude. Everyone should read his stuff.