The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was a book club pick that I was particularly excited for. I've been meaning to read Sherman Alexie's work for years, so it was nice to finally have a firm excuse to put him at the top of my reading list.

This collection of short stories packs a punch. Many of the stories are short, but they're dense. I had trouble reading more than two or three at a time, meaning that it took me a week to read the book. Which is saying something, since I frequently read books of similar length in a single day. But these stories took a lot of digesting. There's a lot of pain and anger that can't be funneled into anything except writing, so the reader experiences the full force of it. I was frequently caught off guard by single sentences that exploded into my brain and refused to let me go on.

There are a lot of repeated themes: poverty, alcoholism, basketball, stories. This is another reason it helped to slow down with this book. If I'd try to just barrel through, some of that repetition would probably have bored me, leading me to disconnect a bit. But because I was taking it a bit at a time, I was better able to appreciate each story on it's own merits.

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