Bookish Thoughts

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 t...

I've been meaning to read this book for years, and now I'm kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. It might actually be a perfect coming of age story that deals refuses to shy away from a wealth of tough issues or lose it's hope or humor, while also having fun with the more common tropes of First Love and The Big Game. The story is sort of a diary of main character Arnold "Junior" Spirit, and it's peppered with his illustrations and cartoons. They're a great addition to the story, sometimes merely illustrating characters or ideas, other times containing bits of the narrative. It's a fun way to pull in Junior's passion and make the book feel a lot more personal and unique. Junior spends the book struggling to reconcile past and future, his individuality with his community (or communities). He leaves the reservation to attend the better funded white school in town. As the first person to do this, he receives crap from all direc...