Louise Erdrich's Blog

Dear Book Lovers,

Every spring they appear. Birds we don't normally see for the rest of the year touch down and startle us. Right now orioles are passing through the city. Some will stay and build their tunnel-like nests in the highest branches, their songs like glass bells. I'm reading A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul.

Only recently have scientists been able to trace bird migration more accurately, and the results of their studies are astounding: Chimney Swifts can live and sleep aloft for 10 months at a time, only landing to nest and raise their young. Birds are able to put half their brains to sleep while flying, while the other half calculates the route. The science of how birds follow maps has to do with magnetism, starlight, and apparently defies quantum physics. I have to read that part over again.

Other terrific reading: We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff, a history of Native American Comedy. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman, includes two of my all time favorite stories, The Great Silence by Ted Chiang, and The Midnight Zone by Lauren Groff.

I read The Midnight Zone past midnight on a very still dark night and the last two paragraphs scared me to pieces. I'd read this story in daylight and not been so deeply affected. But I recommend reading The Midnight Zone alone at night. Being that scared by a piece of writing is strangely uplifting.

Yours truly!

Louise

Dear Book Lovers
I must report that wonderful books by Native writers are flooding our store.�� On the young adult front, Firekeeper's Daughter, by Angeline Boulley, explores an Anishinaabe community through the voice of a fierce, funny young woman who 'began as a secret, and then a scandal.'�� We're also excited about Ancestor Approved, a rich trove of Intertribal stories for kids, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith, as well as Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe and Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild.�� Eric Gansworth's Apple, Skin to the Core, is like all of his work both cerebral and passionately of this earth.��

To Be a Water Protector, The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers, by Winona LaDuke, is a call to join the movement battling world ending fossil fuel projects, currently Line 3.�� This is powerful, straightforward, essential work in the voice of a master storyteller fighting for everyone's future.�� American Indian Stories, by Zitk��la-���� with an introduction by Layli Long Soldier, illuminates the life of an extraordinary spirit, a Lakota woman whose voice is both historical and contemporary.�� Brandon Hobson's The Removed grapples with historical removal and loss in a Cherokee family.����
What a wealth and swirl of books!�� And there are more.�� I'll be adding to this list.

A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo and bearing the lovely title, 'When the Light of the World was Subdued Our Songs Came Through' rests at my bedside because it contains worlds of thought, sorrows, and visions of power and solace. ��
It is late, and I'm going to open this volume now.�� Good night dear book people!��
Read on, stay careful, be ready for spring.

Louise




�� ��

This year will always be a year of befores and afters.�� Here we are now, in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing.�� Here at Birchbark Books, we grieve with George Floyd's family.�� We stand with the protesters and are among the protesters.�� We are heartsick and furious. Our task now is to provide information that will help deepen understanding that will lead to real, true, change. However it is worded -- defund, dismantle, abolish -- we have to fix policing.�� A movement to do this has started here in Minneapolis and reverberated throughout the world.�� What we do now will help lead the way for others.



There are reasons that reform hasn't worked since Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and countless others were killed by police.�� Ricardo Lopez, Senior Political Reporter for The Minnesota Reformer, wrote this article addressing systemic racism in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and why it persists in our police force.�� I can't say it better than Mr. Lopez. �� ��
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/minnesotas-decades-long-failure-to-confront-police-abuse?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker��





Last Friday, the City Council passed a resolution to create a "Future of Community Safety Work Group".�� This group will study modes of public safety and seek experts who can help keep ALL citizens safe without resorting to harassment, intimidation, and violence.�� The result of Black Lives Matter, Black Visions Collective, citizen activism, and this study by the City Council, is likely to be a policing initiative on the ballot next November.�� We need to know the issues and get out the vote.



When I first saw signs demanding Abolish The Police, I was confused.�� How could such a thing happen?�� I turned to The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale.�� This�� matter-of-fact book has helped me understand what an initiative next fall could look like.�� I can't recommend this book highly enough.�� Let's not lose the momentum that we have, let's not stop creatively coming together and growing, let's not be a city that allows things to go back to the way they were before.�� I want to be part of a true after. ��



We have a few copies of The End of Policing now, and will be getting many more soon from Verso Press.�� Please call and reserve a copy of this book.�� The word essential has gotten a lot of use lately, but when I say this book is essential I truly mean it.��



While you are waiting for The End of Policing, I also recommend White Rage, The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson -- a book that brings clarity to history and sheds light on where we are now.�� At present, I'm reading From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.�� I'm not done with this book yet, but Taylor is a formidable analyst and a brilliant writer.��



Shock, rage, sorrow and protest open a lot of hearts.�� Let's keep our hearts open to one another and make real change happen right here.��



Love and Justice,



Louise

The Undocumented Americans. Early on in this brilliant, vivid, tender, furious work, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio tells the reader that she is crazy.�� But I've not met a saner person on the page.�� Brave, yes, outrageous and honest, yes, but far from crazy, although Villavicencio shows how being crazy is often the sane response of an undocumented person to life in the United States.

Villavicencio interviews undocumented workers who rushed toward the burning towers on 9/11, cleaned up afterward, ruining their health, people who saved other American lives during Hurricane Sandy.�� In every crisis, including this pandemic, undocumented workers are on the front lines cleaning hospitals, delivering food, caring for the vulnerable.�� Just look at the headlines, "Don't Deport Health Care Workers", "Undocumented Farmworkers, Still Deportable, Are 'Essential'.

I've dogeared half pages of this book, not only because the information is so vital, but because Villavicencio has remarkable descriptive gifts.�� She describes her father's feet, "small and fat, like mine, so you can't tell they're swollen.�� After a few years, my dad's feet would hurt so much that he walked like he was on hot coals . . . "�� She talks about his life, measured in deliveries, "a raisin bagel with cream cheese and coffee with hazelnut creamer.�� A blueberry muffin and black coffee; two cranberry scones . . . "�� There is Julieta, "a big woman with the cheerful, paranoid manner of a debutante with a secret."�� And Theodoro, "a lonely, ancient man, but he says he is fifty-six.�� He is a tree.�� His mouth is curved downward, wrinkled set deep like bark grooves . . . our conversations feel like dark, hardened sap.

What can I say.�� This book.�� I read it in gulps, late at night.�� I couldn't stop.�� You really have to read this book. ( I would press it into your hands if I didn't have to stay 6 feet away from you.)

Dear Friends,



When people say "this has never happened to our country before" I want to say, "yes it has."�� Indigenous people suffered wave after wave of European borne epidemic diseases, which killed 9 of every 10 people.�� The trauma continued through the Flu of 1918 and the scourge of tuberculosis.�� When treaties were made it was thought that Native people were going to vanish, but no.�� We are still here.�� In her torrential book of poetry Colonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz addresses these losses.�� With tenacious wit, ardor, and something I can only call magnificence, Diaz addresses the consuming need we have for one another.�� This is a book for any time, but especially a book for this time.�� These days, and who knows for how long, we can only touch a trusted small number of people.�� Diaz brings depth and resonance to the fact that this has always been so.�� Be prepared to journey down a wild river.



Yours for books,



Louise��

Dear Friends,



When people say "this has never happened to our country before" I want to say, "yes it has." Indigenous people suffered wave after wave of European borne epidemic diseases, which killed 9 of every 10 people. The trauma continued through the Flu of 1918 and the scourge of tuberculosis. When treaties were made it was thought that Native people were going to vanish, but no. We are still here. In her torrential book of poetry, Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz addresses these losses. With tenacious wit, ardor, and something I can only call magnificence, Diaz speaks of the consuming need we have for one another. This is a book for any time, but especially a book for this time. These days, and who knows for how long, we can only touch a trusted small number of people. Diaz brings depth and resonance to the fact that this has always been so. Be prepared to journey down a wild river.



Yours for books,



Louise��

Oh, Winter.  Here you are again.  It seems like you never left.  The snow lies heavy on my heart and on the trampoline that I have been keeping shoveled for many a winter past.  The thing is, books -- when snowed in, when the temp drops, when you feel the snow will never stop.  At least there are books!



And what books.  I have to write about Olga again!  We know that I'm completely in favor of Olga Tokarczuk.  From the advanced readers pile, I plucked Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, and immediately loved the eccentric voice and the murder mystery which satisfied with its eco undertone and its slippery wit.  I also loved Flights but it is utterly different, more philosophical, grounded in the body.  I found myself a bit choked up when I learned she won the Nobel Prize because she so deserves it.  And because now there will be more translations of her books.





I loved Ann Patchett's The Dutch House.  Perhaps it is my favorite of her books, which is saying a great deal.  Ann wrote a character I still think about, Maeve, an ironic saint.  And there is a villain she does not redeem -- very difficult to maintain a loathsome character.  I so respect Ann's discipline.  The house is also a character.  You won't forget it.  This beautifully constructed novel really is the perfect read when you are snowed in or need something classy looking to be seen with in a coffee house.  I mean, the cover alone! 



All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews.  Actually, anything by Miriam Toews. 



Two Books That Belong Together:  Cold Warriors, by Duncan White and The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott.  I read these books together and was pretty much overcome by all that I learned about Doctor Zhivago, the Cold War, and the real Lara.  I didn't know that one of our secret cold war weapons was actually literature and that Animal Farm was translated into Polish and thousands of books were air lifted and dropped behind the Iron Curtain.  The Secrets We Kept is a delicious read about what disregarded secretaries knew and told or didn't tell.  After I read these books together I kept collaring people, pushing these books at them the way I'm now pushing them at you. 



What am I reading tonight?  Before I make pumpkin pie with my youngest daughter?  Exhalation by Ted Chiang.  Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.  





Now I have to stop.  I promise a Holiday List to come and also books to look forward to when January happens.   Also, I will let you know how this pie turns out.  I really can only cook two things and neither one is pie.





Yours, as always, for books.



Louise

People (including me) usually answer the question "What's on your book table" with a lament about the messy pile and the impossible task of keeping those books in some sort of order.  However, I have cleaned my room.  It has taken time, I'm really proud of this.  In keeping with this, I am going to give a neat list of what my neat stack looks like starting with the largest book and ending with the top one, the smallest. 








Last Witness, by Svetlana Alexievich.  Compelling accounts and memories of children who were very young when World War II started.



The Mosquito, by Timothy C. Winegard.  Fascinating!  The uses of the mosquito, besides essential food source of birds?  To cull humanity.



Coyote Warrior, Paul VanDevelder.  The New Indian Wars and a young Mandan/Hidatsa lawyer who continued his father's fight in Washington.



A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde.  The complex solace of what is means to forget -- and the inevitability of same.



The Nickel boys, by Colson Whitehead.  Searing account of a nightmarish and predatory "school" that swallows a promising child.



Facism, by Madeleine Albright.  If she is writing a book about facism then we should all read it right now.



Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk.  A sly, seductive, funny murder mystery in which an "invisible" older woman takes on a personal investigation of killings that seem to be the doing of forest animals rising up to exact justice upon those who desecrate their domain.  This is one of my favorite novels of the summer, or the fall (I read an early copy) and I think it will be on many a messier book table than my own very soon.



Yours for books!

Since reading Pat Barker's powerful Regeneration trilogy, I've been an ardent admirer of her work.  The Silence of the Girls, her latest novel, is extraordinary.  Ostensibly a retelling of the Illiad from the point of view of Briseis, captured queen and war prize of Archilles, the book seems more an artifact unearthed from time than a historical novel.  Barker's genius is to tell this story with such simple and direct poetry that it speaks truth.  Says Briseis "Great Achilles.  Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up  We never called him any of those things, we called him, 'the butcher.'"
     Every sentence is anchored in the senses.  The odors of women waiting in a hot tower to be murdered or enslaved by their captors.  The pathetic sight of slave women too old to be sexually used, asleep in burrows with the camp dogs.  The crackling sound of lethal infection beneath the skin of a wounded soldier.  The taste of watered wine.  The blunt disgust and horror of being forced to have sex with the man who has murdered your family.  The salty rapture of bathing in the sea.  Barker works with a lived poetry.
     At times this book reads as a moving commentary on our current ethos. 


     As Briseis unflinchingly recounts the daily murders and the shifting uses enslaved women are put to in the Greek war camp, she uses the survival bonds of hurt and seething women as a sort of chorus of disdain.  Men waste their power in idiotic quarrels over women, over honor, over nothing, while women desperately attempt to guard their children and live out their lives no matter how brutal.  One of Barker's great themes is how violence erodes the personality.  The stubborn pride of Achilles leads to the loss of his childhood love, Patroclus.  Meditating on the madness of Achilles' grief Barker refers to Strange Meeting, by perhaps the greatest poet/soldier of World War One, Wilfred Owen.  Over and over, Achilles enters an underworld of the war dead, Hades, searching, and 'then, as he probes them, one springs up and stares, with piteous recognition in fixed eyes . . . '  This is a line from Strange Meeting, in which a soldier meets the man he recently killed, as does Achilles.  He is haunted by Lycaon, the son of Priam, who scrambled up a river bank toward Achilles, greeting him with the word, Friend.  Achilles did not spare him, or think twice, and he is tortured by the enormity of his casual cruelty.





As powerful as this scene and so many scenes of male reckoning are, throughout this book, it is a book of women.  Women who bear their children in agony and raise them with infinite care, only to see their sons slaughtered off-handedly on the intimate field of battle.  Women who survive by exchanging warnings, gossip, information on how to handle men.  Women who, let us not forget in the nascent democracy that was Greece, had no agency, no power, who were chattel, who were silenced.  In Homer's gorgeous bombastic epics the men slaughter children and each other, they pout, they roar, they rage to the heavens, while the women take care of everything on earth. 



Oh dear, I forgot about Valentine's Day!  Oh well.  It is a truly brave fellow who will gift this book to his lady love.  And a woman among women who will get it for herself and pass it to a friend.



The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker. 

I am not a fan of daylight savings time, but here we are.  It will be dark no matter how we try to play with time.  For these nights that start before the day is over, thank Hermera, Goddess of Daylight and Hypnos, God of Sleep, for Good Books, under the protection of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Patron Saint of Literacy.  Notice how all of this early darkness stirs the need for divine intervention?  Those books I mentioned.  I must begin with Kate Atkinson's Transcription because since reading this book I can't find another novel that I want to read.  Transcription begins with a woman lying on pavement after an accident, being fitted by a neck brace, and thinking 'What an odd thing existence was.'  Read the beginning after you read the end.  (You'll want to start over, but there are other books, like The Winter Soldier, and many short days to come.)  This book upends the usual existentially sour male dominated spy novel by putting the narrative into the capable, kind, naive yet ruthless sort of young woman you would want as a relative.  She transcribes the conversations of Nazi sympathizers during the beginning years of World War II, while living a mysterious and richly peopled life.  I can only tell you that you won't want to miss a word of this book.  Atkinson is so adept and deadpan a novelist that in her hands you sweep along with the narrative, beneath its spell, all the while knowing your master (this novelist) is delighting in casting this spell.  Thank you, Kate Atkinson.





In difficulty over finding my next novel, having finished a most extraordinary biography (Stefan Zweig's Balzac, bought at What Goes Around Bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin) I chanced on The Plant Messiah by Carlos Magdalena.  Subtitle: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species.  I was hooked when I read Magdalena's declaration that he doe not accept extinction.  I was enthralled with the lengths he goes to in order to crack the secrets of how to propagate the one remaining plant of a species on the very brink.  This is true suspense.  When he compares the world of plants and the process of extinction to a library in which, for instance, we burn all of the books but the ones with blue covers, he means to tell us how little we know about plants.  Plants contain millions of unknown medical salvations as well as being, of course, carbon gobblers, producers of oxygen, our most reliable source of food, and if I may say, extremely pleasant companions for a desk bound writer.  I have, for instance, a gardenia bush sent in the early 1990's by the writer Scott Turow.  He has surely forgotten all about his lovely gesture, but this gardenia continues somehow to flourish -- reliably producing five or six scented tropical blossoms every August, here in Minnesota.  All it seems to need besides lots of water is southern light, a summer porch, and seashells embedded in its dirt.  But sorry, there is another book . . .



Maid, by Stephanie Land, by another young woman you'd like as a relative, is an autobiographical day to day struggle.  Land battles the dirt and disorder of others in a ferocious effort to provide for her daughter.  In the process, she not only to survives but grows into the writer of a vibrant and engaging book.  I've also started reading Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg.  Long Descriptive Subtitle: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.  That tells you what the book is about and what we have to fight to keep.  He includes independent bookstores as palaces, which of course I appreciate.





Back to The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason.  By rights this book should be number one on all bestseller lists at present.  Why isn't it?  Can it be that this novel is too interesting?  Too well constructed?  Too filled with humanity, depth, arcane facts and matters of life and death?  Is it just too perfect a book?  Everyone I have pushed to read this book says yes.  Please judge for yourself if this isn't one of the most satisfying novels you have ever encountered.  



Novels for the Long Nights:  The Overstory, by Richard Powers, Transcription, by Kate Atkinson, and The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason.
Perfect Gift Book:  The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley
Books of the Past: Balzac, by Stefan Zweig
Books of the Future:  Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James.  This book isn't out until next February, but it is a whirlwind fantasy, violently strange, gorgeous, outrageous, brutal, slippery, and even funny.