I was going to say that the books I found most striking in 2009 were nonfiction, but as I think about it, that’s not completely true. Yes, I would say that the “best” books I read this year (whatever that means) fall into this category: William Vollmann’s Imperial and Dave Cullen’s Columbine, both of which used a combination of reporting, reflection and narrative to undercut pervasive myths about their subjects and get at the more complicated stories underneath. But equally compelling were a trio of small books — B.H. Fairchild’s poetry collection Usher, Lydia Millet’s short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys, and Ted Kooser’s brief memoir Lights on a Ground of Darkness — that each in its own way reordered my inner world. What connects all of these books, including “Imperial” and “Columbine,” is the depth of their observation, their tendency to nuance and detail, the way they have of slowing down the moment so that we can see it fresh.
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Joseph Boyden. If you are an American, this may be the first time you have heard this Canadian writer’s name. It will almost certainly not be the last. Boyden, who is part Ojibwa Indian, published his third novel The Orenda in Canada in September, and it has been a runaway bestseller here ever since. For reasons known only to his American publisher, the book will not come out until May in the U.S., but we live in a wired world so you can simply order the book from Amazon.ca or Amazon.uk, where the book became available in November.
The Orenda — the title refers to the Indian word for “soul” or “life force” — uses fiction to retell the foundation myth of Canada, and, by extension, all of North America, putting Native people back at the center of the story where they belong. The novel, set in the mid-1600s during the French conquest of what is now Ontario, Canada, is told by three rotating narrators: a proud and violent Huron warrior named Bird, a young Iroquois girl named Snow Falls whom Bird adopts as his own after slaughtering her family, and a devout French Jesuit priest named Christophe who is based on the historical figure St. Jean de Brebéuf.
I have written about The Orenda before for The Millions, and I will almost certainly do so again when the book has its American release in May. I apologize in advance for repeating myself, but in a literary culture beset by endless hype, logrolling, and backscratching, it is rare to find the genuine article: a truly necessary book. The Orenda sheds new light on the dark crime at the heart of all North American history, but more important than that, it renders the ostensible victims of that crime, the Indians, as complex, fully realized human beings.
Every day while I was reading an advance copy of The Orenda this summer, I drove past a billboard advertising The Lone Ranger, which showed Johnny Depp in war paint with a dead crow inexplicably plopped on top of his head. That’s why Boyden’s work is necessary. We all know Depp’s Tonto is a travesty, and the movie justifiably tanked at the box office, but we don’t as a culture seem to know what to put in the place of that war-whooping savage that filled the screen of the million-and-one Westerns we all watched on TV as kids. In The Orenda, Joseph Boyden is quietly, brilliantly showing us the way.
More from A Year in Reading 2013
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A Year in Reading: Omar El Akkad
A Year in Reading: Richard Lange
Richard Lange is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of stories Dead Boys. He lives in Los Angeles. Read more about him at www.richlange.comMy favorite book of the year was Fat City, by Leonard Gardner. It’s a novel about a couple of small-time boxers in Stockton, CA in the late ’50s. We follow these fighters as they train in ratty gyms, drink in skid row bars, chase women they don’t love, and work through their hangovers in dusty onion fields. Gardener finds harsh beauty in the bleakness and constructs sad poems out of broken dreams. These men want so much and get so little, and all of a sudden, BAM, you’re sitting there trying to read with tears in your eyes.Another book I liked was Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly’s dad has jumped bail on a meth charge, and it’s up to Ree to care for her two younger brothers and overmedicated mom. Her quest to track down her father before the bond company snatches the family’s house puts her in conflict with an unsavory branch of her extended clan and leads to some harrowing scrapes. You’ll shiver during Woodrell’s descriptions of the icy Ozarks, flinch at the sudden violence and come to love the indomitable Ree. It’s a simple tale made momentous by Woodrell’s quiet insistence that these poor folks and their hardscrabble lives deserve our respectful attention. I have to put in an Elmore Leonard, too, The Switch, from 1978. A kidnapping plot spins out of control in a shaky moral landscape where everybody’s guilty of something. I’m a fool for Leonard’s casual yet tightly controlled style and peerless dialogue. There’s also a lot of humor here, as he skewers the ’70s suburban country club lifestyle and makes sure that all the bad guys (and girls) get what’s coming to them.More from A Year in Reading 2007
I can’t find a good place to jump in with a general comment so this is the latest My Year in Reading so I’ll jump in here.
I love this chain of writers/readers/writers/readers. So many interesting books to put on hold at the library, books I never would have found on my own. This is why I love The Millions.
Also, or But–I wish pop culture (junk to me) didn’t get sentences and paragraphs here. RIP Susan Sontag, it’s really tricky to write about pop culture or its context and have it be truly interesting. As David Ulin says above, all of his selections in some way “reordered his inner world.” That’s what I want and Jackie Chan, Madonna or Beyonce will never ever do this for me. Others disagree. Just my two shekels.
I agree that “reordered my inner world” is a phrase both lovely and precise for that thing that happens when a book moves/changes you. I’m going to be quoting that for a while.