January 2015: Louise Erdrich

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January 2015: Louise Erdrich

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1sweetiegherkin
Editado: Ene 1, 2015, 12:21 am

Our first author for the new year is Louise Erdrich. Has anyone read her works in the past? What are you planning to read this month?

edited for typo

2Mphathi
Ene 1, 2015, 12:20 am

I am planning to read the poem Pass me a meatball Jones, a gathering of feelings, by James David Matthews.

3Tara1Reads
Ene 1, 2015, 12:55 am

I have The Painted Drum. Although I am not sure I will get to it in January as Louise Erdrich is the author chosen for the month of April for the AAC challenge.

4sweetiegherkin
Ene 2, 2015, 11:05 am

>3 Tara1Reads: Well, I guess if you do get to in January, you'll be ahead of the game for April! :)

My plan is to pick up from the library Love Medicine in print and The Round House as an audiobook. I've heard a lot of buzz about The Round House, and none about Love Medicine but the latter is on the list of 1001 books to read before you die, so I figured I should give it a shot.

5overlycriticalelisa
Ene 2, 2015, 11:38 am

i won't get to them this month, but have long been meaning to read tracks, love medicine, and the beet queen. i have read one by her that i wasn't impressed by, tales of burning love.

6LucindaLibri
Ene 2, 2015, 5:59 pm

I read quite a few Louise Erdrich novels in preparation for a Summer North Dakota Humanities Symposium focused on her work a couple of years ago. A few others I read for book groups. I was trying to read all of her work, but got distracted, so appreciate this push to get back to it.
I've read:
Love Medicine
The Beet Queen
Tracks
The Bingo Palace
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse excellent!
Four Souls a favorite
The Plague of Doves also excellent
The Round House disturbing but well done
and
Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

So I think Tales of Burning Love is next on my list. I'll try to get to that this month.

One heads up I have to offer: several of the books on the list above include the same families/characters and can be viewed as a kind of series (though they can also be read separately). Some of the books have been revised substantially by the author, so you might want to get the most current versions (though I used whatever copies the library had for some of them and was not disappointed). (If you want more info, the interwebs has lots to tell you :)

Enjoy!

7sweetiegherkin
Ene 2, 2015, 10:48 pm

>6 LucindaLibri: Thanks for the heads up. I did see that Love Medicine was the first of a trilogy but interesting to know that perhaps the books are not so very inter-connected after all. I also saw that there were several updated versions in my county's library system but rather than wait around for inter-library loan requests, I'm just going to go with the one that is in my local library.

8LucindaLibri
Ene 2, 2015, 11:36 pm

>7 sweetiegherkin: I'd say they are interconnected, but not interdependent. You can read them in any order . . . in fact there are different recommendations for what order to read them in if you prefer chronological in terms of the story or chronological in terms of order published. It's all good, either way . . . because the stories are moving and the characters are interesting . . . and the writing is excellent!

90wllight
Ene 3, 2015, 9:01 am

I want to try Four Souls, I think. I'll get it from the library. I haven't read this author before, and from what I have seen of her work I should enjoy it. Good to know order is not important!

10Tara1Reads
Ene 6, 2015, 8:57 pm

Review: The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich
Also my very first review posted on LT
NO SPOILERS



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is the first book I have read by Louise Erdrich and at first I did not think I would get through it. I hated the first couple of chapters and all the characters that were introduced in the beginning. But I kept reading and the book got better as I got to know more about the narrator of the first part of the book. But the book really got better for me in the second part when the narrator switched over to an old man, Bernard, who I loved. My favorite chapter was in this second part of the book, the chapter entitled "The Wolves."

I wasn't always impressed with Erdrich's writing. Sometimes I thought her sentences were too long and confusing with too many poorly placed commas and dashes that made following along difficult. But then there were a few times where she absolutely blew me away with awe-inspiring quotes such as the following:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

Needless to say, I was really struck by some of the writing, some of the events in the book, and how Erdrich brought everything together in the end. I am so glad I went out of my comfort zone to try a book by Louise Erdrich. It was definitely worth it, and I might pick up another book by her in April for the AAC.

11sweetiegherkin
Ene 7, 2015, 9:44 pm

>10 Tara1Reads: Hey, nice job on your very first review! :) I do like that quote you shared.

12Tara1Reads
Ene 7, 2015, 10:17 pm

>11 sweetiegherkin: Thanks! I realized after I read The Painted Drum that it's considered the last book in the series. But thanks to this thread I know it doesn't really matter which order you read them in. And the book certainly didn't seem like part of a series when I was reading it. It was complete on its own.

13sweetiegherkin
Ene 15, 2015, 8:43 pm

How is everyone doing with reading Louise Erdrich this month? I'm finding that even though I think it is well written, I'm having a hard time getting into Love Medicine. Not sure why ...

14LucindaLibri
Ene 15, 2015, 10:42 pm

Tonight I started Tales of Burning Love. Some familiar characters and families (the Morrissey's and the Nanapush's). Also, dry humor describing the main character Jack Mauser and his 5 wives . . . and that's just in the first 30 pages!

15MarthaJeanne
Ene 16, 2015, 3:50 am

>10 Tara1Reads: I suggest you copy your review to the work so that it can be seen with the 31 reviews already there. Reviews belong to your book record. They can be added easily in edit book or on the review page for the work reached by clicking on the number of reviews or on the reviews link in the left hand menu.

16sweetiegherkin
Ene 26, 2015, 10:24 am

I stumbled on this very interesting and insightful interview of Louise Erdrich by the Paris Review. Thought I would share. Enjoy!

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louise-e...

17Tara1Reads
Editado: Ene 27, 2015, 6:21 pm

>16 sweetiegherkin: Thanks for sharing. I did not know all that about her husband. I also didn't know she had a bookstore in Minneapolis. Too bad I didn't know about it when I was there.

18sweetiegherkin
Feb 7, 2015, 5:10 pm

This week I finished reading Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, which as I said earlier, I found a little slow to get into for the first 20-30 pages. After that though, I ended up really enjoying it, if enjoy is the right word for this book. Erdrich is a very talented writer with a poetic pacing to her prose; I didn't realize that poetry was the quality I was appreciating so much in the novel until I read that interview in The Paris Review (linked above). The book featured a wide range of characters in terms of age, sex, etc. that were all interconnected in one way or another (many through familial relationship, although these relationships were often complicated, to say the least). The characters were all interesting, even the ones who only showed up tangentially, so I could see why Erdrich would want to revisit them later in other books.

Re: all our earlier discussions about the series, it seems that her books are NOT strictly series in the way we are used to with some serializations, like Harry Potter for instance, in which the story simply progresses forward chronologically in another book. When I was doing some research to find out which book came next and finding very different results (including whether or not particular titles were even part of the series or not, or what the series' title is), the conclusion I was drawing is that Erdrich writes new stories that sometimes feature characters from a previous story but the books are not necessarily interdependent. I could be wrong, but that seems to be what the case is. At any rate, I will definitely be reading some of her other books in the near future.

19Tara1Reads
Feb 7, 2015, 5:21 pm

>18 sweetiegherkin: I found the character relationships to be complicated in The Painted Drum too. I kept a character map going as I read the book. I find that helps me when there is a lot of characters.

20LucindaLibri
Feb 9, 2015, 1:35 pm

>19 Tara1Reads:
Most of the newer editions have hand-drawn family trees at the beginning of the book. They are VERY helpful, though I'm not sure whether they are included in ebook editions.

I'm still finishing Tales of Burning Love . . . which I'm enjoying, but reading rather slowly.

21Tara1Reads
Feb 9, 2015, 11:04 pm

>20 LucindaLibri: I read a hardback copy of The Painted Drum from 2005. I guess that is not new enough for it to have the family tree. I do think I remember reading about Erdrich including the hand-drawn family trees in the article that sweetiegherkin included in message #16 though now that you mention it.

22LucindaLibri
Feb 11, 2015, 8:39 pm

>21 Tara1Reads: No family tree in the front of my copy of The Painted Drum either, so she may not have created one for that one.

I finally finished Tales of Burning Love. The long section with four women trapped in a car during a blizzard telling "Tales of Burning Love" to keep themselves awake was marvelous. and reminded me of my time living up in the Fargo area.

I'm still rather in awe of how all these books work both independently and as part of a larger story of these same characters. Sometime I'm going to have to re-read them in a more chronological order (in terms of the characters lives). BTW, most of Tales of Burning Love takes place around 1995.

23sweetiegherkin
Feb 15, 2015, 4:16 pm

>21 Tara1Reads: Yep, that was in that Paris Review article. Erdrich said at first that she didn't think to include them because she didn't view them as important to the story but then readers were coming up to her at events with their own attempts at crafting a family tree, so she realized that they needed to be included.

>22 LucindaLibri: That does sound like a really interesting work. I like the independent but inter-connected stories as well. Good luck trying to order them chronologically by character/story dates! I had a hard enough time trying to figure out which books even belong to the "series" or not, getting conflicting answers from different sites.

24BookConcierge
Ene 4, 2018, 9:37 am

The Birchbark House – Louise Erdrich
Book on CD narrated by Nicolle Littrell
4****

What Laura Ingalls Wilder did for the pioneer families in 19th century plains states, Erdrich has done for the Native Americans in this same time period.

Omakayas is a seven-year-old Ojibwa girl living in Michigan. She is the sole survivor of a small pox epidemic when she’s taken into another family as an infant. Tallow is a strong matriarch and Omakayas (also called Little Frog), thrives in the community on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island, also known as the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker. The book follows Omakayas, her family and the tribe through four seasons of 1847.

I was fascinated by this story of the life of the Native Americans during this time period. I learned about the hard work of tanning hides, the craft of decorating special garments with intricate beadwork, the cycles of hunting and gathering, and the dangers (and joys) of living so close to nature.

Omakayas is a wonderful narrator – inquisitive, observant, intelligent, and compassionate. She’s also a typical seven year old – sometimes a little naughty, and not always understanding the reasons why she is asked to perform certain tasks, or forbidden from other adventures. I can see why this is sometimes taught in social studies classes for middle-grade students.

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa, and she spoke to various Ojibwa elders about the significance of Madeline Island. Events depicted are historically accurate (including a documented small pox epidemic). The text version includes Erdrich’s pencil drawing illustrations.

Nicolle Littrell does a fine job performing the audio version. She has good pacing and the book is clearly understandable for even younger readers.

25sweetiegherkin
Ene 18, 2018, 7:27 pm

>24 BookConcierge: Nice! I've heard good things about this book; it's always being checked out at our library. One day I'll get around to it. Good to know there's a decent audiobook version out there!