I #AmReading Louise Erdrich's #TheSentence, and it's such a beautiful book. I find the story so compelling, but even if the story ended up going nowhere I would just be glad to have read these sentences. Highly recommend!

My favourite book this year was The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.

The book starts with a ridiculous 60 year prison sentence, injustice and chaos, then becomes completely calm, and then back to real life including the pandemic, George Floyd and the uprisings that followed, injustice and chaos.

There is also a ghost. Louise says we need to be a bit scared.

There is humour. And the book moves seamlessly between life death and something in between, maybe.

One of the first things I did was watch a video on the Ojibwe language, because I had no idea what it might sound like.

75% of the words are verbs and 25% of the nouns are classified either animate or inanimate. So animate, something that either moves on it’s own or has a heartbeat, includes trees, clouds, rivers, weather, and surprisingly a car ‘daabaan’ since it moves on its own.

The book was gripping with many universal themes reaching far beyond this one community. So much Native American wisdom.

#LouiseErdrich #TheSentence #books