An Absolutely Long Review by a Part-Time Mexican: The Book List

Because let’s face it, my reviews tend to be a tad on the babbling side.

It was probably a detriment to The Hunger Games that I started reading the first book in the trilogy shortly after finishing The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Because if we’re talking kids in peril, struggling to find a way to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against them? Sherman Alexie wins, hands down. I don’t mean to knock Suzanne Collins or her fans here, but the books are what they are, and the emotional resonance of Alexie’s work is far greater.

While The Hunger Games is able to tap into the idea of putting kids in danger, it’s done on a mythological/dystopian level. It’s fantasy, and it’s the kind of fantasy that doesn’t allow a reader to experience the true fear of possibly losing a child—or oneself—to forces outside of anyone’s control. Read Alexie’s National Book Award winner, though, and you’re confronted with a reality that happens every day on Native American reservations and other poor enclaves across the country. And you’re not even confronted with it full force—in his excellent talk at the National Book Festival this year, Alexie said that he’d deliberately used fiction as a way to make the book more optimistic as opposed to following the exact script of his life (in the form of a true autobiography) because the end result would have been too depressing. Too disturbing. Too sad.

Yet what he’s given us touches reality closely, and for that reason alone it should be read. Every kid should read this in order to understand the realities that others face all over the country, and that sometimes rebellion is as simple—and as scary—as going to a new school 22 miles away, where you won’t be using your mother’s old textbook in class.

Part-Time is the story of Arnold Spirit Jr., a high school freshmen who is smart, bullied and hoping to make something of himself even when hope is in short abundance. Transferring from the high school on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, to Reardan High, the book chronicles Arnold’s freshman year. In the process of moving to Reardan High, Arnold finds himself more bullied than ever on the rez, lost without his best friend, Rowdy. Rowdy, like most others on the rez, sees Arnold’s desire for a better education at Reardan as a betrayal, and makes him pay for it as much as possible.

In its straightforward prose, Part-Time seems deceptively simple, but it masks a profundity that made me choke back laughter and stifle sobs on the Metro. Capturing the tough negotiation of living in two worlds, Arnold endures losses and experiences triumphs throughout the year, and they are all tinged with the odd mixture of guilt, confusion and happiness that comes from moving ahead while not wanting to leave everyone else behind. Along with Alexie’s stellar prose is Ellen Forney’s accompanying art, illustrating the funny, painful and matter-of-fact moments in Arnold’s life—all from Arnold’s perspective, as he’s a budding cartoonist.

The second-most challenged book of 2010 according to the ALA, Part-Time doesn’t shy away from the difficult nature of Arnold’s life, or the fact that he’s a teenage boy—he will swear, he will make bad choices, he will masturbate, he will lose important people, he will be brutally honest about his poverty, he will struggle, and he will do it all with a sort of gallows humor that some will probably find inappropriate. Yet he’s just trying to survive, and he’s trying to do it in the best way he can. How can that be challenged, hidden? Baffled, party of one, right here. (Then again, I’m baffled by censorship on a regular basis.)

The best part about Part-Time? Besides seeing Arnold grow, laughing and crying with him? It’s that the book makes you think. For me, it was pondering the idea of being a part-time anything. You can argue that most kids are a part-time something, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that being a part-time minority is one of the toughest, most heart-wrenching things a kid can go through without the proper guidance to negotiate that path. My parents, Cthulhu bless ‘em, couldn’t help me when it came to dealing with being the sole minority in an all-white school. They gave me love and strength, but even that could fail in the face of the pure venom that emerged from Saline’s unholy hallways. I did my best to fit in, and that in turn caused my parents to wonder why I was changing. Like Arnold in Part-Time, I felt like I was betraying my culture, but I had to do what I could to survive. I didn’t do it to hurt anyone. Arnold is arguably more successful at negotiating an all-white high school than I was; he’s a good athlete who is willing to fight, while I was an overweight kid who was afraid to challenge anyone.

But Alexie’s given me the key word—part-time—in which I can continue to explore my own thoughts on identity. Because it doesn’t end as a kid: follow Alexie’s tweets, and it’s clear that the conflict never stops. Hell, Sonnet 87 has seen many an identity musing, particularly this one.

Alexie also highlights the topic of extreme poverty with an honesty that needs to be read far and wide. This is the kind poverty where you have to walk 22 miles to school because there’s no gas money and you can’t get a ride. The kind of poverty where you go to bed hungry on a regular basis. The kind of poverty that leads to depression and alcoholism, which can take lives since, again, hope seems as rare as the almighty dollar. It’s a telling commentary on how this country fails kids on reservations, in inner cities, in rural communities, seen through the eyes of 14-year-old kid who just wants the same shot as everyone else.

The reality that Arnold faces is jarring, disconcerting, and frightening; you never want to imagine a kid going through that, but it’s a fact of life. Again, this is the type of book that should be read by everyone because, chances are, you’re reading about someone not like you. You’re reading something that could happen and that’s something you can learn from. You’re reading, in some way, the life that someone’s living, right now. It helps you understand the diversity of this nation, it helps you understand different perspectives, it helps you understand that not everyone can do what you’ve done quite so easily. You’re doing what Arnold does: challenging yourself with something hard so that, ultimately, you can grow.

A definite recommend. (And wow, look! A post for October!)

Onto the book list:

Finished:

1) Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman
2) Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work by Tim Gunn and Ada Calhoun
3) Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: A Novel by Maaza Mengiste
4) Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
5) Destiny and Desire: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes; Translated by Edith Grossman
6) The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
7) Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
8) Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
9) The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir
10) Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
11) The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
12) Empire Falls by Richard Russo
13) Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
14) The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
15) The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
16) The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen
17) The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman
18) Between Parent and Child by Dr. Haim G. Ginott
19) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
20) The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
21) The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir
22) Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
23) Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later by Francine Pascal
24) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
25) One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
26) Different Seasons by Stephen King
27) Unpublished Novel
28) Unpublished Novel
29) The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
30) Carrie by Stephen King
31) Next by James Hynes
32) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
33) The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
34) In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
35) Unpublished Novel
36) Adrenaline by Jeff Abbott
37) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
38) The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
39) Alcestis by Katharine Beutner
40) Unpublished Biography
41) Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson
42) Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes
43) Published Novel by My College Roommate (No, I’m not joking; no, I won’t reveal who it is)
44) The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
45) The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
46) Unpublished Novel
47) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
48) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Re-read:

1) Threads by Nell Gavin

Currently Reading:

1) The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios by Eric Rasmussen

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Husband or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2) Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
3) Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman
4) The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education by Craig M. Mullaney
5) Saints at the River by Ron Rash
6) Lowboy by John Wray
7) A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein
8) State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
9) In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault
10) The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell
11) Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer