What are you reading the week of Sunday, January 11, 2015? [View all]

Good morning, all! Apparently I'm the early bird this week.

Right now I've just started a small book, Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun which is a re-telling of a couple Athabaskan Indian legends from Alaska by Velma Wallis. Something completely different from my usual fare of murder mysteries. Yesterday I read an even smaller book by the same author called, Two Old Women which is another Athabaskan Indian story that only took a few hours to read.

The author herself is a Gwich'in (one of the Athabaskan bands in Alaska) from the Fort Yukon area of interior Alaska and she wrote these two books in the early 90s, based on the traditional stories her mother had passed down to her. She has a lovely, spare writing style which beautifully honors the oral tradition from which these stories are descended, as well as the land and the climate of the far north boreal forests. Having lived in Alaska for 6 years - although not so far north - it's easy for me to relate.

Having run out of Scandinavian books after finishing Burial Rites (about which I've already posted a separate thread) I decided to turn my attention to Alaska - didn't want to stray too far from the Arctic Circle.

Next on deck I have another Alaska book, Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner. It's a raised-in-the-wilderness story about the son of a white family in Alaska living the subsistance lifestyle in the far North.

After that, I'm at the mercy of inter-library loan gods and will have to wait and see which of the dozen or so books I have on order will make it to my library this week.