BOTM: D. Brown, Bury my heart at wounded knee*
M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake
J. Berger, Ways of seeing
M. Kundera, Immortality
L. Lee, A moment of war
D. du Maurier, My cousin Rachel
H. Murakami, Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world
R.L. Stevenson, Kidnapped*
I've had to abandon my objection to Margaret Atwood doing Science Fiction, because - aside from the Handmaid's tale, which is a bit clunky - it turns out she does it really well. However, her achievement pales beside the feat of historical re-imagining that Dee Brown manages with his famous, and wonderful, account of the history of the end of the plains Indians. Reading it for the second time, I looked up the reaction, and the criticism. Some of that criticism is probably fair. It is a whitewash, and no attempt is made to analyse and understand the acts of the settlers. But, more than ever, I don't think that matters. What he does is to give a vanished people a history, albeit one without a happy ending. And he does so with a voice that isn't that of the victorious Americans. That's astonishingly hard to do - we are all prisoners of own historiography - and here it's done with style and an emotional punch that still smarts long after I finished reading. Were I to do one of those ten books challenges, it would be there.
