Fiction

Last edited Sun Dec 30, 2018, 07:36 PM - Edit history (1)

read. Sometimes, I can't make a contribution, but this week I think I have hit the motherlode.

I started reading Tayari Jones's book, An American Marriage but got about 1/2 into the book and the whole thing started to seem a bit contrived. It just didn't ring true for me. I know it's on President Obama's list, and I tried, but it just wasn't what I wanted to be reading.

I am thrilled that you are reading Lighthouse Island as Paulette Jiles is one of my most favorite authors and that book is absolutely among my top tier. It is right up there with The Handmaid's Tale on my list of best/favorites. I read somewhere (maybe on Paulette Jiles' blog) that there would be a sequel to Lighthouse Island which would make me jump for joy, but then I read this blog entry which addresses characters from her book, News of the World:

The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge A thrilling tale of betrayal and revenge set against the nineteenth-century American frontier, the astonishing story of real-life trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier. Based on a true story, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits, and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.

"Michael Punke serves as the U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He has also served on the White House National Security Council staff and on Capitol Hill. He was formerly the history correspondent for Montana Quarterly, and an adjunct professor at the University of Montana. He is the author of "Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mine Disaster of 1917, "and "Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. His family home is in Montana."