Alexie

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7. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

What everyone else said. I loved this book. There are lots of people I want to give a copy of it to.

8. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie

I found this harder to read than Absolutely True Diary; the writing style was much more opaque, full of long rambling sentences without a comma to be seen. It's also heavy in magic realism, which tends to make a work hard for me to get into.

Something I found interesting about it was the set of elements found in this book also found in Absolutely True Diary, such as having a character with hydrocephalus (I just read his Wikipedia page, and saw that he apparently based this on himself).

There were a few lines that I found striking and thought-provoking, such as this:

They all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names. That is the problem with Indians these days. They have the same names all their lives. Indians wear their names like a pair of bad shoes.