Great Listening: Sherman Alexie reading his young adult novel

Sun, 08/22/2010 - 6:42pm by annevm

The best part of the AADL Summer Reading Game for me was listening to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie who narrates the BOCD. I love Alexie’s teenage-sounding voice as he assumes the role of his character, 14-year-old Arnold Spirit, a Spokane Indian and the star of this semi-autobiographical novel. Arnold, who was born with water on the brain and is bullied on the reservation, loves to draw and says this about his cartoons: “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny lifeboats.“ When Arnold transfers from the reservation school to the white high school in a nearby town -- that is when I started driving longer routes and hoping for more red lights, so I could hear more of the story on my car CD player before arriving at my destination.