AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

I live in New York City, and every few months, I escape the noise and concrete and traffic to head to my parents’ lake home in northwest Minnesota. There, I hear more calls from loons than I do neighbors in my Harlem apartment building, and there, deer seem to outnumber people. But with the pandemic, I’ve stayed put to weather it out in my own city. (To each their own.)

It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve found myself thinking more and more of wide-open spaces, of shimmering lakes and sunshine. And because I can’t visit lake country right now, I’ve decided to travel there by the page and to revisit one of my favorite works from one of my favorite authors: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich.

Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, to a German American father and a half-French, half-Ojibwe mother, Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. (Ojibwe and Chippewa are used synonymously.) As an author, she’s best known for fiction that incorporates her Native American heritage: Love Medicine, LaRose, and The Round House, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. But in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich is her own subject as she explores Lake of the Woods in Minnesota and Ontario with her then-18-month-old daughter. Replete with the shimmering lakes and sunshine I’ve been thinking about, it’s at once a travel memoir and meditation on history and mythology.

As a writer, Erdrich marvels at the small stuff, and that small stuff imbues the book with a sense of wonder over the natural world. As readers, we’re right there with her, reveling in the beauty of cattails rising out of deep water, glossy otters lolling on rocks, and shadows stretching long on a beach. And as travelers slowly starting to venture out again—whether in our backyards or to destinations more far-flung—it’s books like this that remind us of the power of paying attention.

Yours in lazy lake days,

Katherine LaGrave
Digital Features Editor, AFAR
@kjlagrave

Looking forward to this book, I enjoyed The Round House.

Great selection!