Wednesday, October 16, 2024
1pm and 4:30pm
The Sentence: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
A wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.
The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
Related Resources:
- more to come - check back
- Erdrich's bookstore in Minneapolis: https://birchbarkbooks.com/
Keep reading:
- Definitely look at the "Totally Biased List of Tookie's Favorite Books" in the back of the book.
- Novels set during a pandemic (including COVID) - https://modernmrsdarcy.com/pandemic-novels/
- Novels set in bookstores: www.nationalbooktokens.com/13-books-about-bookshops and www.icpl.org/books-more/staff-picks/lists/books-set-bookstore
Discussion prompts: (some borrowed from: www.vox.com/culture/22927681/sentence-review-louise-erdrich and libromaniacs.com/the-sentence-book-club-questions/)
- What do you believe we owe the dead? (VOX)
- The Sentence veers pretty wildly between emotional tones. Tookie’s theft of Budgie’s body is very madcap and fun, and then her early days at the bookstore are settled and restrained and slice-of-life-esque. By the time Erdrich gets into the pandemic and the protests over George Floyd’s murder, she’s writing something close to narrative nonfiction. Do the shifting tones work for you? (VOX)
- Have you read any of the books recommended at the end? What did you think? (VOX)
- What would be on your personal ghostbusting playlist? (VOX)
- How are all the sentences in the book related? Tookie’s prison sentence, the delicious sentences within the books that Tookie recommends, and the book called The Sentence and the (nearly deadly) sentence within it which sent Tookie into a kaleidoscopic tailspin. How are these various sentences related? How do they drive the narrative? (Libromaniacs)
- Dissatisfaction is a positively voracious reader. After reading Deacon King Kong,
he tells Tookie that he’s been transformed. Tookie ruminates, “That he
could change because of a book brightened me up. It was the same with a
lot of people who called to buy books.” Have you ever had that
moment of transformation from reading a book…or experienced the glow
from having recommended a transformative book? (Libromaniacs)
