Book Beginnings - Winter in the Blood and Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America
For Rose City Reader's Book Beginnings on Fridays "where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading."
I went to the library this morning to pick up a book on hold and to check out another book, Fools Crow by James Welch. I was recommended Fools Crow by Charlotte McGuinn Freeman over 20 years ago and want to re-read it. Right next to it was another book by Welch, Winter in the Blood. So I grabbed that one, too, because of the title.
After the library, I stopped by my favorite thrift store, Bargains Galore. Amongst the various treasures I found was a book by Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America.
So, in honor of the northern hemisphere winter solstice tomorrow, here are two quotes from the books' beginnings.
Winter in the Blood - Welch
In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak and watched the sorrel mare, her colt beside her, walk through burnt grass to the shady side of the log-and-mud cabin. It was called the Earthboy place, although no one by that name (or any other) had lived in it for twenty years. The roof had fallen in and the mud between the logs had fallen out in chunks, leaving a bare gray skeleton, home only to mice and insects. Tumbleweeds, stark as bone, rocked in a hot wind against the west wall.
Winter Brothers - Doig
His name was James Gilchrist Swan, and I have felt my pull toward him ever since some forgotten frontier pursuit or another landed me into the coastal region of history where he presides, meticulous as a usurer's clerk, diarying and diarying that life of his, four generations and seemingly as many light-years from my own.
Both books are about Native American life and history, subjects that recurred, unplanned, in some of the books I've read this year. (My 2025 book wrap-up post is currently in draft, while I wait for the end of the year and any last books-read to add to it.)
So I decided deliberately to read more broadly on Native American topics this coming year. Besides today's library and thrift shop haul, I have two books coming in the mail: one on North American indigenous interpretation of the Bible and one on G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations.
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