2009 books

45) William H. Armstrong, Sounder, 1969
This came to me with the promise of being a successful example of 'writing the other', though that clearly wasn't the object of the exercise as the depiction of love, loyalty and courage that Armstrong fills his story with is what's meant to shine through most of all. On the surface it's a dog story but at deeper levels it's also clearly much more than that, focussing more in what binds a poor black family together in the face of the extreme prejudice and inhumanity they face in the Deep South. Sounder won the Newbery Medal in 1970 and I'm hardly surprised: it's powerful and simple and built around someone else's true story, but without the author's introductory note to that effect this might only have been half as good. Recommended.

2009 books

46) Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 1989  ( RE-READ )
This has been high on my list of likely re-reads since I first discovered it in 1996. A solitary, elderly man who lives alone at the edge of the Ecuadorian jungle becomes the one person who can track down and kill a dangerous ocelot, but he'd rather be left alone to read the tacky romance novels that he uses to teach himself to read. This has a memorable sense of time and place at the farthest edges of what's left today of Spanish colonialism, and Sepúlveda's lively, good humoured storytelling also comes with a subtle environmental message. He knows who he's writing for, which is something that probably helped this debut novel win a total of eight European literary awards. Actually better than I remembered it being the first time round, this one's staying on my shelf for keeps.