First, Orenda. First because I read it first and first because I think it's one of the most important books written in the last decade or so. Orenda is the Things Fall Apart of the Americas. Just as Chinua Achebe showed the fast deterioration of a world that seemed to be working just fine in Africa, Joseph Boyden showed us what happened through the colonization of North America.
Most importantly, he showed us the nuanced version in which First Nations people were and were not victims. They were powerful, independent and in charge, dealing with the French as equals for a time. Their own choices, because they were actors in their own history and not passive victims, were part of the shifting tides of history. They took French priests into their villages because they thought it would bring them trading advantages, not because they were forced (or worse yet, fools). There was no way to no that disease would follow, that European rivalries would exacerbate their own historical conflicts with the Haudenosaunee.
Yes, the French held racist attitudes, and they acted in their own interests, but Joseph Boyden's fictional account does more to help people understand the complexities of history than just about anything out there. It's brilliant and supremely important.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is not a typical book for me. It is something of a science fiction touchstone apparently and served as the basis for Blade Runner. But it's much less dramatic than Blade Runner yet somehow much more pregnant with meaning. The 'andy' characters are not super-human; they are, more than anything, simply human. And this is what prompts Deckard to struggle with what it means to be alive.
Read both, but if you have to read one, choose Orenda.
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