Start with The English Patient. It is the most plotted book he has written, it can be read straight through, and it teaches you the method in the least punishing form.
The tidier-looking alternative is to start with In the Skin of a Lion, published five years earlier, since two of its characters walk into The English Patient as adults. Reading it second here is deliberate. In the Skin of a Lion is looser and will feel as though it is withholding a story — it is — and readers who meet that first often conclude the writer cannot plot. Meet him at his most legible, then go back and the earlier novel reads as generosity rather than evasion.
The instruction that matters more than the order: slow down. Both of these books are built in sections of two to five pages that jump in time and place without warning, and they reward roughly half the speed you would give an ordinary novel. Twenty or thirty pages a sitting, with the section you just finished reread before you move on. The connective tissue is imagery, not causation.
The Sri Lankan books
Running in the Family is the funniest thing he has written, assembled from anecdote, photographs and poems, and can be read in short sittings without losing anything. Anil's Ghost is the opposite: cold, forensic, short enough to look easy, and the most emotionally difficult book here — it is set during the Sri Lankan civil war and turns on the identification of the dead.
Leave a few days between them. The gap is part of the effect, because the second book is systematically dismantling the island the first one built.
The early experiments
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter are around 113 and 160 pages and are by a wide margin the hardest reading on this path. Do not plan by page count; give each a week.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is not a novel in any normal sense. It is poems, prose fragments, an interview, a passage in comic-book register and a set of photographs, with an empty photographic frame at the front. Coming Through Slaughter, about the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, is nearer to a novel but comes apart as its subject does. Expect to finish a page and not be certain what happened, and expect rereading it not to resolve that, because the withholding is deliberate. These are the two books on this path that people abandon, which is why they sit in the middle rather than at the start.
Note also that typography and white space do real work in both — where a fragment sits on the page and how much blank surrounds it carries meaning, so these books genuinely do not read the same in every edition.
The later novels
Divisadero, The Cat's Table, Warlight. These are quieter and the fragmentation is buried rather than displayed, so they can be read a little faster. Divisadero is the difficult one and should come first: it abandons its own characters halfway through and spends its second half on a different life in a different century, a structural gamble some readers find magnificent and others find a betrayal. The Cat's Table is the most straightforwardly enjoyable book on this path. Warlight is the most controlled. In this order the sequence runs from the largest risk to the surest hand.
The poetry
The Cinnamon Peeler is his own selection across three decades and can be dipped into in any order; its title poem is the single best-known thing he has written and is worth three or four readings before going further. Handwriting is a single short sequence and should be read in order, in two or three sittings, after the Sri Lankan material is familiar. Two or three poems at a time over two to three weeks is the right pace — a poem here takes as long as ten pages of the novels.
Where to stop
If you want four books: The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, Running in the Family and Warlight. Stage three is for readers who want to see where the technique came from.
Follow the full ordered path here: Michael Ondaatje Reading Order: Where to Start.
