The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

November-December 2001 -- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (fiction)
Meeting Location: Sara D.'s apartment

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

October 2001 -- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (essays)

For this book we met at Sara Jelliff's place. For me, this was my first experience with David Sedaris and I was not disappointed. He was so funny in a sort of tragicomediac way. We took turns reading our favorite parts in the many sections of the book. We also discovered that some of the selections in the audiobook were different.


FROM THE PUBLISHER

ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays - it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all.

No medium available to mankind is spared his cultural vision; no family member (even the dynasties of family pets) is forgotten in these pages of sardonic memories of Sedaris's numerous incarnations in North Carolina, Chicago, New York, and France.

One essay, punctuated by a conspicuous absence of s's and plurals, introduces the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms himself with a thesaurus, learns every nonsibilant word in the lexicon, eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North Carolina teachers with his out-of-nowhere and man-size vocabulary.

By an ironic twist of fate, readers find present-day Sedaris in France, where only now, after all these years, he must cling safely to just plural nouns so as to avoid assigning the wrong genders to French objects. (Never mind that ordering items from the grocer becomes rather expensive.) Even the strictest of grammarians won't be able to look at the parts of speech in the same way after exposing themselves to the linguistic phenomena of Sedarisian humor.
Just why is a sandwich masculine, and yet, say, a belt is feminine in the French language? As he stealthily tries to decode French, like a cross between a housewife and a shrewddetective, he earns the contempt of his sadistic French teacher and soon even resorts to listening to American books on tape for secret relief.

What David Sedaris has to say about language classes, his brother's gangsta-rap slang, typewriters, computers, audiobooks, movies, and even restaurant menus is sure to unleash upon the world a mad rash of pocket-dictionary-toting nouveau grammarians who bow their heads to a new, inverted word order.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

September 2001 -- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (nonfiction)

This is one of the books that I really enjoyed in part because I might never have read it on my own. We had a really good discussion on this one.

From Publishers Weekly

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.

Jake's Orphan by Peggy Brooke

August 2001 -- Jake's Orphan by Peggy Brooke (juvenile fiction)

We chose this book because Peggy Brooke was visiting for the Writer's Conference in Children's Literature held each September. This was actually one of the few book club meetings I have missed, though I did read the book.

From Publishers Weekly

Tree, a 12-year-old orphan so rootless that no one seems to notice his lack of a proper name, is the hero of this compelling debut novel set in 1926. When he is lent out to a dour North Dakota farmer for a year, he is glad to escape the dreary St. Paul orphanage and get a chance (so he thinks) at family life, even though his joy is tempered by anxiety about leaving his reckless 10-year-old brother, Acorn. But Mr. Gunderson, the farmer, makes it clear he is not looking for a son in Tree, and Tree is quick to realize how much of an outsider he is. When Acorn runs away from the orphanage and shows up at the farm, Tree's own precarious position falls into jeopardy. There are flaws here--overly neat timing, a somewhat easy (and easily foreseen) resolution with Mr. Gunderson's kindhearted brother, Jake, coming to Tree's rescue--but the prose itself is solid. Brooke's ability to build characters through small snippets of dialogue and her sensitivity to details give texture and depth to her poignant themes. Ages 10-14.