What is the What

I just got home from another fabulous book club meeting. Have I mentioned how much I love this group? Yeah, well, it can't be said enough - I love this group!

Some of the highlights that made tonight's meeting interesting:

• Jen, the evening's hostess, is fostering 4 very cute kittens and their very cute mama.


• I can touch my elbows together behind my back but no one else can.


• Jen and I are the only ones who cannot touch our toes.
  
• Grace can touch her palms flat to the floor even while wearing super-high wedges! Kiri is pretty dang flexible, too.


• Grace tips over if she tries to balance on one leg with her eyes closed - which is a sign of having an old brain.


• Suzanne could balance on one leg with her eyes closed all day - a sign of a young brain.


• Kendall's college roommate had an unusual talent that is too crass for me to discuss here. One member of our book club also has this talent.


• Sarah cut her hair and it looks great!

Oh yeah, and we talked about a book. We read "What is the What" by Dave Eggers (who went to my college at the same time I did, who is the object of Kiri's latest crush and who is known personally, though not favorably, by Sarah's boyfriend.) This book is the novelized autobiography of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Valentino Achak Deng. It's told in the present as Achak is being robbed at gunpoint in his Atlanta apartment and then bound and gagged. In his mind he tells the attackers his story from his pre-war life in southern Sudan, through his time walking across Sudan as a 7 year old boy, being shot at, attacked by lions and starving in a group of 300 other boys, to living in refugee camp for 10 years in Kenya and finally to his resettlement in the United States.


This was the most amazing thing about tonight's book club (and its not the fact that we can go straight from an intelligent discussion on the plight of the Lost Boys and the merits of the fictionalized autobiography right into a showcase of our flexibility and wacky talents):

Yep - for the first time in recent memory, EVERYONE liked the book, including, Kiri, our habitual naysayer. Kiri is a genius who seems to have read every book ever. While she claims to like many books, she likes very few of our book club reads, mostly due to the stereotypical caricatures that are made of the protagonists. This definitely is not a bad thing - all opinions are welcome. But this time - hey, Mikey, he likes it!

The meeting did have its low points, too:

• Suzanne is moving to Utah and this was her last book club.


• The hits keep coming - Grace's move to California is pretty much completed and this was her last book club, too.


• Here's the kicker - this was our first book club without our Lilipolean, leader of all. Sad, sad times.