Aunt Hagar's Cram Session

With the next Brooklyn book club meeting in less than a week, you should be heading into your last fifty pages. Unfortunately, you're still stuck on page 12, fighting through "In the Blink of God's Eye."

That's why we got cramming! With limited time to get through 14 thirty-page stories, it's time to get your priorities straight. Figuring out which stories are superior and which are little more than filler, however, is virtually impossible without magic. Lucky for you I've already read the whole book, so I'm in a good position to recommend a good alternative to unreliable, scattershot methods like "random guessing" and "reading the stories in order."

If I had to do it again, and I only had time to read a third of the book, these are the stories I'd tackle first:

Old Boys, Old Girls

Bad Neighbors

A Rich Man

All Aunt Hagar's Children

Blindsided

For my money, those are the five best. If you have more time and want to dig a little deeper, here are another five that probably won't kill you:

Common Law

Spanish in the Morning

The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia

A Poor Guatelmalan Dreams...

Resurrecting Methuselah

And honestly, I would only read these last four if I wanted to capture Edward P. Jones at his least impressive:

Tapestry

In the Blink of God's Eye

Root Worker

Adam Robinson

Good luck, folks, and happy cramming! Hope to see you at 1:30 this Sunday.

January book club: brooklyn again!

I hope no one minds if we do an adult read for next month (kidding, Josh...who could have known that a colorful picture book was actually intended for children? Crazy).

Anyway, since I'm a short story fan and I grew up in the DC area, I'm going with All Aunt Hagar's Children, the most recent story collection by Washington author Edward P. Jones. You'll know him from his Motherfucking Pulitzer Prize.

I can only find an Amazon link to the LARGE PRINT paperback version, but trust me, it is around in regular paper back. It looks like this:



Not sure you want to tackle almost 400 pages of the working class black experience in 20th century DC? No prob...read one or two stories and you're good to go, just like in college.

I'm scheduling the meeting for Sunday, January 27th...for those of you who might be worried, that's the week after MLK Day (and the Conference Championships) and the week before the Super Bowl. For once, you won't have to choose between a three day weekend, football, and the book club.

Ahem! For the second time, the club will be in South Slope Brooklyn, with the address and exact meeting time to follow via email. I would also like to add that I'm really excited about the menu.