book trail: august

hello book trailians. (and all you book trailian wannabes. i know you’re out there.) i am here to pump you up for this month’s read: what is the what by dave eggers.

now, dave eggers is a special man. he writes the kind of books that really polarize people: readers either love eggers and devote their lives to him or they hate him with a kind of vehemence that is really sort of startling.

as is customary for me in all kinds of polarizing subjects, i can see the virtue in both sides of the argument. i both love eggers and i hate him. i love the olympics and i hate what’s happening in darfur. (see?)

this newest eggers book is written alongside valentino achak deng, a real-life survivor of sudan. bless eggers heart, he can’t call the book true anymore (thank you very much, oprah and james frey) but it is semi-true. (go ahead and throw stones, but isn’t everything about life both completely true and “semi-true” all at the same time?)

i hope you’ll give this one a try. i’ve been waiting for months for my number to come up at the local library and it looks like my time has finally arrived!

if you’ve started what is the what and you’ve caught yourself thinking, “this eggers boy is a freaking genius” then check out a heartbreaking work of staggering genius and mcsweeney’s. you won’t be disappointed.

join us august 31st to laud or defame what is what. whichever camp you’re in, i promise it will be fun.