Monday, November 10, 2008

And our inaugural book club selection is:

A Confederacy of Dunces, written by John Kennedy Toole and chosen by Kevin.

According to Powell Books:
John Kennedy Toole's hero is one, huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures. Ignatius J. Reilly is a flatulent frustrated scholar deeply learned in Medieval philosophy and American junk food, a brainy mammoth misfit imprisoned in a trashy world of Greyhound Buses and Doris Day movies. He is in violent revolt against the entire modern age.

Ignatius' peripatetic employment takes him from Levy Pants, where he leads a workers' revolt, to the French Quarter, where he waddles behind a hot dog wagon that serves as his fortress.

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece that outswifts Swift, whose poem gives the book its title. Set in New Orleans, the novel bursts into life on Canal Street under the clock at D. H. Holmes department store. The characters leave the city and literature forever marked by their presences — Ignatius and his mother; Mrs. Reilly's matchmaking friend, Santa Battaglia; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levy Pants; inept, bemused Patrolman Mancuso; Jones, the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses. Juvenal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift, Dickens — their spirits are all here. Filled with unforgettable characters and unbelievable plot twists, shimmering with intelligence, and dazzling in its originality, Toole's comic classic just keeps getting better year after year.
Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we.

Okay everyone, you have one month. Meet you back here on December 10th.

5 comments:

  1. It took me too damn long to get this book. Thank God for TG break, I will be able to catch up!

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  2. Is my calendar broke?

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  3. Hold tight, dearies. It appears that we've had a bit of a setback and some of us *cough!*Kevin*cough!* aren't quite ready to discuss the book yet. If it's alright with everyone else, let's give it the weekend and then meet back here on Monday. I will take the lead if necessary...

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  4. Dear god I've got a lot of reading to do this weekend.

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  5. I'm not intending to add any pressure to anybody who's busier than me this time of year (and please enjoy finishing _CoD_!), but just in case anybody's going shopping or to the library and wants to know my choice for the next book, it's going to be _Johnny Got His Gun_ by Dalton Trumbo. Yep, the book that begat that Metallica video.

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