American On Purpose – June 2014
July 12, 2014 in recap
Hello book clubbers! Here we are at the recap for June, 2014’s book club and I confess: it’s been a few weeks. I just like to wait to post so I can check to make sure I don’t have Alzheimer’s yet. Which will be a much less funny joke when I do!
Ok, so we started off with some food- dip with veggies courtesy of Sarah. I made a cheesy chicken casserole which Des was a very good sport about eating since it had spinach in it and broccoli on the side. Not only that, but the “potatoes” in the casserole were actually cauliflower so Des wound up have a very healthy, veggie-filled dinner, completely unbeknownst to her. MuhahaHAHA!!
We’re still on Sawyer-schedule so we got down to business pretty quick and went over the book, American On Purpose, by Craig Ferguson. This was timely for several reasons. First, it was humorous, which we all thought we could use as a change of pace after our last few sister-killing, child trauma books. Two, it has to do with Ferguson’s love of America, which I thought was nice coming up on July 4th. And Craig is in How to Train Your Dragon, Part II (great movie, go see it!) which came out around this time so I thought, why not?
For the most part we liked the book. Des didn’t think it was quite and enjoyable or funny, but in many ways it’s not. Craig is a very funny man but he had many tough years and many parts of his story, specifically his alcoholic years, are tough to hear. That said we thought he was a great writer, a funny guy, but also sentimental without being too cheesy.
We then chatted about the handful of articles we had posted… A mom writing about not wanting her son to share made a case that we found compelling despite ourselves. We talked about the meaning of names (“Des is super chill”), women letting women make choices without judgement, and the HI-larity of celebrities reading tweets (nice work Kimmel!). We also talked about an Arab woman, stoned to death for marrying a man who had previously killed his first wife – ugh. Our conversations came back to how grateful we are that we live in a country where we can be free to make out own choices “right” or “wrong”, and how much we enjoy late-night comedy. And we talked about how great Des’s cats are.
Dessert was Des’s chocolate-covered strawberries (mmmm!) and then we headed home for a (relatively) early night. Next month is at Sarah’s, but in the meantime we have brunch planned to celebrate Salooniversary 2014 – year 3! It’s so crazy. Good work, us!
