WHAT BOOKS DOES YA'LL SUGGEST?

Sweet Potatoes, Please hep me.

It fell to Aunty Belle ter host the annual Cracker Lady's Book Club plannin' luncheon fer the 2006-07 book season. Of course, lemonade is standard offering, but iffin' thangs doan progress well, Aunty will hit 'em wif Jewel of Russia swamp-water.

We meets on Friday --so hurry!!--ter come up wif 12 selections ter read fer the comin' year. I need some ideas --we'uns is eclectic (uptown word!) in our readin' habits, but we does try ter include one biography each year, one or more current events book, one play or book of poetry, the rest is open--fiction, travelogues, short stories, children's literature, classics, essays, cookin', gardening, memoirs...even art books. Most fun art book so fer is Welcome to India.

We's got us a habit of getting together fer lunch in the dead of summer to deal out reviews and recommendations, and it can git testy seein' as how we ain't rotatin' selections, but must come ter a consensus on each book chosen. This is how our most diverse membership of eight ladies skirts the dastardly trick o' sneakin' in a book others jes' hates. So it ain't organized by "yore turn-my turn" selections...no, we's like the yoo-knighted nations--we gots to reach a consensus on each book.

Now, ter hep me, mebbe ya needs to know a bit about the members.

Ya'll met Livvy (see previous post) so ya knows about her. She likes ter give airs 'bout her er-udition (Thelma thought she was braggin' on her air-condition all these years!!) So Livvy hauls in the fereign authors, an'we'uns read English Patient an' McEwan's Atonement, and most bizarre of all, The Fig Eater which ain't by no fereign author, but is only seemin'so as it is set in Austria. The writer is some lah-di-dah maven at Vogue, and the book is murderously weird.But very very visual.(fer you naughty lassies, this book is a close as Aunty Belle plans to ever git to erotica)

An there's Thelma who ya'll met two posts back in "Does ya'll go ter Dinner next Door?" so fer shur we's gonna git a book on eatin---Thelma done had us readin' MFK Fisher (too wonderful ter miss out on), and Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone (hilarious!)

An they's Miss Moribund who always wants to read the latest tear-jerkin' woe-is-me story (whar' me is some emotional exhibitionist thas' seen often on the front of Enquirer.) We tries ter gently substitute more literary sadness like Embers
or Anna Karenina.

We have Wombat Winnie, the local League of Wymym Voters Chairperson Emeritus Foreverist. She will come wif a sheaf of political harangues disguised as "popular reading" but Aunty done sandbagged Wombat onc't wif Clash of Civilizations.

Ya'll would find Trampin'Browne interestin'...our menfolk always wanna know what Trampin' suggests, and them menfolks read it too. She's "into" the Himalayas; she's got her own Sherpa family, now, after so many tramps. But she done got us'uns ter read The Great Game --about the exploration of Afghanistan, Indian, Iraq China in the 1800s, the biography of Beryl Markham (lady pilot in africa) and Into the Wild.

Mary Mahr-tha Peckinpaugh is jes' a true Southern lady. She offers us "let's remember who we are" selections. This is often Southern writers,so we's been all through Alice Walker, Olive Ann Burns (Must read Cold Sassy Tree)Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, Kaye Gibbons (ya gotta be tough ter read her), Peter Taylor, Zora Neale Hurston and even Kerouac's tedious self exploration. But ain't nobody toppin' Flannery O'Connor--not now, not never, not nohow.

Stanna (Stanhope) Lowell can slide a verbal stiletto a'tween yore ribs, and ya'll would think it is a lovey-dovey little tickle, until ya feel a bit o' stickiness under yore corset. Does ya' guess that she is partial ter murder stories, fact or fiction. So she's shur ter bring somethin juicy, but I'se done wif thangs like In Cold Blood. We read Turow's Burden of Proof, mayhap as crisp a "lawyer-author" murder plot as ya can git. It was Stanna who first thumbed Silence of the Lambs during a beach read-a-thon some years back.

Then there is the war-mongering religious zealot hostess....so of course Aunty had 'em ter read Murder in the Cathedral and recently, Gates of Fire (battle of Thermopylae), and to review how we got here from there, Tuchman's Guns of August.


(that was in two years ago when we fought like possums over our selections, so we jes' settled on readin' books wif the month in the title: Guns of August, When September Comes,April BLood...)

Well, ya'll, ya' can see I'se needin' some hep--ain't got one suggestion as yet, and it is only a few glasses of lemonade until Friday! What do ya'll suggest???