Vote for April too! (also by Sunday 2/12 at midnight). We're going to get one month ahead of ourselves so voting doesn't cut into reading time. I took the liberty of recycling some choices from a couple years ago that sound interesting:
1) The Wild Things by Dave Eggers
Max is a rambunctious eight-year-old whose world is changing around him: His father is absent, his mother is increasingly distracted, and his teenage sister has outgrown him. Sad and angry, Max dons his wolf suit and makes terrible, ruinous mischief, flooding his sister’s room and driving his mother half-crazy. Convinced his family doesn’t want him anymore, Max flees home, finds a boat and sails away. Arriving on an island, he meets strange and giant creatures who rage and break things, who trample and scream. These beasts do everything Max feels inside, and so, Max appoints himself their king. Here, on a magnificent adventure with these funny and complex monsters, Max can be the wildest thing of all. In this visionary adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic work, Dave Eggers brings an imaginary world vividly to life, telling the story of a lonely boy navigating the emotional journey away from boyhood.
2) Still Life with Rice by Helie Lee
As a way to explore and affirm her Korean heritage, Lee reconstructs the life of her maternal grandmother. Born in 1912 into a well-to-do merchant family, Hongyong Baek had a traditional upbringing, culminating in her wedding day, when she met her husband for the first time. Marriage to her charming and somewhat feckless husband turned out to be happy, and Baek was content with her severely circumscribed role. But life was disrupted by political events. To escape Japanese oppression, Baek and her family joined other Korean refugees in China, where her resourcefulness helped her prosper as a dealer first in sesame oil and later in opium. When 36 years of Japanese occupation ended, she and her family returned home. But peace and prosperity came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of civil war. After incredible hardships, family members were reunited, and Baek used her skills as a healer to restore some measure of financial security. Written with great narrative power and attention to detail, a testament to the will to survive.
3) The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Man in the World by A.J. Jacobs
When Jacobs, a pop-culture junkie and magazine editor, got a bee in his bonnet to read the entire abridged set of the Encyclopedia Britannica to stave off the decline of his recalled knowledge, his wife, family, and coworkers looked on with disbelief, amusement, and annoyance. They thought he'd give up on his quest, but fortunately he did not, for his recap manages to impart the joys of learning, along with a lot of laughs. The alphabetical arrangement of his book allows Jacobs to share highlights, many of which show his fixation on the morbid, the insane, and the grotesque in history. Cortés had syphilis. Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women. Throughout, the author digresses with anecdotes about such things as his trip to a Mensa meeting, his visit with Alex Trebek, and (mainly) his wife's attempts to get pregnant. As Jacobs wraps up, he leaves readers with the sense of satisfaction and wistfulness that often occurs when finishing a particularly satisfying book, only multiplied by the magnitude of what he has accomplished. This is a love note to human knowledge and the joys of obtaining it.
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