Literary Group | Annual Holiday Party + The English Understand Wool

Annual Holiday Party + We'll discuss The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt

Join us for our annual Holiday Party! We will celebrate with a potluck dinner and a Dirty Santa book exchange. This year we will also be discussing The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt.  

Please click on the following link to sign up to bring your favorite hor d'oeuvre, side dish, main course, dessert, and/or beverage:

Potluck Sign-up link

For the book exchange, please bring a wrapped book that you have read and enjoyed and are ready to give away.  Try to avoid bringing books that we have already read in our club, but don't worry about it if you are newer to the group and aren't sure what we have read. 

Description of The English Understand Wool:

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?