"Her winter ended, and she felt the return of her own extravagance" --A. B.

The return of my own extravagance is usually marked by a noticeable dent in my stack of Christmas books and the return of hours upon hours of knitting. Here I am, five months later, finally cracking the spine of a book that I've kept tucked neatly between my cotton gingham-clad mattress and the wooden frame of my loft bed for all of spring semester. It became almost comforting as I crawled sleepily into bed in the wee hours of the morning to see it there, though the words on its pages were as mysterious to me as that boy across the room in my Theo class: the familiar external brought a feeling of calm, though what was inside I had no idea. Obviously my days and nights were filled with academic reading, so as not to have even five minutes for such frivolities as pleasure reading, much in the way my attention in class was dominated by the need to diligently copy down notes, not daydream about said boy.

Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation is nothing less than an absolute delight for an American culture nerd like me. In fact, when my older brother handed me the book, his comment was, "You're an American Studies major. You'll love this." Vowell is a contributing editor for the ever-popular Chicago-based radio program This American Life. My brother introduced me to This American Life, as well, when he gave me a copy of a story Vowell had done about her experiences in the high school band. Vowell's voice (also the voice of Violet in the Incredibles) sticks in my mind and I can barely read a whole paragraph without hearing her voice in my head, describing part of her halftime show as being, "A little Latin-flavored number called Tico-Tico."


Vowell writes with an amusing and endearingly dry sense of humor. The book, which follows Vowell across the country on a tour of sites important to the history of American presidential assassinations, is immediately engaging, even for those not as interested in random presidential facts as I. The first passage to elicit an audible snicker from yours truly was a vignette Vowell recounts of an awkward Bed and Breakfast table scene the morning after she saw the play Assassins, a "'musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president'" (3).

"Now a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom. It's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota" (3-4).

Other favorite lines include, "Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food" (21); and "...the National Park Service dedicated this restoration, duplicating the setting of one of the most repugnant moments in American history just so morbid looky-loos like me could sign up for April 14, 1865, as if it were some kind of assassination fantasy camp. So how sick is that?"(22).

I'm only 45 pages in, but I expect that this will be a quick read, as I'm very happy to get to know this ever-close, but yet-unknown friend, between scarf-knitting bouts (Yes, I know it's May, and I live in Alabama, but I knit nonetheless). As for the boy in Theology class....we may never know.

N.B. You can find more from Sarah Vowell, including free weekly podcasts from This American Life here. As a side note, if you do visit This American Life online, look for the 2007 Tour Poster in the store, which my brother's girlfriend Lilli designed (click to enlarge it to see the whole thing.)