Lake Wobegon Summer 1956
Written by Garrison Keillor
Narrated by Garrison Keillor
4/5
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About this audiobook
Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor, born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942, is an essayist, columnist, blogger, and writer of sonnets, songs, and limericks, whose novel Pontoon the New York Times said was “a tough-minded book . . . full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope”—no easy matter, especially the spangling. Garrison Keillor wrote and hosted the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for more than forty years, all thanks to kind aunts and good teachers and a very high threshold of boredom. In his retirement, he’s written a memoir and a novel. He and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, live in Minneapolis and New York.
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Reviews for Lake Wobegon Summer 1956
12 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I don’t like Garrison Keillor’s politics very much. But I love the monologues, possibly because they remind me of me. This is no exception; small town, nuclear family, coming of age, Eisenhower is president, confused about sexuality and religion and loyalty and honesty and convinced nobody else is (the protagonist, Gary; not Eisenhower. At least not as far as I know).
Gary is 14. He makes flatulence and mucus jokes, lusts after girls, has a copy of High School Orgies hidden under the sink, and, since he’s a member of the Sanctified Brethren, wonders if God is going to smite him for all this. When I was 14 I made the same jokes and had the same lusts, although I had a Playboy and it was in the closet, and I was a Missouri Synod Lutheran and therefore possibly slightly less smiteworthy. Alas, you can’t go home again and do it over. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Garrison Keillor has always been one of my favorite authors and is probably my favorite book of his. This is a classic coming of age story. The writing is quite hilarious! I really recommend it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/57/31/03 This is just a classic book that will have you laughing out loud. Funny, easy read and brings back the old days.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I've read several Keillor books and this is my favorite. It's hilarious.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Much lower than my usual rating for a Garrison Keillor book and it's so long since I read it that I can't specify why. All I can remember is that it simply didn't really grab me at any point. I think I prefer the usual Lake Wobegon structure (or lack of) where we move between different personal stories in a seemingly random way. Focussing on one character all the way through was strangely less engaging.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This did not amuse me, much to my surprise and disappointment. Are his other books different/better I wonder?
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Not only is it trashy and boring it's not even funny.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A touching and honest coming of age story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gary's forays of sexuality and writing and baseball are recounted for a summer of growth and change.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've long been a fan of Garrison Keillor, and that was the original attraction of this book. This novel felt a little uneven for my tastes, though. Highlight for me included his newspaper accounts of the Lake Wobegon Whippets - written in beautiful, over-literacized English. Another was his descriptions of the childhood days he spent with Grandma and Aunt Eva. There was such a sweetness there.Good, but not great.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I first discovered Garrison Keillor while milking cows in Minnesota in 1972. He had a morning radio show and without fail played "Help, Help Me Rhonda" every single day his show was on. It became a kind of joke. But it was a fun show to help pass the time while having manure swished in my face. Ever since, I've been a devotee of the Lake Wobegon section of his current radio show (can't stand most of the music, so now I get just the Wobegon section as a podcast.) They are a delight, as is this quasi-autobiographical set of memories recounted by Gary who is obsessed with the illicit magazine, High School Orgies (you know the one with the two teachers, unable to control their mutual lust, doing it in the library.) And the time when the principal was speaking to the class and let one rip that had to be absolutely the most vile and smelly fart ever, causing our Gary to giggle, whereupon he was asked what was so funny, and he had the temerity to tell them it was because of the fart. The teacher is livid and then there is the conversation with Mother. (One should always have a clean backup joke for just such occasions.)
Gary learned he had a talent for writing and discovered he could fend off the local bullies, (who had a cumulative IQ of about 12) by writing salacious poetry, or puns on the order of "Anne of Green Buggers," or "Buggers in the Willows," -- you get the idea.
I loved the scenes with The Sister haranguing his father to get Gary to dry the dishes when, as everyone knows, water evaporates, so why dry them, is Gary's strategy. Meanwhile, Gary is reading High School Orgies on the swing on the front porch, having it hidden in the P volume of the encyclopedia, a gift from a relative who gave a different volume from a set of the encyclopedia to each relative for Christmas. (This was a tactic my mother used. For Christmas one year, she game me volume one of Montaigne's essays -- in French -- and volume two to my brother. In high school Montaigne was not high on my reading list, but you get the idea.)
The book is an affectionate, mocking look at a conservative small town in the Midwest during the fifties. It did bring back some memories. (I hid my copy of Fanny Hill under a loose floorboard in the third floor bathroom.) It's not Keillor's best effort, but entertaining nevertheless.
Note: If you are a sanctimonious prick you will probably not enjoy this book. It has its share of scatological and masturbatory references. There is no plot. Get over it.