Reading and Eating Meeting

This past weekend our local MythSoc book discussion group held the highlight of its year, the annual Reading and Eating Meeting. Instead of our usual Sunday afternoon, we gather of a Saturday night in a spacious house in the hills for potluck supper and an evening of readings around the fire. We brought my broccoli casserole. wild_patience read from one of the Thursday Next books. I read John M. Ford's "Ernest Hemingway goes Christmas shopping" pastiche from Heat of Fusion; and "The New Shadow", Tolkien's fragmentary sequel to The Lord of the Rings, which breaks off after eight pages just as the plot starts to heat up. (It's in The Peoples of Middle-earth.) I chose the latter because one of our members had mentioned a few months ago never having read it. That same person gave an excellent reading of the LOTR scene introducing Treebeard. Our one juvenile attendee, aged 15, gave a few amusing selections from the first book of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, which were entertaining enough that I want to read the book; but the real surprise for me was another attendee's selections from A Book of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét, a book of biographical poems for children published in 1933, which I'd never come across before. (My mother, my arbiter for 1930s-40s popular culture, has never read it either.) I've now borrowed it from the library, as I enjoyed the poems very much, particularly the conclusion to the one on Admiral "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" Farragut:

And while "damn," as you know,
Is a word to eschew -
He knew when to say it -
So few people do.