Despite checking four of her books out of the library, listening to her recent interview on WEMU and doing the requisite Googling, I’m still not sure what Sarah Vowell is going to talk about when Ypsilanti District Library hosts her at Pease Auditorium on April 8. That doesn’t matter a bit, though — I’m going to like it anyway.

That’s perhaps the most delightful thing about the distinctive voice that lots of us came to love during her 1996-2008 tenure as a contributing editor for the Public Radio International show “This American Life”: it tells you within one note that what you’re about to hear is going to be literate, sharp, sarcastic and, particularly for us left-leaning nerds with a profound appreciation for a good deadpan, hilarious.

“I like to keep it light when I can,” she answered airily when WEMU’s Lynn Rivers asked recently if she cultivates her trademark snarkiness. (Vowell could not be interviewed for this story due to a looming deadline, but event consponsor WEMU did feature her as a pledge-drive draw in late March.) Actually, she went on to say that she doesn’t sit down to write with the purpose of being funny, but “humor is a good tool. I am trying not to be generic, and sometimes that’s the best way.”

Like the time when, during the long aftermath of the 2000 election, she saw Bob Dole’s face on a JumboTron and noted with the prescribed lilt of nostalgia that it reminded her “of a simpler time, when you could lose an election and not be president.” It got a laugh, she said, but mostly it channeled everything she’d felt about the whole sorry mess into one sleek line.

Besides, a well-developed sense of humor is a good thing to have if you’re also in possession of a voracious interest in American history. That the whole story is rather dark is a thesis she pretty well proves by the top of page two in her last book, “The Wordy Shipmates,” starring a collection of souls who sail from Southampton to Plymouth in 1630.

“You can’t be interested in history and accentuate the positive,” she told Rivers, and frankly, Vowell doesn’t try — anyone who writes a nonfiction volume in the first person called “Assassination Vacation” has clearly made her peace with an exploration of the macabre. “It comes from the fact that we’re all going to die,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’re all obsessed with it in different ways. Some people are obsessed with obscuring it… For me, writing about history is a denial. I go and try to bring the dead alive.”

Sarah Vowell talks about the inspiration for “The Wordy Shipmates”:

That’s no small task, especially if we’re all being honest about how many times our high school history classes brought on a case of site-specific narcolepsy. In an interview with Powells.com, she relates a story about being on a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in which an author was berated about a fictional Holocaust story by a scholar insisting that “We must avoid easy entertainments.” “And I was just sitting there thinking, ‘Lady, entertaining is hard.’ Anybody can bore something up, but making some of this stuff entertaining is the hardest thing there is.”

Actually, Vowell almost inadvertently makes the case that a little history can go a long way toward livening up our daily existence after Rivers asks her if she’s the sort of person who pulls over at every roadside marker proclaiming some bit of significance had happened there. She’s usually pressed for time when traveling, she answered (which might also have to do with the fact that since she doesn’t drive; if she’s in a car she’s on someone else’s schedule).

But a walk down 11th Street in her adopted hometown of New York City recently led her to discover a building plaque saying that Eleanor Roosevelt had lived there between 1933 and  1945 — an unremarkable fact until one realizes that Roosevelt’s husband was the president at that time and therefore living a couple hundred miles away in Washington D.C. “So what the plaque really says is that Eleanor and her husband weren’t getting along,” translates Vowell. Now doesn’t that make a much better sign?

Although I and the rest of her fans are pretty much ready to buckle up and let her take us to any place in the time-space continuum that she feels she’d like to take on — from the Rhode Island founding, to the corner of Michigan and Wacker in Chicago, to hints that the next book will explore Hawaiian plantations — I found one of her sweetest history gems in finally getting around to reading “Radio On” before writing this story. Its full title ends “A Listener’s Diary,” and it chronicles the year between December 31, 1994 and December 31, 1995 through the lens of her radio dial, wherever she happened to be.

This is not an exercise for the casual radio listener, and her love of “audio art” comes through in her reflections on the medium, her visits to local NPR affiliates, her recollections of signing up to join her college radio station before ever registering for classes. Remember 1995? Kurt Cobain was gone but not forgotten. Plenty of Hole and Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam carried on the Seattle Sound. Rush Limbaugh and his “Mr. Newt” had just taken over the country (and no one yet knew the name Lewinsky). Michael Jordan was still making comebacks. Ira Glass had just launched a solo project called “This American Life.” We didn’t know the outcome of the O.J. trial. Jerry Garcia got to find out whether the dead are, in fact, grateful.

One gets the sense that the book — her first — was written before her voice had fully congealed into its quirky-history-professor mode, when she was making a transition from the dial to the page that she dryly described to Rivers as a failed music career. Fifteen years later, though, what it is is history — a meticulously detailed, thoughtful history of one full year in American public life.

I really hope that it comes in handy to some smart-mouthed writer who decides to tell the rest of the 23rd century what the turn of the millennium was like.

Sarah Vowell comes to Pease Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 8. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased here or by calling the EMU Convocation Office at 734-487-2282.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.