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157. One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   B.J. Novak

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Humor

288 pages, published February 4, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

One More Thing is a collection of humorous, witty and sometimes surprisingly affecting short stories from B.J. Novak, an actor, writer, and director best known for his work on The Office (where he played Ryan the temp).  In one story, a boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes, only to discover that claiming the winnings may break up his family.  A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins and asks Tony Robbins himself for help achieving this mission.  Author John Grisham contemplates an epic typo.  A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother.  One of my favorites is a retelling of the classic fable The Tortoise and the Hare in which a revenge minded hare is obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life.

 

Quotes 

“…slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.”

 

“In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.”

 

“If you love something, let it go.

If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.

Basically, just drop everything, who cares.”

 

“Regret is just perfectionism plus time.”

 

“But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.”

 

“You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”

 

“It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.”

 

“I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.”

 

“Being young was her thing, and she was the best at it. But every year, more and more girls came out of nowhere and tried to steal her thing.  One of these days I’m going to have to get a new thing, she thought to herself–but as quietly as she could, because she knew that if anyone caught her thinking this thought, her thing would be right over right then.”

 

“I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”

 

“In my opinion, there are two types of perfect. The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world it would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of “perfect.” This is the type of perfect that makes you and most other people think, “Why isn’t everything like this? Why is it so hard to find …” a black V-neck cotton sweater, or a casual non-chain restaurant with comfortable booths, etc.—“that is just exactly the way everyone knows something like this should be?” “Perfect,” we all say with relief when we finally find something like this that is exactly as it should be. “Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”

The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.”

 

“All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment.”

 

“It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.”

 

My Take

My family and I love watching The Office, so I was interested to see what B.J. Novak (who was a creative force on that classic show in addition to playing the somewhat dodgy temp Ryan) would come up with.  I also had really enjoyed reading two books by Novak bestie Mindy Kaling.  While Novak’s stories are often entertaining and sometimes thought provoking, the collection is a bit uneven.  He tackles a wide variety of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Still, I am happy to have read this book, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as Kaling’s work.

 

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155. Everything Changes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Tropper

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

352 pages, published March 28, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Everything Changes tells the story of Zachary King.  In his appearance to the outside world, Zack has it all.  A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free luxurious Manhattan apartment, and an engagement to Hope, who is beautiful, smart, and from a wealthy family.  However, as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier—and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.  When Norm, Zack’s unemployed,  freewheeling, Viagra-popping father, resurfaces after a twenty-year absence, looking to make amends, Zack begins to question everything in his life.

 

Quotes 

“You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn’t follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.”

 

“The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.”

 

“Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.”

 

“it’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character. I’m not like him becomes your mantra,”

 

“Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way.” Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. “That’s a pretty dire outlook on life,” she says. “What’s the point in working to be happy if you’re going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it’s time to pay the bill?”

 

“The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it’s too late to apply to yourself.”

 

“I wake up like this, this sense that I’ve somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right because of some seemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I’ve made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into…something.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed several books by Jonathan Tropper (The Book of Joe, This is Where I Leave You, and One Last Thing Before I Go), I had high hopes for Everything Changes.  I was not disappointed.  Tropper has a knack for creating colorful, sometimes eccentric (and always entertaining) characters that retain enough of their humanity that they seem like real people.  He then puts them in situations that combine pathos with the outlandish.  The result is often extremely humorous with an undercurrent of the poignant.  Everything Changes hits all of these notes and it was a pleasure to read.

 

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151. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Bryson

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel, Memoir, Humor

397 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson’s memoir of his more than 500 miles of hiking the Appalachian Trail or AT as it is often referred to.  The AT stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most beautiful terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes.  If you want to do a major hike in the U.S., it’s probably the place to go.  Bill Bryson introduces the reader to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other characters that he meets along the way.

 

Quotes

“Black bears rarely attack.  But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do.  All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but – and here is the absolutely salient point – once would be enough.”

 

“I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

 

“To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.”

 

“You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”

 

“Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.”

 

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

 

“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.”

 

“At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”

 

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

 

“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

 

“Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.”

 

“That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”

 

“In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition–either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit–that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.”

 

“But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”

 

My Take

I listened to A Walk in the Woods right before my husband Scot and I left to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain.  Fortunately for me, I was doing the “minimum Camino” of 5 days and 114 kilometers.  We also had a luggage transport service, so all we had to carry were day packs with water, jackets and a few other items.  Our hike was nothing like the grueling experience described by Bill Bryson.  While he didn’t make the case to me for the hard core experience of hiking the AT (I’m happy just doing the minimum Camino), I’m sure that heartier souls will be inspired by Bryson’s vivid descriptions and humor in this very readable book.

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143. Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matthew Diffee

Genre:  Humor, Cartoon

240 pages, published May 26, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee (editor of The Rejection Collection), Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People is an insightful, often hilarious collection cartoons that will appeal to anyone who is beautiful and intelligent.

 

 

My Take

Finally, a book that’s not for everyone!  All kidding aside, this book was a bit of a cheat since it did not take me long to get through it.  However, I did enjoy it and found myself chuckling throughout.  A fun diversion.

 

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123. The Financial Lives of the Poets

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Jess Walter

Genre:  Fiction, Satire, Humor

304 pages, published September 22, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Financial Lives of the Poets tells the story of Matt Prior, who gave up his business journalist job to start a blog called Poetfolio which conveyed financial news in the form of poems.  Needless to say, Poetfolio didn’t work out all that well and Matt is in danger of  losing everything else in his life, his wife, his house, his children until he discovers a way to save it all that seems too good to be true.  

 

Quotes

“But it’s not easy, realizing how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realization that the edge is so close to where we live.”

 

“Among the world’s evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation—smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids’ school.”

 

“I don’t know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his

criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep with the fishes, or like Al Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually, now that I think about it, he’s not like Al Pacino at all but more like Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?”

 

“my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)”

 

“Listen,” Richard says, „unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”

See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.”

 

“So I make one phone call, and just like that, we’re eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.”

My Take

After finishing Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walters’ best-selling and critically acclaimed 2012 book, I wanted to read more by this amazing author.  After a quick Amazon search, I zeroed in on The Financial Lives of the Poets, a satirical book about the financial crisis that Walter had written a few years earlier.  It did not disappoint. From the hilarious concept of “Poetfolio,” a website that delivers financial news in the form of poems, to great characters to his capture of the zeitgeist of 2008 financial meltdown era, Walters delivers a quick reading, fun book that has something interesting to say about our modern times.

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112. The Rosie Effect

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Graeme Simsion

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

368 pages, published July 21, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Rosie Effect, which is the sequel to The Rosie Project, follows Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman after they marry and move to New York to study and work at Columbia.  The happy couple faces a new challenge when Rosie discovers she is pregnant.  Don, whose Asperger’s Syndrome makes him a unique and unforgettable character, decides to learn all that he can about becoming a father.  However, it doesn’t take long for his unusual research style to get him into trouble.

 

Quotes

“I thought you were happy about having a baby.’ I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances.”

 

“To the world’s most perfect woman.’ It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.”

 

“It is generally accepted that people enjoy surprises: hence the traditions associated with Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries. In my experience, most of the pleasure accrues to the giver. The victim is frequently under pressure to feign, at short notice, a positive response to an unwanted object or unscheduled event.”

 

“Watch some kids, watch them play. You’ll see they’re just little adults, only they don’t know all the rules and tricks yet.”

 

“before sharing interesting information that has not been solicited, think carefully about whether it has the potential to cause distress.”

 

“After the most basic physical requirements are satisfied, human happiness is almost independent of wealth. A meaningful job is far more important.”

 

“In marriage reason frequently had to take second place to Harmony”

 

“I watched as she took a second sip, imagining alcohol crossing the placental wall, damaging brain cells, reducing our unborn child from a future Einstein to a physicist who would fall just short of taking science to a new level. A child who would never have the experience described by Richard Feynman of knowing something about the universe that no one had before”

 

“One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich laying bricks in Siberia probably generated a higher level of happiness than one day in the life of a retired rock star in a Manhattan penthouse with all the beer he could drink. Work was crucial to sanity. Which was probably why George continued to perform on the cruise ship.”

 

“It was odd, paradoxical-crazy-that what Rosie seemed to value most about me, a highly organized person who avoided uncertainty and liked to plan in detail, was that my behavior generated unpredictable consequences. But if that was what she loved, I was not going to argue. What I was going to argue was that she should not abandon something she valued.”

 

“Rain Man! I had seen the film. I did not identify in any way with Rain Man, who was inarticulate, dependent, and unemployable. A society of Rain Men would be dysfunctional. A society of Don Tillmans would be efficient, safe, and pleasant for all of us.”

My Take

During the first year of my thousand book quest, I read The Rosie Project and really enjoyed it.  It was clever, light and fun and had a great character in the person of Don Tillman whose Asperger’s Syndrome made for some hilarious situations and dialogue.  In The Rosie Project, Don is looking for a wife and approaches the endeavor with his characteristic logical mind only to end up with the unlikely choice of Rosie Jarmon.  In The Rosie Effect, author Graeme Simsion relies upon a similar formula, but this time applies it to Don’s impending fatherhood.  It’s not quite as clever and fun as the first book, but it was still a treat to read it and there are truly some very funny moments that had me laughing.

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109. The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:   Jonas Jonasson

Genre:  Fiction, Humor, Foreign, Historical Fiction

384 pages, published September 11, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

As he prepares to celebrate his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson does the unexpected.  Still in his slippers, he steps out of his nursing home window and into an incredible adventure.  He will find himself accidentally in possession of a small fortune, on the run from the mob and the police and on the way will make the acquaintance of a colorful cast of characters, including Sophia a former circus elephant.  We learn about Allan’s amazing life and his close encounters with the major players of the twentieth century, along with his key role in shaping our history, through a series of interspersed flashbacks.   

 

Quotes

“People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.”

 

“When life has gone into overtime it’s easy to take liberties,”

 

“There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make vodka from goats’ milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb.”

 

“Revenge is like politics, one thing always leads to another until bad has become worse, and worse has become worst.”

 

“Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.”

 

“Allan admitted that the difference between madness and genius was subtle, and that he couldn’t with certainty say which it was in this case, but that he had his suspicions.”

 

“But God answered with silence. He did that sometimes, and Father Ferguson always interpreted it to mean that he should think for himself. Admittedly, it didn’t always work out well when the pastor thought for himself, but you couldn’t just give up.”

 

“Never try to out-drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.”

 

“Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away forever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts forever, except possibly general stupidity.”

My Take

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a fun book that alternates between the present day, hilarious antics of a 100 year old man and his ragtag gang who are on the run from the police and his adventures through the 20th Century.  Through the inscrutable Allan Karlsson who specializes in the art of blowing things up and has perfected the art of making alcoholic beverages from goats milk, we meet Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman Mao Tse-Tung , Francisco Franco, Charles de Gaulle and, best of all, Albert Einstein’s dim-witted half brother Harold.  Quirky and unique, this book is a fun and fast reading romp.

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107. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Melissa Byers

Author:   David Sedaris

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Essays, Memoir, Humor

275 pages, published April 23, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

An eclectic collection of essays from David Sedaris, an eminent humorist, which cover different eras in his life, from his time as a child in swim competitions fruitlessly trying to impress his dad to his daily routine of picking up trash around the English countryside to his surprisingly pleasant colonoscopy. The essays range from hilariously funny to serious, moving or even depressing.  

 

Quotes

“All these young mothers chauffeuring their volcanic three-year-olds through the grocery store. The child’s name always sounds vaguely presidental, and he or she tends to act accordingly. “Mommy hears what you’re saying about treats,” the woman will say, “But right now she needs you to let go of her hair and put the chocolate-covered Life Savers back where they came from.”  “No!” screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. “Listen,” I’d like to say, “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop its crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

 

“I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then reread them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.” That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.”

 

“Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”

 

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”

 

“Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I’d remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I’d wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.”

 

“There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”

 

“Of course, the diary helps me as well. ‘That wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,’ I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.”

 

“It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.”

 

“I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered.”

 

“Then there are vegans, macrobiotics, and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.”

 

“My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn’t prove I’m color-blind, just that I like big butts.”

 

“Drawing attention to Gretchen’s weight was the sort of behavior my mother referred to as ‘stirring the turd,’ and I did it a lot that summer.”

 

“In Japanese and Italian, the response to [“How are you?”] is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by “Not so good.”

 

“On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. “Goddamnit,” I whispered. “I knew I forgot something.”

 

“It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

My Take

I have always enjoyed the humor of David Sedaris, especially his autobiographical essays, and this book was no exception.  His essay on modern parenting compared to his childhood had me trying to read parts of it to my husband Scot, but being unable to do so because I was laughing too hard.  The book was worth reading for that experience alone.

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103. The Sellout

Rating:  ☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Paul Beatty

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

289 pages, published March 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens—on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout tells of his upbringing by a single father who exposed him to racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes, but when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir.  All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.  The narrator then sets out to right another wrong.  Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment.  Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he reinstates slavery and segregates the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.  

 

Quotes

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

 

“If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.”

 

“My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.”

 

“If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.”

 

“The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything.”

 

“I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren’t there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That’s why black literature sucks!”

My Take

I picked up The Sellout from the library after seeing several rave reviews on the internet and a reference to it as a book that captures the current zeitgeist.  Hopefully, I will save you the pain of reading this horrible book.  I HATED it!  It seems that every other sentence contains the f-word, the characters to a person are irredeemable, the story meanders all over the place with little cohesion and the writing is dull.  Enough said.

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88. Yes, Please

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:   Amy Poehler

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Humor

329 pages, published October 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Yes Please is a humorous memoir by Amy Poehler of Saturday Night Live and Parks and Rec fame.  In plainspoken and irreverent style, Amy recounts stories from her normal childhood all the way through her divorce from fellow comedian Will Arnett.  The title “Yes Please” refers to her formative experience with the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv group in which she was taught to say “yes” to any improv idea thrown her way.  “Yes Please” is also  an apt description of her response to a wide range of opportunities throughout her life.  With chapters like “Treat Your Career Like a Bad Boyfriend,” “Plain Girl Versus the Demon” and “The Robots Will Kill Us All” “Yes Please” will make you both think and laugh.  

 

Quotes

“It’s called Yes Please because it is the constant struggle and often the right answer. Can we figure out what we want, ask for it, and stop talking? Yes please. Is being vulnerable a power position? Yes please. Am I allowed to take up space? Yes please. Would you like to be left alone? Yes please. I love saying “yes” and I love saying “please.” Saying “yes” doesn’t mean I don’t know how to say no, and saying “please” doesn’t mean I am waiting for permission. “Yes please” sounds powerful and concise. It’s a response and a request. It is not about being a good girl; it is about being a real woman. It’s also a title I can tell my kids. I like when they say “Yes please” because most people are rude and nice manners are the secret keys to the universe.”

 

“I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people that dream and support and do things.”

 

“You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.”

 

“I think we should stop asking people in their twenties what they “want to do” and start asking them what they don’t want to do.”

 

“Anger and embarrassment are often neighbors.”

 

“Your ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to your happiness and general well-being. See what I just did there? I saved you thousands of dollars on self-help books. If you can surf your life rather than plant your feet, you will be happier.”

 

“Either way, we both agree that ambivalence is a key to success. I will say it again. Ambivalence is key. You have to care about your work but not the result. You have to care about how good you and how good you feel, but now about how good people think you are or how good people think you look I realize this is extremely difficult. I am not saying I am particularly good at it. I’m like you. Or maybe you’er better at this and I am. You will never climb Career Mountain and get to the top and shout, ‘I made it!’ You will rarely feel done or complete or even successful Most people I know struggle with that complicated soup of feeling slighted on one hand and like a total fraud on the other. Our ego is a monster that loves to sit at the head of the table, and I have learned that my ego is just as rude and loud and hungry as everyone else’s. It doesn’t matter how much you get; you are left wanting more. Success is filled with MSG.”

 

“However, if you do start crying in an argument and someone asks why, you can always say, “I’m just crying because of how wrong you are.”

 

“The only way we will survive is by being kind. The only way we can get by in this world is through the help we receive from others. No one can do it alone, no matter how great the machines are.”

 

“You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look.”

 

“Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier.”

 

“Watching great people do what you love is a good way to start learning how to do it yourself.”

 

“Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that- that’s what life is. You might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s really special and if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself”

 

“Hopefully as you get older, you start to learn how to live with your demon. It’s hard at first. Some people give their demon so much room that there is no space in their head or bed for love. They feed their demon and it gets really strong and then it makes them stay in abusive relationships or starve their beautiful bodies. But sometimes, you get a little older and get a little bored of the demon. Through good therapy and friends and self-love you can practice treating the demon like a hacky, annoying cousin. Maybe a day even comes when you are getting dressed for a fancy event and it whispers, “You aren’t pretty,” and you go, “I know, I know, now let me find my earrings.” Sometimes you say, “Demon, I promise you I will let you remind me of my ugliness, but right now I am having hot sex so I will check in later.”

 

“Career is different. Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Mix in public opinion and past regrets. Add a dash of future panic and a whole lot of financial uncertainty. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren’t. Career is the thing that will not fill you up and never make you truly whole. Depending on your career is like eating cake for breakfast and wondering why you start crying an hour later.”

“The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.”

 

“I am introducing a new idea. Try to care less. Practice ambivalence. Learn to let go of wanting it.”

 

“Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It’s expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.”

 

“Now, before I extend this metaphor, let me make a distinction between career and creativity. Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, “I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going.” That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world. Your creativity is not a bad boyfriend. It is a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and maybe cook you delicious food.”

 

“I asked the indefatigable Betty White what she was going to do when she got home. She told me she was going to fix herself a “vodka on the rocks and eat a cold hot dog.” In one sentence, she proved my theory and made me excited for my future.”

 

“Annie taught me that orphanages were a blast and being rich is the only thing that matters. Grease taught me being in a gang is nonstop fun and you need to dress sexier to have any chance of keeping a guy interested.”

 

“Because remember, the talking about the thing isn’t the thing. The doing of the thing is the thing.”

 

“nice manners are the secret keys to the universe.”

 

“Ignore what other people think. Most people aren’t even paying attention to you.”

My Take

I listened to Amy Poehler’s Yes Please which was read by Poehler and, like Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants, I recommend the audio version of this book.  Like Fey, Poehler has led an interesting life with lots of twists and turns.  Reading both Yes Please and Bossy Pants, you will see that Poehler and Fey are in a mutual admiration society as each book has a significant discussion about the other. Poehler’s memoir is filled with sage advice for women working and raising a family and lots of humor to boot.  I unequivocally recommend it.

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