Tag Archives: Funny

Rose of No Man’s Land by Michelle Tea (2005)

Fourteen-year-old Trisha has a hypochondriac mother, a sister who wants to be on The Real World, and not much else.  Her new job at a teenybopper mall store leads her to Rose, a rebel who smokes and otherwise does what she wants, and together they set out on a late-night adventure through the sprawl of northeastern Massachusetts.  Tea’s writing hums with crazy energy, sharp observations, and madcap scenes that leave you racing.  This is a book about when everything was exciting and meant something, a book for those of us who play by our own rules.  Read it.

Rating:

Where I Got It:

Christmas gift from a friend who was like, “I’ve got a book for you.”

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Michelle Tea’s website

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

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Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari (with Eric Klinenberg, 2015)

Dick pics. Waiting exactly two hours before responding to a flirty text.  Swiping through Tinder while at an actual bar because the people there aren’t quite good enough.  Aziz Ansari reveals string after string of sharp, relatable truths about 21st century phone-based dating and how today’s young adults struggle through a new period of emerging adulthood in their quests for the perfect soulmate.  The book smartly blends sociological research, jokes about rappers, insights into the dating scenes in Japan and Buenos Aires, and actual, useful advice for navigating the ever-changing world of modern romance.  Well played, Aziz.

Rating:

5-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online this September after telling myself for months that I was finally going to read the damned thing.

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Aziz Ansari essay, Everything You Thought You Knew About L-O-V-E is Wrong

Eric Klinenberg’s website

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris (2014)

I like David Sedaris’s writing because it’s funny, easy to read, and poignant, and most things I like satisfy at least two of these.  His latest collection is mostly essays with a few fiction monologues thrown in (the best of which, “I Brake for Traditional Marriage,” features a disoriented right-winger who murders his family and wants to grow a mustache like Yosemite Sam’s), but I enjoyed it slightly less than his earlier work because most of the essays (about, say, losing your passport or picking up highway trash) feel less zany.  It still earns a solid four Kafkas, though.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Christmas Gift, 2015.

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David Sedaris’s Website

David Sedaris Reads 50 Shades of Grey (video)

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, by Nick Hornby (2006)

Nick Hornby writes with down-to-earth honesty, and this second collection of Stuff I’ve Been Reading essays (which partially inspired this book blog) for The Believer is no exception. Its most poignant moment comes in the preface, where he encourages people to actually read books they enjoy and to not read certain books just because they seem important: “Please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program.”  Books should be fun, so let’s keep them that way.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Christmas gift, 2014, along with Nick Hornby’s two other collections of book essays (one of which still remains in the stack…).

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Housekeeping vs. The Dirt at McSweeney’s

Nick Hornby’s Website

American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller (2014)

An encyclopedia of humor clichés of the Looney Tunes/newspaper comic variety, American Cornball covers the ubiquitous falling anvils, stinky limburger, and bindlestick-carrying hoboes of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, along with why and how these now-outdated gags entered the mainstream.  Miller realizes (rightly!) that books about funny things should also themselves be funny, and writes with graceful wit and humor.  The book is also exhaustive, with enough pictures, literary references, and observations about the human condition to keep the fun moving through the 500 pages from A to Z (or, from “Absentminded Professors” to “Zealots”).

Rating:

5-kafkas

Where I Got It

Ordered online, Summer 2015.

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Amazon page

NPR Interview with the author