Dawn's Reading Blog

I bought this book after reading a review somewhere that promised laugh-out-loud funny from this collection of essays. I’d never read anything by Sedaris before but When You Are Engulfed in Flames delivered on the reviewer’s promise. Sedaris is a gay man living abroad, so we don’t have much in common, but funny is still funny.

Mostly stupid.

There’s also a short story called Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, which I’ve read but don’t own and don’t remember. Since I didn’t remember any of Mostly Harmless either, I took that as a bad sign and refused to buy the complete series just to obtain it.

Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone is more of a humor book than a spiritual journey. Unlike the author of Eat, Pray, Love, Beth Lisick never takes her mission too seriously or tries too hard. The chapters, each of which is nominally devoted to a self help topic, are mostly humorous accounts of what’s going on in her life.

She goes to some seminars and meets some of the self-help gurus. She laughs a bit at their fans. Sometimes she tries one or two things they recommend, half-heartedly. Sometimes the things actually work, despite her lack of commitment. At the end, nothing much seems to have changed except that she’s tired from working on herself all year long. Easier to laugh at other people, I guess.

Lisick is apparently a humor writer, and taken in that vein this is an entertaining book, but it leaves me longing for what it could have been. Steve Pavlina was more what I was looking for, though I don’t always agree with his emphasis. He is at least really trying.

Getting down to the dregs here. All I remembered about So Long and Thanks For All the Fish was that it was too much Arthur Dent. I understand he’s nominally the main character, but he’s never been the good character. He was a straight-man to the others’ riotous insanity. So you take away the riotous insanity and you’ve got the sound of birds chirping as no one makes a joke leaving no one anything to react to. Arthur Dent is no comedian and Arthur Dent is no hero.

I re-read it once Steve was done with it (he said it was OK for the first two thirds, which is generous of him) and discovered nothing to change my memory. I found myself skimming frequently.

Four down and one to go. About Mostly Harmless I remember nothing except the quip on the cover: “The fifth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.” Sadly, I suspect that’s the funniest line in the book.

Steve continues reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and I continue following along behind him re-reading them. Life, the Universe & Everything was his favorite so far but it’s never been one of my favorites. It’s got a bit too much plot and the humor is recycled.

Steve finished the second book in the Hitchhiker trilogy, Restaurant at the End of the Universe, so I had to read it too. He found this one silly but I think it was always one of my favorites. The Total Perspective Vortex, for instance, and the cow that wants to be eaten are pure genius. And one of my favorite quotes is “I get weirder things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”

Then there’s the whole bit about the man who rules the universe. “Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?” Steve tells me that was originally Socrates or Plato or someone but all I know is I heard it from Douglas Adams first.

My father lent me Bridget Jones’s Diary to read back when it first came out. Seems like a funny pick for a father, doesn’t it? But he’s always had a sense of humor and so does Bridget Jones. I enjoyed it so much I bought a copy to add to my library, which turns out to have been a good choice since I just enjoyed re-reading it. I think this is a third read, but it’s the first time I noticed that my edition gives her weight in pounds, not stones. The first time through I had no idea how much a stone was. I eventually looked it up online, but while I was reading her weight-related agonies, I didn’t know whether or not they were “valid.”

If I’d known that Bridget weighed about as much as I did, would I have felt differently about her weight? Would I have related to her struggle more closely because she’s trying to lose the same five pounds I’m always trying to lose? Would I have recognized my own seesaw? At the time I assumed she was pleasingly plumb–not grossly unattractive but genuinely in need of weight loss. Obviously I could also have assumed that she was beautiful the way she was and that her obsession was neurotic. There’s some basis for thinking that since at one point she takes off ten pounds and has people telling her she looks sickly. But of all the options, why didn’t I assume she was just like me?–fine where she was, maybe better five pounds lighter, but mostly needing to be careful about getting five pounds heavier.

Later, they made the movie. The actress–who happens to be almost exactly my height–rather publicly had to gain weight to play the role. And she looked visibly pudgy with that weight on. Is that what my weight looks like? It’s nice to believe that it only looks that way on TV, but no wonder we all obsess about our weight. Turns out that a) Bridget Jones is my weight and b) Bridget Jones is overweight. Doesn’t that make me overweight? Then why don’t I think so? Although I ride the same seesaw as Bridget, I seem to have escaped the self-esteem roller coaster. Rather than thinking I look bad at every weight, I tend to think I look good at every weight. Bridget and Rene Zellweger may be chubby at 5′ 4″ and 125 lbs, but I’m not. Sure I need to lose five pounds, but that’s only so I can climb better. I couldn’t possibly get more gorgeous, right? Everyone say “right”!

I also smoked and drank back when I read this for the first time, so there was much there to relate to. Whether or not I was seeing someone, I don’t remember, but my luck with men has always been good. No major amounts of fuckwittage, except on my part. 🙂

Who didn’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in high school? I can remember, after being turned on to the first one, how eagerly I awaited new installments. A big bag of sour apple-flavored Jelly Belly’s and a book so funny that if my stomach didn’t hurt from too much candy, it hurt from laughing so hard. That was my “happy place.”

But apparently my boyfriend missed the memo. He was browsing my books the other day, looking for something “not depressing,” and picked up this one. I warned him it wasn’t his sense of humor, but I was wrong. We were able to share a few favorite quotes. When he returned it to me, I couldn’t help reading it again. I’ve probably read this book more often than any other in the world and it can still make me laugh out loud. Now if I could just remember not to panic.

The Thong Also Rises is another in the Whose Panties are These series of humorous travel stories written by women. They make great travel books and I read this one on my trip to the Dolomites where I was having adventures of my own that would fit pretty nicely into this series.

But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! is hard to categorize. I was looking for a travelogue. It’s not quite that. It’s humorous in spots, though not always. It has some recipes, oddly. It has some travel tips, almost all of which are amusingly out of date. It’s more a collection of anecdotes than anything else, very loosely centered on travelling and other cultures. Kind of an interesting read, but mostly for the anachornisms.