Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980 – 1988
Michael Palin
The second installment of the diaries of actor and writer Michael Palin is an excellent continuation of Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. Palin continues to chronicle both the successes and failures of himself and his Python cohort, but also his own family’s growth, his wonderful spunky mother and the sad decline of his sister into depression. Like diarist Sir Samuel Pepys (1633 –1703) his own personal comments show Palin to be a warm, caring, colorful and brilliant man. In addition, those of us who enjoy nosing around the backstage of life will enjoy descriptions of the humdrum and everyday workings of the rich and famous. The end product of a movie, play or book may seem effortless but the energy and work going on behind the...
The Bucolic Plague
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
This is one of those books that has me vacillating wildly between seething jealousy and abject horror. When Josh and Brent, overworked Manhattanites, find the perfect old mansion for a song it seems like their dreams have come true. The first months of farming and spending weekends at the Beekman house are idyllic. But the two driven A-personalities soon feel the need to do more. What was a peaceful retreat becomes a task-master. Having Martha Stewart herself as Brent’s boss makes their scrutiny of the farm and their need for country-perfect even more intense. Hilarious, sad and a hell of a warning to those who don’t know the word “no.”That being said, they do seem to have landed on their feet with their...
McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes
McSweeney’s
Sheer silliness for the well-read and deeply snarky. Entries include
Thirteen Writing Prompts: Imagine if your favorite character form nineteenth-century fiction had been born without thumbs. Then write a short story about them winning the lottery.
Klingon Fairy Tales: There was an old woman who lived in a shoe with a big spike on it.
Quiz: Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character?
Lady Macbeth on Ambien: “Doctor: Hark! She speaks! And with her mouth full, too.”
Moab is my Washpot
Stephen Fry
A true Renaissance man, actor and comedian Stephen Fry has written a wonderful biography of his childhood. Mostly set in his childhood of boarding schools, Fry tells about the loneliness of being gay and British, his love of music, family problems and eventual life of crime. Brilliant and witty.
“Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks.”
At Least in the City Someone would Hear Me Scream
Wade Davis
Davis’s first chapter “Coonskin Cap” ties with http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html for funniest thing I’ve read in the last year. A flamingly fabulously gay man who escaped his home in the Ozarks to recreate himself as an anonymous city-dweller, Davis decides at 40 that he is doing it all wrong. After a number of not-particularly subtle signs, he and his boyfriend buy a cabin in Michigan. Davis wants to invent his own “Wade’s Walden”. The couple have no idea how tough life is in the dead of winter, deep in the woods. Davis makes a valiant attempt to assimilate, tries to loose his snarkiness and cynicism and to embrace nature. Sometimes it works,...
Stephen Fry in America
Stephen Fry
British actor and comedian Stephen Fry (Jeeves of Jeeves and Wooster fame) is that rare breed of European – one who actually likes Americans. In his attempt to show his British audiences that we aren’t all a bunch of loud, vulgar, gun-toting religious nuts he undertakes a project to visit all 50 states…in a black British taxi. Many of his visits are more than just tourist spots. He visits the boarder patrol in Texas, the homeless in Oklahoma and Hmong food stores in Minnesota. He also visits Ted Turner on his bison ranch, the Maharishi University in Iowa, hunts, canoes, eats tons of fried stuff and generally has a grand time…with lots of ridiculous safety gear involved:
How is it that work clothes know when they are...