A Basket of Anecdotes

I picked this book up randomly, looking for a funny book to break up the heaviness of my recent choices.    This is collection of very short anecdotes from the author’s life, no more than a few pages each.

Hawn has a good sense of comedic timing, and her writing feels conversational, as if she’s really telling you this story in a bar or a stand-up routine.   Everyone has unusual stuff happen to them once in a while, but not everyone can see the humor in those situations, and not everyone can tell those stories in a way that invites you to share their laughter.  Hawn seems like a person who is always looking for humor, and that attitude is refreshing.  

That said, I couldn’t read this all the way through in one sitting, even though it’s quite short.  While her writing is good, it’s chock full of silly comparisons.  They were funny, but more than a few in a row started feeling overwrought:  “She exploded into laughter that lasted long enough to teach a penguin how to make brownies” or “He was obviously higher than the Hubble telescope”–both made me smile, but I can only take so many such comparisons in one sitting, and this book is full of them.  I ended up reading about one chapter a day, as a kind of brief interlude from the rest of the day, because that’s all I was ever really in the mood for.

Rating: 3/5.  Overall, this was an easy distraction that I mostly turned to when I was waiting for meetings to begin.  Hawn has talent and it would be interesting to see her try something else with little more editing so that only her most stellar wordplay is included.