Usually, celebrity autobiographies are pretty boring. Even if you like the actor, it’s tedious to listen to them blather on about their craft and how lucky they are and blah blah blah (the obvious exceptions are the WW2 celebrities, who made movies and punched Nazis). Neil Patrick Harris gets this-not enough to resist the urge of writing an autobiography-and makes his book pleasant and clever-and surprisingly heartfelt. Framed as a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the reader is an active participant in the book, flipping […]
Clever Woman
This is comedian and writer Jen Kirkman’s second book, and it’s quite nice. It’s not a comedy book, but a collection of essays and stories about her life. She’s divorced, she’s childfree, and she has an unconventional job. Hopefully it goes without saying, but you don’t need to be any of those things to find her writing relatable and charming. If you listen to her podcast “I Seem Fun,” you’ll find that some of the stories are familiar. But definitely not all, or even most. […]
Cerebral palsy, the sexiest of the palsies.
Firstly, whether or not you end up reading Zach Anner’s book, it’s definitely worth a trip over to YouTube to check out some of his videos. (Might I recommend this one, this one, and this one?) The guy is goofy and slyly funny. It’s always a happy day when one of his videos shows up in my inbox. He’s the kind of guy who decides to create a video series where all he does is give people virtual high-fives. Often he’ll make a joke that […]
First world problems getting you down? Try Tehran
On a scale of Donald Drumpf to Samantha Power (United States Ambassador to the United Nations) regarding my knowledge of the geopolitical landscape, I would rate somewhere in the middle, as I had to Google to figure out who to herald as an example of someone very well knowledgeable regarding world events, but I knew what the word “geopolitical” meant. That being said, I wasn’t terribly familiar with the history and current events of Iran, and this memoir was a stark look at what it […]