Are You Kidding Me, Another One?

There’s a chance that if you’re reading this review, you might not be an active participant in Cannonball Read 6.  Maybe you didn’t sign up, unsure of whether or not you could participate to your satisfaction, or you missed the deadline, or you just wanted to cheerlead from the sidelines, or any other number of reasonable and perfectly fine reasons.  Nonetheless, you could always try to read fifty two Cannonball Read reviews this year!

In fact, you might even be able to read fifty two Cannonball Read reviews of Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened.  How does one even begin to review a book when so many others have been so eloquent?  Allie Brosh has a blog where she draws funny pictures along with funny stories that are sometimes not so funny when they hit close to home, and now there is a book where you can get alot of beloved entries but not all of them.

I started reading Hugh Howey’s Shift Omnibus a week and a half or two weeks ago, and after finishing First Shift found myself ever so slightly adrift when starting to read Second Shift.  I would read a page or two and then find something else to do, usually involving Disney Infinity toys.  So after realizing that my self-appointed review day was approaching again and not wanting to review an Oz graphic novel for the second week in a row, it clearly became time to open up Hyperbole and a Half and read some comfort food as well as some new additions that are likely to become comfort food instead of plowing further into the gripping dystopian future that Mr. Howey had waiting for me.  The chapter on motivation felt like it was openly mocking me for having chosen the path of least resistance.

And I think that’s why we collectively love Hyperbole and a Half so much.  It speaks to us in clear and simple terms that we are not alone in our feelings of restlessness, of depression, of wanting to eat more cake than is humanly healthy.  It speaks to us in the ways that we want to be good people and yet find every possible scrap of proof that there is that to ourselves, we are not.  It does it all with artfully artless illustrations that makes one scoff about how they could write a blog full of MS Paint pictures too, and then prove themselves wrong by appending their attempts to Cannonball Read reviews.

So no, I don’t have very much to add to the conversation of why Hyperbole and a Half is such a wonderful blog, why Allie Brosh is a national treasure, or why this book is the hero that our Gotham deserves.  I don’t want to damn the book with faint praise, not when it made me burst out laughing at least three times.  If you’re somehow unfamiliar with Brosh’s blog or the book after all this time and all these reviews, you can still enjoy many of her entries from whence they originated.  And then when you find something brilliant, hilarious, crushing, or all three at once, you can scoot back over here and click the link up above to get the expanded, wonderful collection that Allie Brosh has put together sent merrily on its way, and contribute your own review to the growing pile.  Or at least tick one more review to read off your list.

[Shameless plug for my CBR6 Review Archive]