Tag: book reviews

Review: Norm Macdonald: Based on a True Story

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Woof.


Now that probably doesn’t seem like a great opener, but I do find myself with things to say both good and bad. Woof is mostly an exclamation related to some sort of exasperation or tension and release, and that’s what a humor book should be. Tension and release.


I don’t know I’d recommend this book to just anyone. Or rather, I would recommend it if I knew you well enough and I knew that you knew what was what.


Humor books aren’t for just everybody.


You’ve got to appreciate the craft and look past some of the murk. Some people can’t, and that’s okay. Some people are offended, and that’s okay. You have a right to be. Some of the offensive bits just aren’t funny, and using ‘funny’ to deflect culpability is a real problem.

Humor is built on tension and release, if the release doesn’t land then it’s not funny.


So here’s what’s important for you to hear: Norm Macdonald was a good writer. Norm Macdonald was someone skilled with words and inflection and story telling. He set word after word with an ease in an inevitable domino. Norm Macdonald was also someone who liked to take the piss and pull the rug out at the last minute, so as to skewer whatever sentimental turn he might have accidentally taken, instead assuring himself of maintaining his tone and humor and not tumbling accidentally into vulnerability.


That’s not an insult. He was a damn good writer, he knew what he was doing, and he did it. Unapologetically in most cases.


There are occasional themes in his humor that I can’t get behind–which is why if I was gonna recommend this book I’d want it to be to people who I knew knew what was to be known, as it were. There’s mentioned transphobia (which he apologized for in his comedy later in life), a few feckless mentions of rape, suicide, over the top misogyny, all intended to be humor —but the fear is how people take it; either as endorsement or insult. Satire is all risk if people can co-opt it.


The narrative takes this arc that begins very strong and then leans hard into revisiting old bits and Norm Macdonald characters from SNL. If you weren’t familiar with Norm Macdonald already you could say: my god, what risky and original content. Unfortunately if you know who Norm Macdonald is, and you probably do if you read this book, you probably have heard a lot of these jokes before. They’re given some new life and framing, I even liked the bit where the book is randomly interrupted by a suffering ghost writer who inserts his own thoughts (hatred) about Norm Macdonald.


I would have loved, fucking loved, to have read a completely original Norm Macdonald novel. The first few chapters in which he describes his fictional childhood are absolutely beautiful. They’re compelling, well written, full of Mark Twain-esque charms and then Norm Macdonald gut punches. It’s a bit, of course, but it also shows a skill with words and narrative framing that honestly I would have been happy to see extended into a whole damn book if not several. But then the rehashed bits come in, and the SNL characters, and you wish someone had sat the man down and said, ‘Look, you don’t have to rely on that.’

That’s condescending. Yeah, well.

What I’m saying is: the original content is amazing and you’re left feeling you only ever scratched the surface of how talented he was.


The book is strong for the things Norm Macdonald’s comedy was strong for: careful word choice, narrative framing, and clever turns. It’s also weak for the things Norm Macdonald’s comedy was weak for: punching down, no matter how good naturedly, and leaning into his want to be one of the boys.


I can’t tell you, honest, how much I liked those opening, original chapters. How I laughed at them, screenshot things to friends, and actually cared about the characters he’d made up to populate his childhood.


I also loved that you can see just what he’s doing: he’s telling you outright, you aren’t going to get to see the real me, fuckers.


Norm Macdonald, who I’m led to believe cut a quiet figure in life, and apparently didn’t drive despite living in LA, creates a purposely overly misogynistic character, detached from reality, shamelessly plotting to either fuck the world or take his own life. The character Norm chronically wears his own merch, at one point handling a man recognizing him by pointing at hat, shirt, etc., as the man says ‘what do I know you from?’ He pokes fun at his gambling addiction by taking the joke to its extreme, he overstates everything.


The book is in many ways overlapping framing devices, which Macdonald was the master of, sandwiching bits.


Particularly I’m fond of his sure fire answering machine bit which he repeatedly touts as being the best joke he’s ever written, and each time it’s told it never lands. He presents it again and again, straight faced, in new situations; pulling out his guaranteed winner, to stunning failure. His faith to the bit never wavers.


That might be this book in a sentence.

After he passed, I had heard an anecdote that I hope and kind of bet was true. It seems like it must be true because there’s no punchline and if Norm or one of his ilk had come up with it, he’d have pulled out the rug before it got too sentimental.

He was getting heckled and rather than clap back, the way we praise a comedian for being able to do, he paused his routine and asked the man if he’d be willing to meet with him after the show. After the show the man sort of sheepishly came back stage and Norm asked him what was going on with him and if he was all right. The man ended up breaking down crying and Norm Macdonald took him out to dinner. They spent the night bullshitting and Norm left him better off.

Every story I’ve heard about the man on his own, quiet and not seeking attention, is about something kind he did.

If you like his comedy, you’ll like the book; it’s like an in-club, a well tested group of inside jokes among a global mass of friends. I have a friend who when I said I was reading it kept saying ‘Oh, Norm’ in the same way we talk about one of our own friends who has passed.

If you don’t like his comedy, or the group of comedians he buzzed around and tried to keep the approval of, you might not like it. That’s totally fine, there’s shit not to like.

I just sort of hope he knew how good a writer he was.

Review: Poison for Breakfast

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I would call it atmospheric.

The atmosphere is both circular logic and literary nonsense, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense and not the dismissive way which we say ‘nonsense’ casually.
Poison for Breakfast is not a novel. It’s a meditation on the nature of storytelling in the guise of a story.


Sort of, kind of, ‘Poison for Breakfast’ is about consuming poison and trying to work backwards to figure out how you’d gotten to the point of being poisoned. Snicket is given a note informing him that he has been poisoned and now he, as a reliably known mystery solver, must solve the mystery of this suddenly appeared note, his poisoning, and therefore his apparent murder.


He doesn’t actually tell you very much at all, buried in convoluted Lemony Snicket-ism upon Lemony Snicket-ism, meditating on the nature of storytelling. He tells various non sequiturs that he initially frames as action then admits are really just things he’s thinking about but that probably did occur at some point and therefore are still true.


Handler, as Snicket of course, talks about the nature of story structure, the importance of inspiring bewilderment, what details are and are not important to include, and the need to cause the reader to buy in to the side of the narrator. At one juncture he tells a story of a bad lesson given by an ornery writer which sounded remarkably familiar and which I paused in reading and laughed…. because I read that book this year.


Handler, as Snicket, talks about the evolution of writing advice as well, his ideas of the rules of writing changing in real time as he discusses Lemony Snicket moving about his fictional morning uncovering his potential imminent death and therefore murder.


He also very, very carefully discusses various ways to make eggs—a nod, I’d say, to the rule Lemony Snicket gives that you should only tell information relevant to the story. Handler, as Snicket, tells you many, many irrelevant things in the course of telling you the story, the story where he may presumably die at the end, without sharing other necessary information.


The true theme appears to be rules and breaking them.
Like cracking many eggs.


It is also a meditation on safety. The way in which safety can be so suddenly and irreversibly taken out from under us, “we have poisoned ourselves”.


We read to identify with bewilderment, explore our bewilderment, and we throw ourselves into imagination to find solutions to our bewilderment.


I encourage you to read this short, under 200 pages, meta narrative disguised writing advice. Slowly.


It’s in many ways life advice, too.

Review: M is for Monster

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I’m never entirely certain how to review graphic novels and I tend to stray away from graphic novels and comics in reviews. Those are apparently just my recreational reading. Yet, I wanted to discuss M is for Monster by Talia Dutton in part because it is her first graphic novel and I think it ought to be celebrated and promoted.

An extended metaphor for accepting identity, a scientist attempts to bring her sister back to life following an accident, yet is repeatedly and vocally disappointed by the results; this causing her new creature to mask and question who she is in a world where she is not the person that everyone tells her to be. 

The art is comfy, possibly a strange description, but for a story which is Frankenstein-inspired some people might assume gore or graphic art. I find Dutton’s work to be beautiful and tasteful, as well as in line with a lot of other queer content I’ve seen that takes uncomfortable topics and twists them into elegant metaphor.

Review: Musicophilia

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Musicophilia by Dr Oliver Sacks is one of those books that I picked up and put down again over the course of years. First published in 2007, I used to fondly tap on a copy whenever I saw one in a bookstore. In part because of my love of Oliver Sacks. As a former neuro-whatever, the psychology equivalent of the muppet Gonzo, I’ve been reading case studies by Dr. Sacks for as long as I can remember. Musicophilia combines some of Sacks’ most keen interests, music and neurology, perception and creativity, and human perseverance into a book that feels inevitable.

It is a fingernail scratching at the surface of an iceberg, but it is the only book like it that I know of.

Dr. Sacks was, among other things, fascinated by music and keen pianist though he always lamented not being as adept as others; he was a very joyful man who pursued knowledge and understanding, conceptualizing things in a uniquely precise way. What sticks with me aside from Sack’s usual attention to detail and science, are particularly the opening chapter discussing a man struck by lightning who after developed keen musical intuition and writing ability. Other chapters which struck with me of particular interest were use of music therapies with individuals who have impulse and tic disorders. I think the applications of musical therapies are barely understood and so promising.

Dr. Sacks writes as he always does with keen, pointed interest. He doesn’t muck about, ever, he had far too much to discuss and learn, yet he was thrilled to talk about what he had learned with you.

The book is an excellent toe-in-the-water for learning about music therapy and musical disorders as well as music’s place in neurological development.

Review: How We Live Now

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I picked this one up sometime after reading Insomniac City, also by Bill Hayes. This book is a small snapshot of New York City during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the early days of quarantining, and is both a love letter to the city and to community.

It discusses all of the things missed, with more of Hayes’ beautiful photography, and how we pang for community when it’s been unexpectedly stripped of us.

Like all of Hayes’ work I’ve interacted with, it’s sentimental and raw, honest and blunt.

I had seen some negative reviews of it from people who misunderstood what the book was about –expecting some intensive description of the COVID-19 pandemic and not one artist’s experience of it. The book is a diary in many ways and beautifully composed, written at a time when no one knew what was going on and what the future held.

Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died

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TW: Childhood abuse, eating disorders

I read this one back in November 2022 and sat on it a while. I think the issue I had, which was nothing to do with the book at all, was that people said it was funny. They remarked, favorably, on the humor and care that went into the book. I apparently just read it differently. I think anyone who was been in some of the same situations would.

First of all, I loved this book. When I picked it up I’d been in a rut and was doing this thing of reading mindlessly. I would skim books then put them down. This book, however, I read every word. I am one of those people who downloads samples of books, first chapters, before I decide to commit. I downloaded this one impulsively while being my insomnia self and within twenty-four hours I had read the whole thing.

Jeannette McCurdy carefully details a dream so many impoverished families have–that one of their kids makes it. Big. In spite of the odds. And that includes a parent who will do anything to make it happen. I was struck by the tenderness McCurdy describes her mother with, particularly in a few biting scenes—her mother’s fond joy when McCurdy becomes concerned that she may age out of her Nickelodeon stardom and happily teaches her about calorie restriction to prevent growth. McCurdy describes it as something her mother seemed to have been waiting for all along. McCurdy details some of the techniques and rules, being taught to lie to doctors and how, by her mother, to support her eating disorder. She also describes casually pulling out one of her own teeth later on.

Another stand-out scene was McCurdy firing her therapist, someone she had come to rely on and confide in who accompanied her to events as an adult to help her manage her bulimia I’m public, after a particularly emotional trigger. She simply walks off and never speaks to her again because the painful power of the trigger outweighs the benefit of her support system.

There are so many points in the memoir where you think ‘well what else can happen to her’ and I didn’t particularly find it funny at all, more like I saw that vein of humor that many of us with abusive childhoods and eating disorders adopt. 

I that what’s most significant about the book is the conversations it starts and the depiction of poverty in America that is all too common and too rarely displayed for what it is.

Week 4, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Dr. Robert Sapolsky

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Psychology month!

Week 4, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky

Arguably not a psychology book, I couldn’t help myself. Dr. Sapolsky is a pre-eminent neuroendocrinologist whose research on stress has, since the 1990s, I think dominated the field of stress and trauma.

 Also, he’s extremely readable which tends to be an oft-touted gift in reviews of his work. Sapolsky is a charismatic, humorous guy and it shows in his writing style, even when he’s verbally beating you up about the misconceptions of dopamine over the last few decades.

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, of which I read it’s 3rd edition, was published originally in 1994 and has become a staple for anyone seriously studying stress and its affects on the body, mental health (which, yes, counts as part of your body), as well as the history of how the field of stress has developed through medicine over the last hundred years. Chock full of anecdotes about medical history, a remarkable breadth of knowledge on the subject, the book details what brought Sapolsky into the study of stress and what has, to the date of the most recent edition, been continually found and supported in the research.

Some people, me being one of them, find a lot of comfort understanding and also being able to explain mental health concerns from a medical standpoint. Some people will just not buy in to mindfulness or talk therapy seriously because they feel it’s a new science or there are too many elements of pseudoscience and that especially when dealing with mental illness, it’s easy for others to take advantage. That’s why I appreciate work like Sapolsky’s that provides so much empirical evidence that can be used to validate the importance of talk therapy, mindfulness, medicinal psychotropic therapies. It’s a huge boon to anyone to be able to understand their own bodies and brains better, but also to have that hammer in your back pocket of a wide history of medical research to support yourself as you navigate having a brain and other people who (yes, even that person) also have brains.

Week 3, Making Space; Taming the Tiger Within, Thich Nhat Han

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Psychology Month!

Week 3, Making Space; Taming the Tiger Within, Thich Nhat Han

Mindfulness has been getting a huge spotlight in medicine the last fifteen years but I often worry that it’s clouded by patients dismissively thinking of it as spiritualism. Thich Nhat Han, a Buddhist monk who sadly died last year, was a mindfulness teacher with a wide variety of accessible material who often managed not to fixate on mindfulness or awareness as a spiritual problem but as a human one. 

I was discussing with a friend at lunch recently another friend who has been recommended mindfulness again and again who always says it’s just too unappealing to her–and the friend at lunch burst out ‘but mindfulness is everything! You can’t do anything without doing mindfulness first!’

And, unfortunately, that’s pretty true. Mindfulness practices, like the ones I used to teach (Yep, I’m biased), are not about sitting in silence and not thinking, as the stereotype goes, but about learning to control your own nervous system. So much of mental health: addiction, anxiety, is rooted in not being able to engage in what we call non-striving behaviors. Sleep is a non-striving behaviors, the more you think about and force yourself to sleep, the less success you have switching effectively between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, for which there is the helpful acronym RIP. Relaxation induced panic.

Not being able to effectively not-strive leads to a huge prediction toward addiction, anxiety, panic attacks, as well as myriad behavioral problems.

 I think Thich Nhat Han delivers a very good methodology of what Mindfulness really is–coming together with yourself, taking control of your own nervous system. Being able to sit with yourself without blotting it out with the noise of everyone else. I have talked to too many people who do not feel their sense of self is stable and who are amazed when nothing changes in their lives without addressing that first.

Making Space is dedicated to how to begin that practice of mindfulness, while Taming the Tiger Within deals specifically with addressing anger. In mindfulness, one of the greatest lessons is being able to sit with anger and embrace anger and appreciation of anger for what it is, without lashing out or causing harm. And it is, like my friend said, the start of everything.

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

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Psychology month!

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

Self Compassion: The Proven Power of being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff is a straightforward argument for why being kind to yourself helps you best to be kind to others and to improve how you view and move through life. It highlights the importance of putting the brakes on catastrophic thinking and reactive behaviors. There’s going to be a theme, if you read all of these reviews on Psychology books, of curbing reactive, adaptive behaviors that may have been advantageous to you at one time in your life but aren’t any longer. It’s incredibly hard to unlearn maladaptive behaviors and Neff puts forward the importance of self compassion toward reaching that goal for yourself. Self compassion is touted and supported as being integral to adapting and learning new behavior and Neff is one of the biggest names in general audiences learning to that end.

Be Calm by Jill Weber is, like so many of these, sort of a hybrid between a work book and a psychology book, focused on anxiety. I decided to pair it with the book on self compassion because…..well, duh. You need self compassion to work through anxiety, the good news being that anxiety is extremely responsive to treatment.

This book is a compassionate description of anxiety symptoms, how they impact functioning and relationships, broken down into sections on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It offers practical guidance on how to curb anxiety stemming from each of these and how they relate to one another.

Week 1, Us, Terrence Real; Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples, Elizabeth Gillette 

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Psychology month! —

Week 1, Us, Terrence Real; Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples, Elizabeth Gillette 

For June (my birfday month) I’ve decided to focus on Psychology books which I’d recommend, beginning with Us by Terrence Real. Real is a couples counseling specialist and makes the argument for relational therapy, a methodology he’s developed to address interpersonal relationships by focusing heavily on inner child work; examining core values and problems which lead to poor communication and behavior with others. There is a straight forward, no nonsense approach on how to bring people from states of harmony and disharmony into repair through compassion.

Real breaks his concept down by discussing how, by living in a patriarchal society, we have created a culture of rugged individualism which becomes toxic as we reject help or assistance, relying instead on our own adaptive behaviors rooted in childhood. Many people reject relational thinking–thinking of and for others, even when it works against their best interest to do so, because it’s seen as anti-individual. People default to thinking of their own traumas, interests, or adaptive behaviors, reacting rather than relating to their current experiences.

Real makes an important point to note that in our individualist, capitalist society, someone can be praised for relying on adaptive behaviors and behaviors which discourage seeking help or assistance—-that a person can have an amazing work life, friend life,  inner life while not understanding why their relationships are failing. The short answer is it’s because your coworkers and employers benefit from your toxic individualism (not making a fuss, not asking for help, not communicating personal problems, internalizing blame and conflict, taking aggressive action against perceived problems), while the people who love you are scrambling to get you to pay attention or to think of their perspectives.

Disharmony is of course to be expected in life. Individuals coming together to live in units and relationships, romantic or not, are going to experience conflict. It’s inevitable. The most important feature of any relationship is how you repair from conflict, if you can repair from conflict.

A second couples counseling book, or really a book that could benefit interpersonal relationships, which I’d recommend is The Attachment Theory Workbook for Couples by Elizabeth Gillette.  The book is broken down into describing each of the main attachment styles, giving examples for readers to best identity themselves and their partner, as well as individual sections on how each combination of those attachment styles interacts with one another with examples; all sections providing questions for reflection designed to increase empathy. Gillette gives a clear set of expectations for the strengths and weaknesses of each pairing and how they could best succeed. It’s a very straight forward, ways to digest work book that describes attachment theory very well for general audiences.