Mary Jo Pehl: Employee of the Month and Other Big Deals

This book was recommended to me as really uproarious, which I thought oversold it; It was a one-guffaw read for me. It’s a series of pseudo-autobiographical essays, recounted with some verve, but with not a lot to distinguish them from other amusing pseudo-autobiographical essays about mildly dysfunctional upbringings and somewhat stressful employment and dating experiences.

Piper Kerman: Orange is the New Black

I’m usually a book-is-better kinda guy, but I found that reading the real Piper Kerman’s account of her incarceration while watching the fictional Piper Chapman’s experience in the Netflix show inspired by the book heightened my enjoyment of both. On the one hand, the book provides the “okay, how much of this really happened?” solidity

Dirk Hayhurst: The Bullpen Gospels

I had somewhat ambivalent reactions to The Bullpen Gospels, but on the whole I was entertained. Hayhurst looks at baseball from the unusual perspective of a perennial minor leaguer. He’s someone (this is my judgment, not his) without enough potential to get promoted rapidly to MLB status, but too potentially useful as a sort of

Caitlin R. Kiernan: Trilobite

I loved Threshold and it scared the bejeezus outta me, but I’m not sure that I completely got it. It’s a bit of a puzzle box. It’s not the sort of book where one version of “objective reality” is an applicable concept, and it’s about the unknowable more than about the unknown. But throughout I

Diablo Cody: Candy Girl

Before Cody became the screenwriter of films like Juno, Young Adult, and the woefully under-appreciated Jennifer’s Body, she spent a year stripping (with a little side exploration into phonesex and some other non-hooker sexwork). Her unflinching memoir displays the same sort of acerbic wit her characters wield. She satisfies my long-standing morbid curiosity about the

Rob Felder (ed.): Damn Yankees

Let’s get this straight: the only reason I checked this book out of the library was because of the parenthetical phrase in the subtitle, “Twenty-four major league writers on the world’s most loved (and hated) team.” It promised a good dollop of hatin’ on the pinstripes, and that was reason enough for me to check

Justin Halpern: I Suck at Girls

Halpern, if you don’t recognize the name, is that guy who parlayed a twitter feed about the stuff his dad says into a career/TV deal/etc.. I’m not a fan of the twitter; I tried it and found it a bit too much of a not-so-good thing. But it was sometimes amusing, and I was curious

Heather Donahue: Growgirl

When I heard of this book, it sounded like the real-life counterpart of Weeds: Donahue, an actress in career free-fall after a successful movie failed to result in a viable career, decides that raising pot sounds like a viable make-ends-meet option, and makes other highly questionable choices; some whacky and some racy stuff ensues. In

Jennifer Traig: Devil in the Details – Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

Traig’s memoir of growing up beset by scrupulosity, a form of OCD manifesting as extremes of religious observance, was often very funny. This was a multiple-guffaw read for me. And beyond its entertainment value, it’s informative and sometimes insightful. I found its structure a little perplexing; it’s somewhere between a linear coming-of-age memoir and a

Tina Fey : Bossypants

Bossypants is a weird mix: one part autobiography, one part collection of comic essays, with a little bit of serious social relevance, and dash of business book for good measure. Not only does Fey offer some decent advice for managing a creative team, her guidelines for improvisation are mostly applicable to a big-deal sales call.