Long time readers of this month-and-a-half-old blog will recall that back in October I suggested that you consider buying Christopher Monks's new book, The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life and that, under no circumstances, should you consider buying the book Wet Cats, which is a book that has lots of pictures of cats that are wet and that is the main competitor to Chris's book. At the time, I hadn't read Ultimate Game Guide, but I recommended it on the basis that Monks is a very funny manwho has written many funny things (he's the web editor for McSweeney's, if that's any hint). Well, I have now read the book and can testify that it is, indeed, very funny. Of course, in my original post I noted that if I read the book and didn't find that it was funny I would nonetheless tell you it's funny anyway, so I guess there's no way for you to really know whether I think the book is funny or whether I am just saying that the book is funny even though I think it is not funny. Still, though, let me say: the book is funny.
It's no surprise, of course, that on a line-by-line, page-by-page basis, the book is hilarious, because that's what we knew Monks could do from reading his pieces on McSweeney's and elsewhere. What is surprising, though, is how well the book works as a whole. I don't read many straight humor books because usually they are just a bunch of funny pieces stuffed together and are not much more than the sum of their parts. But this book actually succeeds in communicating a larger sense of the trajectory of an average human's life in a way that is both funny and, for me at least, kind of sad (but in a good way).
In two-hundred-and-thirty-or-so pages, your character (and the book is probably the second best book I've ever read that is written in the second person, after Bright Lights, Big City) emerges from the womb, encounters all the typical small and large challenges that we all basically face, succeeding in some and failing in others, meeting new people along the way, encountering some of the same people time and time again, and then (SPOILER ALERT) dies. At the end you get a little bit of the feeling that, while the details may differ, this is basically what every life is like: typical, mundane, filled with flashes of love and angst, and, while ultimately unremarkable and pointless, nonetheless delightfully funny and absurd. I guess for many this may seem depressing, but for me anyway, that's kind of how I experience my own life, so the book really resonated with me.
Oh, and did I mention that the book is funny?
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