Book 8 of 2010

There is nothing notable or interesting about when I finished this book.

8) My Custom Van - And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face by Michael Ian Black
Michael Ian Black is a comedian best known for being a talking head commenting on pop culture during VH1 celebrations of various decades. He's also an actor who has been in movies and television shows like The Ten, Wet Hot American Summer and Ed. This is your standard "book by a comedian" whose title describes the format: essays (52, in this case, since I bought the paperback version) that will blow your mind all over your face.


Rating these kinds of books are hard because no matter how funny they are, I never feel like they rock my world to the point where heaping enormous amounts of praise is justified. I did laugh to myself several times, to the dismay of my wife sitting next to me trying to concentrate on something else, and several of the essays were absurd and innovative enough to where, if I had friends, I would have read them passages to make them laugh. It's also a fairly quick read, and each of the essays is short enough that it never feels like a chore to get through one or two in just a few minutes. The letters to the squirrel living outside his house and the extended take on the coolness of Doritos really stand out as excellent chapters.

At the same time, it's a humor book not meant to be anything more than that. Should there be a different scale for ranking humor books? Eh, probably, but I haven't figured out what that scale should be. Let's put it this way: if Michael Ian Black writes another book in the future, I will definitely buy it when the paperback edition comes out.