Minnesota Reads

The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death is absurd and hilarious. This is the kind of book you will want to read aloud to a friend while giggling spontaneously and ultimately loosing the narrative, but enjoying it so much that the other person laughs along at the image of your attempts. Laurie Notaro [...]

I am going to write something here that applies to Sloane Crosley and only Sloane Crosley, and God help us all — please don’t let anyone else take this bit of advice and apply it: Sloane, you need to write more about your personal life. Dates and dudes. Relationships that lean horizontal. Getting dumped and [...]

After reading Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, I can't decide if Chelsea Handler is going to save printed entertainment or drive the final nail into the format's coffin. The arguments for her as print's savior: this is her third New York Times bestseller, so she's apparently converting viewers of her late-night cable show into Barnes & [...]

At some point we all sat around and wondered what the hell personal blogging would mean, ultimately, for the good old-fashioned world of the printed word. The kind that comes on paper, bound, with a flattering author portrait and blurbs from friends. As an anecdote to that, I present Emily Gould’s book of personal essays [...]

David Sedaris still holds the title of Best Comedy Writer in my mind, but after reading My Horizontal Life, I've decided Chelsea Handler is making a pretty strong bid to be the heir to that throne. In My Horizontal Life, the unapologetically (almost proudly) promiscuous Handler recalls her many one-night stands with a tart, dry [...]

I saw Kevin Kling perform at the University of Minnesota Duluth less than a year ago. It was a spare set up, with just the storyteller with a microphone and an adorable accordion player accompanist who punctuated Kling’s stories on the squeeze box, all whimsy and raised eyebrows. Kling, a native Minnesotan, tells his tales [...]

Cassette mix tapes are a generational thing. My parents didn’t make them, probably because they had those crappy 8-tracks. At least they had vinyl. I made tons of mix tapes for practically anyone I met. I started when I was 14. This book features all kinds of mix tapes, but it will be best enjoyed [...]

Here’s a confession: I did not read Chuck Klosterman’s entire book Eating the Dinosaur. This slighting came with his permission, nay, his insistence. Klosterman busts through the fourth wall in his essay about football to suggest that if you aren’t into football, you can jump this chapter: ” … I will understand if you skip [...]

David Cross likes the word “poo.” David Cross does not like Fox News. David Cross loves to hate reality TV. Take those three premises, try to make them funny and you've basically got I Drink For A Reason, a collection of comical essays by the dude best known for playing Tobias F�nke on “Arrested Development.” [...]

As the only person in my family born and bred in Wisconsin, I have had life experiences that were not available to my Minnesota kin. For example, I have been to and enjoyed many cheese houses in my time. Family traditions of babies and toddlers sampling the local brew are commonplace in America's Dairyland. Growing [...]

I’ve grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in English 101 if I Hadn’t Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me. The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred [...]

I read Magical Thinking on recommendation from a friend who understands and appreciates my intense germaphobia. She had read his essay entitled “Rat/Thing,” where Burroughs goes into his bathroom in the dead of night and discovers a “rat/thing” in his bathtub. What follows is one of the most hilarious (“this meant, naturally, that I would [...]

Anthologies are interesting. They have as great a possibility of ending up looking like the inside of the junk drawer as they do a brilliant filing system. This being said, half the merit of an anthology is its organization and flow and the other part is how it fulfills the subject or goal idea. In [...]

Most often when I’m reading, I’m alone in the room if not the entire house. I usually don’t laugh out loud while reading unless there’s someone nearby I can share the humor with. I don’t know why that is, it just is. Most books make me smile at one point or another, most humorous books [...]

Three things are clear about Kurt Vonnegut: he loves the work of Mark Twain; he loves the character of Abraham Lincoln; he absolutely, without a doubt, hates our former President George W. Bush. Now that Bush is out of the picture, can this book stand the test of time? Satire certainly served him well in [...]