Currently Reading

The plot follows a washed-up comedian on a tour through no-name venues in forgettable towns across forgettable states. Having been a waitress at a comedy club for a few years, I can attest, the misery and hubris of the main character are accurate.

It's written by a comedian I never heard of; the foreward, by another comedian I've never heard of, begins with how the book has no business being as good as it is, expecting it to be a lark, a little side-project from his friend, not an actually good piece of writing. And he's right. It's hella good. The writing is fun, passingly introspective with the kind of blasé horniness of henry miller on a scumbag adventure.
Its one of those books, where if you enjoy reading it, what's going to happen stops mattering. I don't need to worry about character's motivations being realistic or threads being tied. So to have a plot that is engaging and always escalating, a little like that movie where Michael Douglas has a bad day, is a plus. Strong vocabulary too, I would challenge you to find another author using the word "sorghum" on the same page a man with his face melted off in a propane tank explosion does cocaine off the owner's manual of his truck while Pantera plays.
Often I find myself wondering if the author could write something as good if it wasn't about comedy. I would have to think yes, but something about it as a first novel also feels like its giving it all that he has. and other subject matter would suffer from the lack of direct authentic experience? Like when watching stand-up you wonder how much of this really happened, but in the opposite direction. With a comedian on stage you want to buy everything at face value until something becomes too bombastic, but here its like you don't want any of it to be true, but have a creeping suspicion a lot of it might be a first-hand testimonial.

A lot of you might not know this but I used to be a waitress at a comedy club. I usually only mention it in connection with the shooting that took place one night I was working, but its largely the reason why the wretchedness that enshrouds the stand up comedy industry is a special interest of mine. I was real keen on this show I would watch on one of the English language channels in Taiwan called I'm Dying Up Here. Y'all ever catch that?

Another book I read back in October and quickly enjoyed was Walking Practice by Dolki Min. Its a korean sci-fi story about an alien trapped in Seoul that needs to take on the form of humans (and eat them) in order to survive and is having a tough time managing stairs. Its quick and fun and silly and takes advantage of typography to tell the story. Whenever the main character returns to their home and transforms back to their original form the words expand and loosen along with the alien's form and skin. That's fun!
The book is a meditation of on what its like to fake it to fit in, I thought it was a good commentary on transness and performing gender, but others have likened it to being another human while neurodivergent. Either way, I like that there's more than interpretation, and the message isn't ham-fisted. What is explicit is the violence, which I like, and the heavy-handed sex scenes, which are asian. Its a short book, but I think you get some of both per chapter, maybe even a death at the same rate.
Walking Practice is punctuated with cool illustrations, also drawn by the author. If you're someone that doodles, you can immediately tell that they were fun to make. If you've read Walking Practice, or are a rare kind of literary poser (thinking of that one roomate I had that had "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" tattooed on his forearm, despite never reading 1984), and you have a cricut handy, I've made a shirt design you can spend an afternoon weeding that I've stuck on my cricut projects page.