Subscribe50 Most Loathsome People In America, 2009
My favorite new-year pastime, the Buffalo Beast’s annual “Most Loathsome” list, is now up. It’s a little more brief (and tame) this year, but still a funny read.
Some highlights:
The Guinea Pig Diaries
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The Guinea Pig Diaries
by A.J. Jacobs - Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 256
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №9
I became a fan of A.J. Jacobs when I read his debut book, The Know-It-All. The idea of reading the entire encyclopedia was a bit preposterous, but overshadowed by the sheer joy of trivia; I never really thought of it as an experiment per se. Things changed a bit with The Year of Living Biblically, which was a genuine life experiment for Jacobs, and one that sometimes put him in awkward positions. If you read my reviews, you’ll find that I enjoyed both, but found the latter somewhat cloying at times; Jacobs has a tendency to profess life-altering revelations or profundities which, if they are true, make him naïve, and if they are false, making him disingenuous.
Last Words
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Last Words: A Memoir
by George Carlin - Publisher: Free Press
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 320
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №3
Last Words took about 17 years to write. As the story goes, Carlin commissioned it in 1993 with Tony Hendra, but it wasn’t until Carlin died in 2008 that Hendra finally pulled together all of his recorded conversations, notes, and other materials and cranked out the more or less definitive semiautobiography of George Carlin, and Last Words is that book.
I need hardly explain who George Carlin is or why he is important—if you don’t know, this review will be meaningless to you—but for those of us well-acquainted with his unique and sometimes unpredictable views, Last Words is really quite illuminating, and I was surprised by not only the general quality of its craft, but the depth of its information, as well.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
by Al Franken - Publisher: Plume
- Year: 2004
- Pages: 448
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №6
It occurred to me recent that I’ve read and reviewed Al Franken’s 2005 The Truth (With Jokes) three times since the start of this meme (1, 2, 3), but never its predecessor, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which is arguably an even better book.
Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly hates Media Matters, a website/organization which mostly just documents lies and distortions of conservatives. It’s important to note that there are really no polemics or extended rants of the Ann Coulter variety—the site is, by and large, either transcripts or video clips of the TV appearance/radio show/etc. in question, usually followed by evidence to the contrary. Given O’Reilly’s penchant for dissembling on-air, it is little wonder that he hates them so much.
Brain Droppings
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Brain Droppings
by George Carlin - Publisher: Hyperion
- Year: 1998/2006
- Pages: 272
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №5
When last we saw a George Carlin book here in A Modest Construct, I was pretty harsh, but I take nothing back: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops wasn’t a very good book. It was unfortunately indicative of the George Carlin we saw in the few years before his death; gone were the elaborate jokes about language, the puns, the extended structures, the tone that manages to be both irascible and playful at the same time (try it: it’s not easy).
The Truth (With Jokes)
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The Truth (With Jokes)
by Al Franken - Publisher: Dutton
- Year: 2005
- Pages: 352
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №66
I read this book once in 2005 when it came out, and then again in 2006.
As this is my third time reading The Truth (With Jokes) since this meme began, it holds a record (as of now) as my most frequently-read book in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme. Why read it a third time? Well, if it wasn’t obvious enough, the recent election had something to do with it. I remembered Franken’s last chapter, modeled as a letter to his eventual grandchildren, about the 2008 election (the book was written in 2005) and how it represented a tipping point in the way the United States did business—read: the conservatives were out, the liberals were in, and everybody lived happily ever after.
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