Didn't finish. Depressing account of a cartoonist dealing with being in his 40's and rehashing limpid ideas with too much bitter sarcasm. Gave it a good 100 pages. Enjoyed some of his cartoons, but not all of them. Needlessly myopic. Onward. ( )

Austin Kleon raves ( )

Excellent essays. He discusses things that happen to real people in real life. Both funny and insightful. ( )

Okay, I didn't actually read every word of this book. It started out so promising, making me laugh out loud and marvel at the quality of the author's writing (and cartoons), but some of the essays just went on for too long to too little effect and I grew tired of Kreider's company. After jumping ahead to the last few very good pages, I'm pulling my bookmark out of page 142 and returning it to the library, but I may just pick it back up again one day, and I will always remember this book fondly for one sentence. In an essay ("The Creature Walks Among Us") about his own disastrous love life, in which he reflects empathetically on the case of the astronaut who gathered some weapons and drove cross-country in a diaper when she found out her lover was cheating on her, he concludes: "We've all worn the diaper." LOLOL :-) ( )

I didn't expect to like this collection of essays as much as I did. Maybe it had to do with a recent break-up and a certain openness to hearing what Kreider said about relationships, about connecting with people, about heartbreak and being young and growing up. Based on his political cartoons, I wouldn't have ever picked up this book, but I would have missed out on a satirical, sarcastic, funny, and poignant collection of essays that talked about varied subjects, from the Tea Party, being friends with a man who becomes a woman, listening to and ignoring the "lone voice of reason," arrested adolescence, and being an adult. Many of the essays are tinged with the emerging adulthood viewpoint, and perhaps that is why they speak so strongly to me at this time.

"Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people's lives; they're as unlike themselves as they're ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before moving back to the suburbs to become their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your twenties make different decisions about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you regard each other's lives with bemused incomprehension. You're like two seeds that looked identical, one of which turned into a kiwi and the other into a banyan" (124-125). ( )