I recently moved to a new apartment, and as I was unpacking my books, I noticed that I had three books by James Thurber, only one of which I had read. This is odd because that one book, My Life and Hard Times, is one of my all-time favorites. I think I took it from my grandfather's house when I was in second or third grade, and I remember lying in bed reading it, giggling over nighttime incidents, familial misunderstandings and amusing anecdotes from turn-of-the-century Ohio. I'd go so far as to say it was my favorite book when I was nine or ten. I loved the stories, and I also loved the funny pictures and captions, many of which still stick out in my mind today. I can still imagine the pictures and stories that accompanied phrases like "Some nights she threw them all," "He fell victim to the same disease that was plaguing the elms," and "Balencicwcz was trying to think." It occurs to me that James Thurber is probably not the most common favorite author of young children, and part of my enduring appreciation of his book stems from the fact that it's just so strange to me that I could have been so enthralled by it when I was so young. I have read it multiple times as an adult, and it continues to be hilarious to me. I gave it to my girlfriend as well, and she laughed her way through it. I think I've kept on coming back to My Life and Hard Times, rather than reading the other books of his I own, because I want to remember those stories that I loved as a kid and reencounter them at different points in my life. However, as I was unpacking I decided it was time to move on and give Let Your Mind Alone a try. It consists of a series of columns poking fun at self-help authors of the 1930s, followed by 28 other columns written by Thurber in the mid-30s, dealing with a variety of topics.

Self-help authors were a pretty easy target for Mr. Thurber. In general, it's pretty easy to poke holes in the theories of people who have "figured out" how to be successful and happy in life. He shows how ridiculous their advice is when applied to specific situations where it could not be followed successfully, and he often identifies it as just plain stupid. For example, one lady advises that a man who is concerned with how to successfully maneuver his date to their table at a restaurant should practice the scenario with his sister. Mr. Thurber first wonders why one should even be worried about this, then presents two siblings who are constantly bickering and making each other miserable in the way that siblings sometimes do. He imagines if, in the middle of their arguing and making fun of each other, the brother asked the sister if she could please help him imagine their house as a restaurant so that he could figure out how he will navigate his date to their table at the restaurant that night. Obviously, she would just laugh in his face and make fun of him some more for making such a dumb request. The whole section is filled with anecdotes like this. My favorite column involves a refutation of one author's assertion that one must "live firmly grounded in reality." Thurber recounts a time that he tried to get in free to a dog show in order to write a column about it, and how he was turned away by a bullying show organizer. He spent the rest of the day wandering around town, imagining all the witty things he could have responded to the bully, and how, in his reimagination of the situation, he could have triumphed over the man spectacularly, shaming him and winning admiration from onlookers. He points out that this daylong daydream provided him far, far more pleasure than he would have experienced if he kept himself grounded in reality.

The remaining columns are a hodgepodge of situational humor, satire of writers such as Proust and Faulkner, anecdotes of daily life in New York, and other odds and ends. They were fun to read, and I wondered whether they would have pleased me as much as My Life and Hard Times did so many years ago. Obviously, the satire would have gone over my head, but many of the stories are similar in nature. He's a funny, neurotic man, and I imagine him to be a bit like Woody Allen. I've only really seen one Woody Allen movie, so I don't have a lot to go on, but they do seem to be similarly self-effacing and willing to highlight their own idiosyncracies for the sake of humor. At his best, Thurber makes me laugh out loud. This volume wasn't as consistently funny as My Life and Hard Times, but it certainly had its moments. I especially enjoyed the final column, which recounted some of his adventures in the world without the aid of his glasses. He describes the fuzzy world of the man who must venture out of his home without his broken lenses as being a bit like Oz, and a bit like Wonderland. I thought his descriptions of things he's (mistakenly) seen and done with limited eyesight were hysterical.

On the negative side, he often seems sexist. I've tried to think of a justification for his perspective on women, because by contemporary standards, his words are not exactly progressive. He has an entire article about why he hates women, and many other articles are rather mean-spirited with respect to the opposite sex. On the other hand, he also has a lot of articles about men who act foolishly and essentially dig their own graves with their spouses, and I think you could safely say that many of his articles are just as degrading toward males as females. There's a strong element of competition between men and women in his conception of intersexual relationships, and he seems to want very badly to win this competition at times, while understanding that he (and other men) are often losing it. He seems a bit scared or intimidated by women, but he also seems to respect them in his own 1930s way. I did a little internet research and couldn't find too much information about James Thurber's sexism, so maybe for now I'll just avoid the stories that seem distasteful to me and stick to the ones that I find funny. I don't think I fully understand the nuances of 1930s New Yorker humor, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge someone based on my own, late 20th century upbringing. I also remember reading Thurber recognized the fundamental importance of his mother in the development of his comedic talents. I would like to think that he does respect women, even though he's afraid of throwing a javelin because he fears he wouldn't be able to throw it as far as Babe Didrickson, which would prove that a woman is capable of throwing an object farther than he can (a scary thought indeed for Mr. Thurber). ( )

Great Thurber, which is to say great humor, and great cartoons. He wrote the first 10 essays included in this book in the late 1930's in response to the flood of self-help books then (and now) flooding the market. He examines several then-popular approaches to pop psych, and skewers them most effectively -- amazing how little pop psyche has changed over all these years, and all this research. The rest of the book consists of twenty-eight essays and short stories, including classics like "The Breaking Up Of the Winships". Laugh out loud funny, the first time you read it, or the fifth. ( )

I LOVE James Thurber! This book is especially hilarious because it "debunks" the self-help books, and even though it was written decades ago, it still resonates! ( )