Sometimes you just need a little junk food for your brain — what my dad calls “popcorn books” — and Dave Barry is always a good source for that kind of nonsense. You can read a few pages, set it down, and come back to it whenever. I’ve reviewed Dave Barry collections here before, and there’s nothing really new to say. This one’s a collection of articles, no more than a couple pages each, published in 1993. He groups them by general categories: healthy habits, […]
If you really need a laugh, you can always check out his haircut on the cover
Oh, Dave Barry. You may not be the height of sophisticated humor, but you crack me up every time. My city has an annual book sale to raise money for the library — it’s basically my Christmas (mass market paperbacks for a quarter!) and I always managed to find at least one Dave Barry collection every year. The basic “theme” of this one is Dave Barry reacting and responding to various weird ass stuff that readers have sent to him over the years. For example, news articles […]
Humor that holds up
Dave Barry released this book (which I bought for a quarter at a book fair) in 1988, and it basically contains all of his newspaper articles for the previous several years. Despite the dated politics (it contains a lot of Nixon & Reagan jokes), it holds up surprisingly well, considering it’s 27 years old (oh my god that means my little sister is also 27 years old…). A lot of it remains very relevant, overshadowing that which does not (such as a whole chapter on the […]
Florida, Never Change
I kind of love Dave Barry — I’ve never really read his humor column, but I’ve read his two previous novels (Big Trouble and Tricky Business) several times. They’re very, very silly books — but the writing is fun and the plots never stop to take so much as a breath. He’s got an excellent sense of humor, and the ability to poke a little fun at just about everything. The sort of read that’s great for a road trip, and since that’s what I had in store […]