Getting Serious About Humor: I'm Done With Wurst For A Long Time

The Thurber Prize folks have announced their semi-finalists for this year's, yes, Thurber Prize for American Humor. It turns out that I've already read one of them, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I liked, and admired, a great deal. Now I've read another one, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. The book combines two of my interests...humor and eating nonprestige food. I've been a little bit obsessed with it.

Raw dog. An expression with a number of meanings, related to some of kind of risk. Doing something unprepared. I didn't look it up until after I finished reading the book (actually, just now), and now I'm thinking the title...Wow. This could be profound. 

I've read a number of Thurber Prize finalists over the last couple of years, and I'm sure that I've mentioned here before that I find them witty, certainly, but not hugely, wildly funny. I guess this makes a lot of sense, because, as I probably have also mentioned before, I have actually read James Thurber, and, you know, he wasn't hugely, wildly funny. I like the Thurber Prize finalists I've read, which I can't say for a lot of prize books (I'm thinking of you, Booker Prize, which I now avoid). But I don't understand how funny you have to be to be a humor prize winner.

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster, and she has a distinctive sense of humor. Raw Dog definitely is a contender for the prize. But the book is a lot. Reading it was an experience.

Superficially, it is about Loftus's hot dog summer, traveling across the U.S. with a boyfriend, a dog, and, I think, a cat in rental cars as she samples hot dogs in various regions of the country. I no longer eat traditional hot dogs, because I avoid smoked meat. But I do eat the occasional bratwurst. When I started reading this book, I went into the freezer where I had a leftover grilled wurst. I heated that puppy up and found a gluten free roll to sort of wrap around it and ate it naked. By the time I was in a grocery store sometime later, while still reading Raw Dog, I just shot by the wurst counter. No, we are not doing that for some time to come. I'm done with dogs for a while.

Loftus went to so many hot dog stands, shops, and wagons and ate so very many hot dogs. This woman ate so much chili on those dogs. And described all those chilis in so much detail. I think that if chili was available, she ate it. And the onions! Good heavens! And relish. Evidently, she'll eat any kind of relish. My digestive system is fragile, and I could feel it failing just reading about what Jamie Loftus ate. It was too much for her digestive system sometimes, too. I know, because she writes about it.

Here's the thing, though, this book isn't just a food and travel story that should be one of those TV shows my husband watches. No, there is a great deal of social commentary here. Real commentary. In a New Yorker article about Loftus, Cat Zhang says that her first job out of college was at the Boston Globe (she was fired) but that she "retains a reporter's allegiance to fact." What she has to say in Raw Dog about things like how the meat industry treats both animals and human workers, gentrification, the pandemic, and Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile drivers (no joke, they've got some worries) come across as serious and well thought out. And then she gets back to the freaking chili! 

A little digression: Loftus comes from Brockton, Massachusetts where my aunt Esther has lived all my life. I've been to cousin weddings there and a funeral. Honest to God, I had no idea about the city's reputation until another family member went to college in Waltham and tipped me off. Brockton seemed fine to us Gauthiers.

Anyway, I'm feeling about the Thurber Prize the way other people feel about the Oscars and Emmys. I hope one of the two books I've read wins.

Getting Serious About Humor: Humor With Mystery

I must have placed Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson on my library list, because I saw it described as "witty." Being a mystery, it is fiction. My legion of readers all know that I like to analyze witty fiction.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is similar to other humorous fiction I've read in that it is wry and clever but not what you'd call a knee-slapper. But I could see what contributed to the humor, which makes it a first with the humorous fiction I've, shall we say, studied.

Voice, tone, understatement, and structure all contribute to the humor of this book. You could say the narrator's inner life contributes to the humor. You could say there's some incongruity here, too, because how could someone like Ernest (the narrator) exist in that family? The structure, as I've already said, supports/contributes to the humor, and maybe you could argue there's something incongruitous going on with the structure. Ernest tells us he's a reliable narrator, that he will tell the truth. And he does, but in his time and not at the times the readers' expect him to. So we assume we know things, find out later we didn't, and are amused and amazed.

I did figure out some of the ending material with this book, but in a satisfying way. Which I will not get into, since I don't want to ruin anyone's reading pleasure.

This is a book that both people who like mysteries and people who don't care one way or the other should be able to enjoy.

Once Again, Sometimes Social Media Works

 I don't actually know Jolene Gutierrez, but she is a Facebook friend. Recently she posted that her book, Too Much! An Overwhelming Day (illustrated by Angel Chang) had reached a couple of milestones...200 reviews at Goodreads and100 at Amazon. Well, we have a little person in our family who can suffer from overwhelm, and probably a couple of big people, too. So I immediately got a copy on one of the ebook apps I use and gave it a look. 

It's a lovely book, without an overwhelming amount of text. Illustrations work fantastically. Speaking as someone who has a family member with some sensory issues and not others, I can easily imagine reading this with him and picking and choosing things. I may have a chance to do so next weekend.

Social Media Keeps Working

Now I've given Too Much! some attention here. I'll review it at Goodreads, and I'll do an X...whatever we call what we do at X...to promote this blog post, which will then promote this book. And that will provide some opportunities for more people to discover Too Much!

Getting Serious About Humor: A Thurber Nominated Romcom

I read Ms. Demeanor by Elinor Lipman while on retreat. I'd picked it up, because it's a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize and I'm an Elinor Lipman fan. Though I've only read three of her books. Perhaps I should make reading Elinor Lipman a thing for this year. Not a goal, because I've already set my goals. Too late for that. I know! I have a Goodreads reading goal. (I surpassed last year's by the way. I didn't mention it here out of modesty and general lack of staying on blog-writing task.) 

What I've liked about the three Lipman books I've read is that she's both light and sophisticated and her basic storylines are unique. And often speak to me, since I was sure that The Inn at Lake Devine was set on a lake near where I grew up. Ms. Demeanor involves food. I like food.

The unique storyline for Ms. Demeanor? The main character is caught having sex in a semi-public place, probably more public than semi, and the legal consequences involve house arrest for multiple months. Things go on from there.

I enjoyed reading the book, but at various points I thought, aren't a number of different things going on here? What's the focus? Then I got to the end and went, Oh! This is a romantic comedy! Now I get it!

I'm not big on reading contemporary romance. Historical is another thing. Historical with mystery even better. Just last month I had to stop reading a perfectly fine contemporary romance, because people finding love all by itself isn't enough for me. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend Ms. Demeanor to all kinds of readers. 

What About The Comedy Aspect, Gail?

I'm finding humorous fiction (remember this is a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor) different from humorous nonfiction. Humorous essays or memoirs will sometimes have humor on every page or sometimes most paragraphs. The humorous fiction I've read so far hasn't. That doesn't make humorous fiction worse or better than humorous nonfiction, particularly since trying for humor in nonfiction can sometimes be jokie or contrived. It just makes it different. 

That being said, the Polish siblings in Ms. Demeanor? Absolutely funny. The interaction between the main couple, lovely and light-hearted. The main character's sister's realtor boyfriend? Funny. The dentist has her moments, as does the nanny who started this whole mess. Hmm. There is quite a bit of humor here. 

Though I have written humorous middle grade novels and a YA, I need to read a great deal more adult humorous fiction to get a feel for how that works differently or if it does.

As a nod to the cooking in Ms. Demeanor, I am going to mention here that I plan to make two pots of soup this afternoon. 

Some New Picture Books Coming In Two Good Series

 Facebook friend Valerie Bolling has two new picture books coming out in August. Here's an appreciation of two of her earlier books that suggest the new ones are something to look forward to.

The first new book is Bing, Bop, Bam, Time to Jam, illustrated by Sabrena Khadija. It's part of Valerie's Fun in the City series. The first offering in that series, Ride, Roll, Run, Time for Fun, also illustrated by Khadija, is about a diverse group of kids who have been released from school for the day. It is time for them to have fun. We're talking minimal words here with some eye-popping artwork. I don't know enough about art to be able to define or label it, but maybe that's just as well. It's terrific. 

Valerie's second book coming out next month is Together We Swim with illustrations by Kahlani Juanita.  This title is the second in her Together Series, the first being Together We Ride, also illustrated by Juanita. Together We Ride is another beautifully illustrated book, though in a very different style. It also has little text, though there's a narrative story here told between word and picture, while Ride, Roll, Run, Time for Fun! is more experiential.

We still have very young children in our family, and I'm a much bigger fan of books that can grab and engage that age-group's minds with story, words, and images than I used to be. I was very taken with these books and look forward to the next books by this author and these illustrators.

The August, 2023 Books And The Book Launch

A book launch celebration for both books will be held on Saturday, August 12 at 10 AM at the New Canaan Library in New Canaan, Connecticut.

A Personal Essay About A Book Of Personal Essays

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: June 13, 2023

I'm trying to expand my essay reading this year, which is what attracted me to Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris. Plus, it was about popular culture, which I have an interest in and appreciation for. Not as deep an interest and appreciation as Aisha Harris's, though.

These are personal essays, on subjects personal to Harris, such as her name, that then reach out to connect to the larger world. Now this is significant, because Harris is a young black woman, while I am a not-so-young white woman. We don't share what you'd call a racial culture, but we don't share a generational culture, either. With some of the essays, I felt as if I was doing the reading for a college course, because the information was so new to me. I had to look some stuff up.

That's not a complaint, by the way. I found it exciting. I now know that IP refers to "intellectual property." One of my son's was surprised to learn I didn't know that. Thank you, Aisha, for catching me up on that. Seriously.

The first essay in the collection, relating to Harris's name, Aisha, is a model for the personal essay form she uses. In discussing her own name, she gets into the impact on Black parents of music and the mini-series Roots. Popular culture shaping people. In her case, it didn't shape her name quite the way she thought it did.

After reading about her TV interests when she was a girl, I felt bad, because I couldn't remember if my sons had had a similar experience with TV shows. I did monitor the TV a bit here. So I got into that with the same son who was surprised I didn't know what IP meant, and, sure enough, he could recall a Friday night lineup with programs I have little recollection of. Which may get into a generational thing--though I watched TV with my kids, the things they enjoyed were probably pretty meaningless to me, so I don't retain them. I think I only remember Boy Meets World because there was a girl in it named Topanga. Which could lead us back to names.

Hmm. Is it meaningful that I was concerned about whether or not my sons had a chance to experience the popular culture of their generation, but I didn't give a thought to what experiences I, myself, had with popular culture growing up? 

I should have, because I think the big takeaway from this interesting and readable collection is that popular culture didn't just shape Aisha Harris. It shapes all of us. 

I Like "I Like This Color!"

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication date: May 1, 2023

 I Like This Color! by Liz Goulet Dubois is described on its cover as "A Silly Story about Listening." If you read all the way through to the last image and line, you will understand why. That last page is sort of deep. There are discussion opportunities there.

However, what I immediately loved about this book was the art aspect. I have little people in my family who are very into art and craft, and this simple graphic novel will hit the spot for them. The favorite colors thing is a big deal for my people. The mixing of colors, too. Additionally, I Like This Color! has a real storyline, which books for younger readers sometimes do not. Duck and Cluck are simple characters children could draw themselves. 

I Like This Color! is the second in the Duck and Cluck series. The series has a terrific website, designed by Liz, that includes a great activities page.

Unfortunately, Liz died last summer. She was very well known in the New England SCBWI, and our paths crossed once or twice years ago. 

I assumed I Like This Color! would be the end of her series. But after seeing both the strength of this book and the beautiful website, I wonder if there couldn't be a future for it. Did Liz leave ideas for future books? Could another author/artist write new books with Liz as the creator of the series? 

These kinds of things have been done before.

At any rate, I hope this particular book does as well as it deserves to.

A Lovely Surprise About Light

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: April 18, 2023

Christine Layton followed me on Twitter earlier this year. Before following her back, I checked her out and saw that she is a writer with a book publishing in a few months. Wouldn't you know it, Netgalley was offering an ARC. As I have said before, sometimes social media interactions work.

Light Speaks, by Christine Layton and illustrated by Luciana Navarro Powell is a beautiful book, both visually and in its short, poetic text. It deals with the many ways humans experience light, beginning with the light that comes from the sun to wake us in the morning. It covers both natural light and humanmade. It would make a terrific read-aloud, both for a group but also one-to-one, with an adult who can talk about things like the satellites, lightening, and fireworks that appear in the book. 

Light Speaks may end up being a gift for a child in the Gauthier family. 

A Charming Sort-of French Spin On Friend Issues

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: April 25, 2023

I sought out My Not-So-Great French Escape by Cliff Burke on NetGalley because of the French setting. I'm always hoping books with some connection to France will throw in some French phrases that I actually understand, which will do my ego a world of good. There is, indeed, a little of that here. But the book is a very enjoyable read even for those not interested in the language.

This is another story that deals with friends drifting apart. But instead of happening in an elementary or middle school, it happens on a French organic farm that provides an opportunity for students from foreign countries to stay for a few weeks. The idea is that the students will learn about organic farming and improve their French. It provides a new spin to the friend situation that, I am told, really is a major concern for kids.

Rylan, who appears to be around 12, accompanies a newly rich friend who he isn't that tight with anymore, to France. No sooner are they there, than the friend cliques up with a group with a bit of a superiority complex, leaving Rylan to make his own connections with the kids who are left. Rylan has some believably low moments over this but rises to the occasion.

A sub-plot involving Rylan's estranged father is resolved in an interesting way. The friends Rylan makes are far more interesting than the ones his old buddy ends up with. There is French food. And Pierre, the organic farmer, is a charmer.

There is plenty here to like.

What Is Going To Become Of This Girl?

Copy provided by Netgalley

Publication Date: January 17, 2023

This Is Not A Personal Statement by Tracy Badua wasn't quite what I expected, which is not a complaint. After being rejected by her top choice college (and all her choices) the main character, Perla, comes up with a plot to go, anyway. I thought she was going to somehow actually attend a full schedule of classes, enjoying freshman life, just not be on the books.

Granted, that would have been quite far-fetched.

Instead, Perla is living a disturbing, secret life, and attending only one class, if I recall correctly. Her plan is to find out what she did wrong with her application and apply again for spring semester.

She doesn't learn much about what she wanted to know, though she does spend a great deal of time thinking about her relationship with her parents who have no idea what she's doing.

I found Perla a little talky as far as her family expectations are concerned. But this is an intriguing set-up for a story and toward the end there is some tension over what's going to become of her. This reader was even left with some tension over what will become of her in the future.

Last fall I read of a man pretending to be a student managing to live on the Stanford campus for ten months. So the living on campus part can happen.

Real Problems For Real Kids

 Copy provided by Netgalley

Publication Date: January 17, 2023

Between the time I requested this arc on Netgalley and the time I received it, I forgot why I was interested in it. It was until I got to the end and saw a picture of the author that I realized that Figure It Out, Henry Weldon was written by my old blogging buddy, Tanita S. Davis. So to be open and above board, I kind of know the author. But I didn't realize that while I was reading this book, because evidently I don't pay attention to author names on covers.

Tanita has done a very nice job of creating a kids' book developed around children's problems. Henri Weldon has a learning disability specifically related to math. The issue is recognized by her family. In fact, until recently she attended a special school to address her disability. She's now getting ready to attend a traditional school where her problem is still recognized and addressed. This is not a child surrounded by uncaring adults left to fend for herself.

That's a big part of what I liked about this book. Because while Henri is supported, she still has problems. Which, sad to say, is life. Her problems are not those we often see in children's books, the problems adults value big time: Death, divorce, death, old age, death, illness, death, war, death, tragedies, and death. They are the problems that children have and that are important to them.

Problems Like:

• Getting lost in the new school building. Sounds minor, but isn't being unable to find a classroom a classic adult dream? What's that about, huh? Henri's struggles to get around made me anxious for young family members who will be finding themselves at new schools.
• Making friends. Not just in the sense of making any friends but making friends who will actually be friends for you. Minor? Then why are we always reading articles about how difficult it is for adults to make friends? It's not minor when it's us, is it?
• Sibling issues. The problem presented here is fantastic, because it's not about rivalry. It's about support. Should Henri be befriending someone who had a falling out with her sister, even bullied her?
• Parent issues. Not parents fighting or getting a new boyfriend but parents who have their own work and time problems that they are dealing with in addition to being parents.

On top of all that, foster children are portrayed in a realistic and positive way here. My understanding is that there aren't a lot of foster children in children's literature. So this is significant.

And, finally, Tanita is writing in the third person. Again, that doesn't sound like a big deal, but not many children's books are written in the third person.

Many people are going to admire Figure It Out, Henri Weldon's portrayal of children with learning disabilities and in foster care. But it should also be admired for being a good book.

Check out Tanita's blog, fiction, instead of lies, which features poetry and, right now, Henri Weldon.