Recently read: My Horizontal Life
[Originally published at the now defunct group blog explananda.com]
Chelsea Handler. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands
The author, a stand-up comic and television personality, regales us with stories about her many one-night stands. I could complain about the alcohol soaked nihilism, the reduction of everyone in this book, including the author, to the shabbiest stereotype; could point out that it’s redundant to speak of “chances” as “probable,” that “inference” doesn’t mean the same thing as “implication,” that the same lame Michael Bolton joke twice in the space of less than fifty pages is two times too many—I could go over all these criticisms and more, but you’d probably reply that what is even more pathetic than reading a book like this is reading it from cover to cover and then having the cheek to assume an air of moral superiority while discussing it. And so I will limit myself to this: For a man of exquisitely refined sensibility, a man such as myself, getting to the end of this book, which I did solely so that I could report to my readers whether it is worth reading (it is not), required an almost heroic perseverance.