Half Empty
- Apr 19, 2011
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 18
★★★★☆
I'm a huge fan of David Rakoff, but until I read this book, I only knew him through his contributions to NPR's This American Life. Why I hadn't gotten around to reading him before is almost entirely due to a backlog of books already on the shelf. Half Empty fell into my hands a few weekends ago while on a trip to Chicago to see a reformed Godspeed You! Black Emperor and, of course, eat my vegan way across the city. But I digress.
Half Empty started rather slowly, and not in that good "slow burn" way where you know three-quarters of the way through things will turn into an absolute blaze of brilliance. I mean slow as in dense, somewhat convoluted, and not immediately appealing. But I stuck with it, and sure enough, in piece after piece, Rakoff's stories began to overlap, building one upon the last, the observations ever more clever and insightful, the humor increasingly laugh-aloud worthy, until, yes, three-quarters of the way through, I was thoroughly hooked. The comedown post-climax was a bit sobering, but really, to keep piling up the laughs would have been disingenuous, no? After all, the book is called Half Empty.
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