Book #4: Sleepwalk with Me

I love Mike Birbiglia. Sure, I love his hilarious stories of the strange things that happen to him (how does such a variety of crazy and unusual happen to one person?), but more than anything else I love how he tells these hilarious stories. So it should be no surprise that I loved reading his new book Sleepwalk with Me: And Other Painfully True Stories.

Birbiglia shares moments from his life pretty much in chronological order, which only serves to demonstrate that, for some reason, the frequency with which funny things happen to him is pretty much a defining feature of his life. For some people, funny things happen to them in high school. For others, the funny things are pretty much restricted to college, or perhaps foreign travel. For Mike Birbiglia, however, these sorts of things happen all the time.

I know that some of Birbiglia's long-time fans hoped that the book would be all original material, but I personally liked that I'd already heard him tell some of his stories before. Birbiglia has such a perfect way of telling his own tales--a mix of great timing, fantastic tone, and a definite sense of irony pepper his oral storytelling; since I already knew some of the stories, I was able to get his voice into my head so it was really like he was reading the whole book to me. Which only made everything even more hilarious.

I would very much suggest this book to people who enjoy listening to Mike Birbiglia live or on NPR; people who like reading humorous memoirs; and people who like the idea that a "normal" American life can be quite a bit, well, odd at times. And definitely laugh-out-loud.