Hilarity Ensues

by: Tucker Max

Tucker Max, partier, drinker, and asshole extraordinaire, has written his final book, Hilarity Ensues. If you’ve never heard of Tucker Max, he’s the author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Assholes Finish First.  He’s basically made a living out of drinking, being an asshole, and drunken sexual exploits.  It’s rather impressive.

Max isn’t the best writer but he’s a damn good storyteller.  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, while not as well-written as Hilarity Ensues, is probably his best book, if only because he put his best stories in there.   Now, Max’s stories are sexist, disgusting, vaguely racist at times (generally him riffing on someone else’s racism to make fun of them), full of drunken debauchery and sex, and crude.  Very, very crude.  They’re also, for most people, hilarious.   Like, laugh-out-loud, oh-my-god, he-actually-did-that, crap-I’m-in-public funny.

And, to be fair, most of the times the butt of his jokes are other party-going drunk people. Which makes a lot of them more palatable.

Hilarity Ensues is a better-written book than his previous ones, like I said, and Max is actually on his way to being a good writer.  He’s also on his way to growing up, because this is the end of his fratire novels.  He is fast running out of stories and no longer making any new ones.

Much of Max’s behavior is so far beyond the pale, I feel glad I wasn’t there, but I’m still laughing at the story.  Outré! Really, very few books have made me laugh like his, though I would say his sense of humor is definitely not for everybody.  He really is offensive. It’s funny for some and unbearable for others.

On the downside, he consistently refers to (drunken) women as whores and annoying or mean women as cunts (words cannot express how much I hate that word), and I definitely was more than a little irked by that.  I finished the book, mind you, but it tested my patience.  I think there was more of that language than in IHTSBIH, but perhaps I’m just more bothered by it.   Max does realize that women are people and it shows in the way he talks about some of the women throughout the book; he just tends to look down upon groups of drunken women in an entirely sexist way.

To be fair, he often makes fun of himself and his male friends, in ways that show he entirely understands his and their shortcomings.  And throughout this book, more so in the other books, I saw that he understood exactly why he behavior was so outlandish, beyond just “people seem shocked.”  Every now and then it feels like he’s riffing on the ridiculousness of how society hides its sexism and other -isms in polite masks.  But not very often.

(Also, Tucker Max’s writing is full of fat-shaming, especially towards women.  So I wouldn’t read this if weight is something you’re sensitive about.)

In short, if you want stories about outrageous drunken exploits with laughs garnered at the expense of polite and politically correct conventions, at the expense of the author and in a very frat-boy mindset, you will find that here.  You will laugh and laugh and occasionally you’ll see a glimmer of something deeper.  If you’re not cool with sexism in any form, if you’re not a fan of crude and wildly inappropriate behavior or sexual antics (and I certainly don’t blame you if you aren’t), this is probably not the book for you.  If you’re not sure, check out Tucker Max’s website, and read a few stories.  If they’re funny, read his books – they’re mostly new material and you’ll laugh.  I promise.  If not, well, his books are just an expansion of his website and won’t be worth your time.

Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation

by: Olivia Judson

This is one of the awesome books I have been reading and talking about in my blog lately.  I am completely and totally in love with this book. It’s 16 kinds of fantastic.

It’s a book, of course, about the evolutionary biology of sex – that is, Judson talks about all the weird and wacky ways that animals reproduce and why scientists think they act like they do.  The format of the book is a huge part of why it’s so amazing –  animals, like fish, mammals, insects, reptiles, and amphibians, write in with their sex-related questions and problems.  And she answers, going off on tangents to explore concepts or similar practices in other animals.  It’s glorious.

Every question and answer is only  a few pages long, making the information easily digestible. Judson does an excellent job of defining science terminology in layman’s terms.  She also – and this is just absolutely superb of her – introduces terms and concepts as they’re relevant, rather than doing a huge info dump at the beginning of the book.  I hate huge info dumps – a lot of science concepts are kind of complicated and people need time to digest them once they’re introduced.  Even if someone picks up the information easily, the terminology is often new and weird and multisyllabic, so introducing a word and allowing the reader to learn it before introducing another new word is a much better tactic than presenting what amounts to a vocabulary list at the beginning of the book.  (I have Strong Feelings about this, guys. Very. Strong. Feelings.)

Anyway, Judson’s presentation of information is smooth and, er, whelming.  It’s generally just enough new information to make the reader feel like they’re learning something new and cool but not enough to make the reader feel lost or unable to keep up.  (Well.  Full disclosure: I am a science person working in the sciences.  So please let me know, readers, if you feel differently!) She’s honest and open throughout – when something is not known, she says so and then proceeds to discuss competing theories that are thought to explain it, noting which theory she most agrees with.

Her vocabulary is quite good, which I don’t know if I liked or disliked.  I liked her precision with words, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like she could have stuck to a more common vernacular since she was already using an extensive scientific vocabulary, which many of her readers were presumably already unfamiliar with.  The tone of the book was light and interesting but sometimes the vocabulary was fighting against the tone. It’s from 2000, so I can safely assume relevant discoveries in the field have been made since then, so some of the gaps in knowledge may have been filled since publication.

Okay.  Now that that’s all out of the way – this book is just fun.  Creatures are weird and they do weird things! It’s fascinating!  I just wanted to quote this book over and over and over – preferably with no context, because the quotes are much more startling that way.  I often found myself laughing at the sheer silliness of animals everywhere.  (There’s an ocean-dwelling species where the female is 200,000x bigger then the male!)

You don’t have to like biology to like this book – it’s not heavy or technical and it doesn’t feel like something you’d read to “improve” yourself.  Rather, it’s wacky facts of animal sex presented with style and wit by Judson.

Judson covers topics like monogamy (everybody cheats), females vs. males (it’s not she-wants-commitment,-he-wants-freedom!), incest (a species gotta do what a species gotta do, y’all), asexualism, homosexuality, sex (like gender here) (also there are species that have more than 2 sexes, which I didn’t know), and so much more.  It’s all in animals – there are no political discussions here – and all based on evidence and research and just really cool information. (I think this information is also important to developing thoughts on some hot-button issues, because people often trying to justify their stances by incorrectly evoking evolutionary biology.   This, however, is not something the author pushes.)

This book is fantastic and I love it!  I would recommend it to anyone who likes nature or animals, or who is interested in sex, or who wants to read something science-y that isn’t scary – this is a great book!  If you have a serious dislike of rodents, if there’s an animal that grosses you out, or if the thought of bugs mating makes you gag a little, than alas and alack!, this may not be the book for you.

Sex and Punishment

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by: Eric Berkowitz

I’m a little scared to do an Internet search for this one, so we’re going pictureless. This is a nonfiction book examining sex laws since Mesopotamia.  Except for the beginning, which touches on early laws in the Middle East, it focuses on Western law – think Greco-Roman, Western Europe, and American up until 1923.

It’s very engagingly written and easy to read.  There were two small factual errors that I caught, which makes me a little wary of the book, mostly because I didn’t know anything about the subject but the references looked pretty good, if lacking in primary resources for the historical things. Anyway, the subject is fascinating and pretty quirky. It does get fairly graphic in the punishments (legal) enactment department but that’s to be expected whenever you talk about medieval laws and apparently the Greeks and Romans were brutal as well.

It was mostly focused on the laws as written, the laws as enforced, and the punishments for breaking the laws.  The author did a great job, however, of explaining the social effects of the laws; he gives a lot of page space to the negative effects on women and gay or bisexual men.  Lesbians aren’t given as much attention but apparently they were mostly legally ignored, to the point where there were very few laws concerning same-sex female relationships.  There was one section exploring why – mainly the men in power just couldn’t conceive of women having sexual feelings outside of a man – in the latter half of the book.  He also spent some time talking about when the concept of sexuality came about and the population’s views on sex at the time. Very helpful.

Another thing I liked is that he was very good at pointing out legal allowances that were pretty much rape and the likelihood of that happening, such as how female servants were often raped by their employers with little to no recourse for protection or retaliation.  It could have been easy to omit or downplay the women or gay men in the book, so it’s nice that the book makes a point of talking about those who were most hurt by the laws.

I found the book fascinating and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject.  You’ll get all kinds of weird facts (like you could punish a man for sleeping with your wife in Ancient Greek by putting spikey fish in a place where no spiky fish should ever reside) and it gives a great historical perspective for the laws and attitudes the USA has today.  Berkowitz does an excellent job of setting the background for the laws and then connecting them across periods as necessary.

The writing was really excellent; succinct, informative, and it flows very well.  There are a couple of really weird transitions and the ending was nothing if not abrupt, but those were the only faults I found with the style. Overall, this book was fantastic.