Awkward Situations for Men, by Danny Wallace
I’ve actually ended up reading most of Danny Wallace’s books - not for any particularly good reason, but they’re generally enjoyably readable, and it doesn’t hurt to dip into something a bit light-hearted and non-fiction from time to time. To be fair, that argument would be better if I didn’t spend most of my time reading comics and SF books, but still, I have a soft spot for the kind of book he normally writes.
This one, however, is a bit disappointing. A collection of articles Wallace has written for some magazine/newspaper I’ve never heard of, they focus on embarrassing situations that he, as A MAN, gets in to. You know, being stupid in front of his girlfriend, feeling a bit fraudulent in front of ‘real men’, getting confused about social etiquette and so on. That isn’t really a problem in itself - I’ve read loads of books of collected columns (I hesitate to call it journalism) and they can be very entertaining - but these feel really thin, to be honest. Thin columns don’t add up to a weighty book, no matter how many times the author claims an over-arching theme in the foreword. A passable enough way to spend the time, I suppose, and perhaps they would be better as an occasional treat rather than all in one book, but this isn’t really worth picking up.
I read the trade paperback during my breaks at work, out now, ISBN: 9780091937577