Book Review - Little Weirds

 

“One of my fantasy dimensions is: Strangers on the street see me and think I might be French”. 

I've wanted to read little weirds ever since reading that first line, via the preview app on Amazon where I knew Jenny Slate's weird was also going to be my weird.  The opener hooked me in and I found her writing style consistent enough to keep the pages turning.  Inside are 47 short stories that range from one to a few pages in length and deal with recurring themes of heartache, family, animals, homes, ghosts, death, dreams, her dog, inequality.  Below is an excerpt, of one of my fvaourite pieces, I Died: Listening.

“Some man was standing right in the middle of the room talking about how he knew that now was the time for men to listen, and he was proud to say that he knew how to listen but strangely he kept talking for so long and I was the one who was listening and so then what happened was that my head twisted around on my neck and faced the wall.

But that didn’t seem to bother him and it certainly didn’t stop him because I guess he was on a roll? And then he just walked around to the other side of me and kept talking, and what he was saying was so obvious but backward and wrong, but to tell him that would have caused a big bust-up.”

I was reading the reviews of the book which fall mostly on the "I love her weirdness" spectrum but a few cringed at the book's self-indulgent nature. It's true but for me, the charm of the book comes from her experiences and viewpoints.  Do not read the book if metaphors, long-running sentences, and observational weirdness freak you out.  

“You are not quite awake yet, but the dreaming is done and so is most of your sleeping. You are waiting inside of yourself, waiting to wake up. You are still behind the curtain that separates awake and activity from sleeping and dreaming. You sense that you are waiting to wake up, but you also know that you are asleep. It feels tensionless, like watching a flag wave, like coming closer to a shore after a pleasure sail. You have a feeling like being happy for someone who has achieved an honor.

It is you.

You are happy for yourself that you have received the honor of a new day on which to ride. You realize that you love yourself easily in this gravity-free space between the worlds of waking and dreaming” - Dog Paw

8.5/10!