| Title | : | Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1935639021 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781935639022 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published November 1, 2010 |
Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason Reviews
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There are bits in this book that had me laughing and laughing quite heartily. Unfortunately, those bits were a little few and far between, even in a book that's pretty quick to read.
Some of the author's shtick really wore thin pretty quickly. While there were a few dozen different pieces assembled here from various sources, it really seemed like it was the same three or four gimmicks dressed in different clothing.
The most tedious of these are advertisements or letters written by someone of questionable mental capacities. The story always begins with a questionable scenario which grows more outlandish as the descriptions continue. The ridiculous lists of demands, requests, offerings, etc. are meant to be humorous, but they're really just absurd without being funny.
Most of the other stories are all born of ideas that are funny conceptually, but that's the problem with most humor writing and even television. Just because it's a funny idea doesn't mean it will continue to be funny beyond that stage.
I can imagine that when it occurred to you that you'd somehow have Mumia Abu Jamal make an appearance as the love interest of a young girl in a fictional series of books about a high school clique who solve mysteries, you'd think there is humor to be mined there. And, maybe over some bourbon and chit chatting about it with a friend, it's funny. Unfortunately, when you actually read it over four or five pages...you're not laughing. Rather, you find yourself wanting it to be over in the hopes the next story will be funny and, more often than not, it also fails.
Though, I have to admit, the ones I liked, I REALLY liked, especially early in the book before I realized the author would be rehashing the joke again in a different form soon and often.
It's a quick read and if you have the ability to just give up early on a short article when you realize you're not going to get anything out of it, you'll probably enjoy thumbing through this book, rather than regretting having read most of it only to get the few prime nuggets of comedy. -
Instead of reviewing Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason (by Mike Sacks) I would like to review one of the blurbs praising the book.
David Miner says: "Why surf the web for hours trying (unsucesfully) to find something funny, when you can just pick up this book and surf Mike Sacks' brilliant brain? Funny tweets, texts, stories, lists, confessions, rules, and even dirty pictures... all between these two covers, with no cookies or pop-ups."
While I agree with the spirit of this blurb, and indeed, would even amplify some of Miner's enthusiasm, I have two reservations. One: David Miner is a TV producer (30 Rock, Parks and Recreation) so I assumed that he is far too busy and important to do any of his web surfing himself. I'm sure he has minions doing it for him. My suspicion is these minions do not have the proper education or web "savvy" to find humor on the Internet. There's plenty to find. (I note from IMBD that Miner was a producer on The Onion Movie, so perhaps his blurb suffers from hyperbole.) But if he's serious, I'd suggest he hire a couple of librarians, or find a few interns from a library and information science program. I could hook him up.
My second problem is of greater substance. He believes that the lack of pop-ups is a selling feature of this book, while I think ADDING pop-ups to the book would enhance the humor. (Especially the piece titled, "The Kama Sutra Corrections.")
That said, I'd give Miner's blurb 5 out of 5 stars. (Yes, I'm sucking up, but who knows, perhaps he'd like to produce one of my books some day.)
Now, you may be saying, "Mark, how can I possibly decide if this book is worth my time or not?" You may be saying, "behold the season of Intestinal Cramping!" You may simply be too excited about the prospect of a "Kama Sutra Corrections" pop-up book to form coherent speech. To all these concerns, I say Mike Sacks book is the GREATEST THING EVER WRITTEN. There. I've said it. I'm glad I have it off my chest.
If that's not enough to make you want to read it, here is an excerpt from: "Out-of-Office E-Mails That Might Not Fly With Those In Charge."
"I will be out of the office until May 23rd because I’m taking a “voyage quest” into the woods behind my condominium. I will be bringing with me only a can of beans and an issue of Swank. So, obviously, “not reachable” . . ." *
This piece alone had me laughing out loud on several occasions, and that is high praise indeed.
*A final note: You may not be able to hire a personal minion with rudimentary searching skills, so the above snippet (and many others) can be found at:
http://www.mikesacks.com/wp/lists/ -
"Worst Places to Die: On a toilet in a Barnes and Noble, reading this book." - Thoughts on Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason by Mike Sacks
There's something about reading award-winning books and novels on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list that makes me want to read really loony books in-between. Well, not really - maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to pick up and read Mike Sacks' Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason.
A collection of short stories, lists, and illustrations spanning both ends of the oddball spectrum, Your Wildest Dreams is the treasure book of ludicrous (and sometimes bawdy) humor your mother tried to keep away from you. From the love-notes-exchange-turned-sour in "Saw You on the Q Train," the groom's wedding day tweets in "George Sarkin is Using Twitter!" to the clueless psychologist aboard the sloop Winslow in "From the Sea Journal of the Esteemed Dr. Ridley L. Honeycomb," Sacks must have one hell of an imagination to have thought up these stories - they're so darn absurd, he must either be crazy or a genius, or both.
He reinvents popular jokes by adding somber endings in "FW: Loved the Following Jokes and Thought You'd Love Them as Well!!!"; in "Arse Poetica," he pitches script ideas to a hardcore porn producer... in the middle of an orgy. One of my favorites is without a doubt "The Rejection of Anne Frank" - where an editor turns down her biography ("a memoir from a 15-year-old is a bit much") and offers some pretty comical criticism:
"Fantasy always works, especially with your tween demographic. Come up with something totally original - for instance, is there any ambiguous historical evidence for the presence, in Nazi Germany, of hot teenage vampires?"
But nothing - nothing - beats the letters of Rhon Penny (silent h), a writer trying to get published by thinking up all sorts of gimmicks and pitching them to various authors such as Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and the family of John Updike.
If you're not prudish about a bit of crass humor and appreciate intelligent comedy bordering on the ridiculous, then Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason is a definite must-read. Indulge yourself - but don't tell your mother.
PS. See page 206.
Originally posted
here. -
As with a lot of the McSweeney's author books, this one has a bunch of hits, a bunch of misses, although some of the hits were the falling-out-of-the-chair-laughing type. In the former group: "Reasons You're Still Single," which can actually make me laugh just thinking of it; and "My Parents, Enid and Sal, Used to Be Famous Porn Stars." In the latter group: "Geoff Sarkin is Using Twitter!" (which might have been funny three years ago or so but now is just kind of tired) and "Saw You on the Q Train."
If you like McSweeney's humor pieces, it's worth picking this one up. Call it three and a half stars. -
This book was terrible! It had sooooome funny parts, no more than a total of ten pages I would say, and the writing was horrendous. Not funny, stupid, I'm ashamed Captain America is on the cover.
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Mike Sacks is a funny guy, and if you’re into stuff like McSweeney’s online whatever-the-hell-they-call-it, you’ll enjoy this book.
The book does suffer a bit from a couple of comedy diseases that are really prevalent.
The first, Onion Fatigue Syndrome, a disease commonly found within the pages of joke newspaper the Onion, is all about how you read comedy. The Onion, like this book, is absolutely hilarious in small-to-medium doses. But if you read the entirety of the Onion front-to-back, you don’t even give a shit about the last couple articles, no matter how hilarious the headlines may be. So if you’re interested in this book, pace yourself.
The second, SSNL (Syndrome Saturday Night Live) is all about taking a hilarious premise and running with it long enough that it’s just not funny anymore. Schweddy Balls is a funny thing to hear Alec Baldwin say, but after a couple go-arounds of “your balls are so sweet” and “your balls would really please my toddler” you get the joke. Then you get it again. And then you start yelling at the TV that you get it in the vain hope that someone will hear you and move on to the next sketch. This book can go down that road in places too. Good premises all around, but occasionally you’re ready to skip to the next piece quite a bit before the end.
But hey, for one guy to have a collection this funny is pretty rare. -
Excerpt from my longer review at BlogCritics.org
http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-your-wildest-dreams-within/
...
Clearly, there is no danger of Mike Sacks growing up any time soon. He delights in imagining the world much funnier than most of us. His playful approach to reality could fill a thousand pages and still be fresh and funny.
From satire to silly, Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason might make you think: “I’d be so cool if I was as funny as Mike.” But you’re not, so be satisfied with his rich topical humor and his view of contemporary society, not to mention his creative ideas for sex positions.
We often think writing is difficult, but Sacks doesn’t seem to work too hard at these clever pieces, and apparently doesn’t need much inspiration. The laughs roll off the page, with his distinctive style, even on the pieces co-written with help from his equally funny friends. Sacks and Scott Rothman co-wrote the “Shared Beach House for Rent” Craigslist ad and the hilarious transcription of a guy tweeting his wedding and honeymoon. -
Very funny! Nice to pick up when you need a quick break. I especially loved the "Rhon Penny" letters to authors and the publishers “suggestions” for The Diary of Anne Frank ("Fantasy always works, especially with your tween demographic....is there any ambiguous historical evidence for the presence, in Nazi Germany, of hot teenage vampires?" Maybe not quite safe for work if you’re reading the Kama Sutra section!
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Mike Sacks is a hilarious human being and this is a hilarious collection of essays. A step above most other humor collections if only for the fact that the style of the pieces varies, so you almost feel as if it's a collection from various comedians as opposed to singularly springing from the strange yet entertaining mind of Mr. Sacks.
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I read this because I absolutely loved his non-fiction book, And Here's the Kicker. This book wasn't as enjoyable. Many of the pieces were okay, but none of them really won me over, and the collection felt repetitive. There were a lot of clever and erudite pieces, and I wonder if they might work better in the publications where they first appeared.
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Loved Poking a Dead Frog, so I was really looking forward to reading some of Sack's own material. I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I felt like Homer Simpson when he was watching Prairie Home Companion and pounding on the TV saying, "Be funny". I really wanted something in here to be funny, but it just didn't turn out that way.
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Found 90% of these hee-larry-us! Summary: This volume collects Sacks's unique humor pieces--Craigslist ads, lesser-known tantric positions, letters to famous authors, lists, jokes, and the occasional illustration--originally published in "The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire," and "McSweeney's."
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Very funny odd little stories. Mike Sacks has an interesting sense of humor that matches will with the long joke/short story style the book is in. I will be passing this to a family member that I know loves this kind of humor.
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Connection: the company I interned for this summer (Tin House) released this book when I was 13 years old.
I did not laugh for long stretches of this book. I was not laughing for so long that I soon looked up and tried to listen to how loud my silence was, and that told me to stop reading. I stopped on page 122, right before the one titled "Arse Poetica." I think this book is hard to do in a world of The Onion + Clickhole, pubs that I think Sacks worked for, but perhaps because of their diverse group of authors you get more variety of jokes: his turn to awkward male nakedness/sexuality feel flat for me constantly! Sorry. -
Compilation of humor pieces, many short, some in cartoon form. A few fell flat, but some were laugh-out-loud funny. Definitely a nice diversion for these difficult times! Also, he must be local to Maryland's DC suburbs as there are several mentions of places or intersections in the area, which is kind of fun.
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This was quite funny!! I have had it on my shelves for years and I just got around to reading it, but now I wish I had gotten to it sooner. The opening story was hilarious ☺
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This is a GoodReads First Reads review:
The good news is that I love the title and the cover. The end.
I obviously do not share the author's sense of humor.
A fellow GoodReads user, Randall (
http://www.goodreads.com/randallghauk), took the words right out of my mouth:
"
[...]
Some of the author's shtick really wore thin pretty quickly. While there were a few dozen different pieces assembled here from various sources, it really seemed like it was the same three or four gimmicks dressed in different clothing.
The most tedious of these are advertisements or letters written by someone of questionable mental capacities. The story always begins with a questionable scenario which grows more outlandish as the descriptions continue. The ridiculous lists of demands, requests, offerings, etc. are meant to be humorous, but they're really just absurd without being funny.
Most of the other stories are all born of ideas that are funny conceptually, but that's the problem with most humor writing and even television. Just because it's a funny idea doesn't mean it will continue to be funny beyond that stage.
I can imagine that when it occurred to you that you'd somehow have Mumia Abu Jamal make an appearance as the love interest of a young girl in a fictional series of books about a high school clique who solve mysteries, you'd think there is humor to be mined there. And, maybe over some bourbon and chit chatting about it with a friend, it's funny. Unfortunately, when you actually read it over four or five pages...you're not laughing. Rather, you find yourself wanting it to be over in the hopes the next story will be funny and, more often than not, it also fails.
[...]
It's a quick read and if you have the ability to just give up early on a short article when you realize you're not going to get anything out of it, you'll probably enjoy thumbing through this book, rather than regretting having read most of it only to get the few prime nuggets of comedy."
To PaperBackSwap with this one, in the hopes that it finds a more appreciative home. -
If you think it’s hard to make someone laugh using only dark, “nearly midnight” words on a white “with just a hint of sepia” page (as I sometimes do), Mike Sacks makes it look easy.
One of my favorite pieces, “Saw You On the Q Train,” takes the ingenious format of a missed connections classified, which then spins wildly out of control over a fight about a porch swing.
Sacks’ lists are honed like a prison shiv, only they’re much funnier. “Game Show Catchphrases That Never Quite Caught On” is as disgusting as it is fantastic. Same with “Things You Must Do Before You’re Too Old.”
Like Woody Allen, Sacks knows that the best, most lasting humor is character based, and the perfectly named Rhon Penny is a shining example. His letters of solicitation to famous writers like Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon are must reads for anyone going through the process of sending out their own writing to anyone out there in the world. Rhon might be an exaggerated version of a failed writer, but he’s a painfully accurate one, and as we all know, truth is the wellspring of all comedy, and I hardly even know what I’m talking about.
If I went on any longer, this review would turn into that E. B. White warning about how dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog and how the frog dies and no one is interested, which I would never want to do to a potential reader of Mike Sacks, because he seems like a good guy so I'll end here. -
I've tried and failed to finish this for years. It's one of those books that I saw and loved the idea of, yet it never really panned out in actual practice. I've no doubt that some will absolutely love the book to tatters. I'm just not one of them.
Part of this is that the stories all seem to think of themselves as far more clever than they actually are. I kept flipping through this because I'd find one or two things that were cute enough to give me hope that there were more funny or quirky stories in here, but to no avail. As soon as I started diving back in, I'd get incredibly bored and toss this book to the side in search of more entertaining fare.
The other part of this is because many of these stories are more entertaining viewed separately and sparsely. I keep trying to rationalize giving this a more positive review because I really, REALLY wanted to like this. Heck, once I'd gotten enough money saved, I eagerly rushed to purchase this. It just didn't deliver. You could argue that I could always read the book piece-meal, but that's sort of what I've been doing and I still didn't care for this.
If you've been looking to read this, I recommend either getting a used copy or going through the library unless you're very familiar with Sack's work and absolutely know you'll like this. -
Another book in the "I didn't finish this" category. While the ideas themselves were charming, I never found it laugh-out-loud funny; it generally only reached, lip curling into a small smile funny. After the first few entries I became bored with the book. It all felt very one-note. In a sense it was the same joke being told over and over in different forms, but not different enough to make it feel fresh. If I had bought this book I might keep it on a coffee table and pick it up, but as I was borrowing it from the library I felt no desire to rush through and finish it before it's due date.
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Sometimes quite funny and enjoyable, sometimes not really at all. But what would a humor book be if it were not hit-or-miss? I wanted a lighter book of short, humorous selections, and that's what I got. This purchase was due to an NPR list I read, and it was good to get out of my comfort zone to read a young writer and not something dense and critically acclaimed. Sacks is in the same realm as Dave Eggers, but more succinct and more spare. A couple passages or stories were pretty damn funny, and some seemed like filler even in a rather short book. Still, this was a nice break.
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The following is a Firstreads winner review:
This is a collection of writings of various nature such as lists, essays and other assorted items. Some of these are actually funny. Others tend to have lost me. Perhaps if someone decides to read this they may find a few items that are funny. A word of caution is in order for the content of this book will be objectionable to some. There is very graphic adult humor within. -
I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads Giveaways.
I'm sorry to say I just couldn't really get into this book. I did find a few parts funny so that made it at least worth my effort, but I'm not sure I would read something by this author again.
I do appreciate you giving me the chance to read this book as I love to try and read anything and everything. -
Mike Sacks is absolutely hilarious. There are so many times that I laughed aloud as I was reading this book (many times on an airplane), perhaps more so than any other book in recent memory. Sacks has a great knack for experimental narrative design that makes the book a quick but complex read. I highly recommend this for anyone who wants to giggle, usually embarrassingly.
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Obviously there is a percentage of the population that will laugh every time they hear (or read) the word penis, but I am not a part of it. I read about half the book, and skimmed through parts of the rest, and didn't find anything that I thought was funny. Maybe if I were male?
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Why don't more publishers publish books of funny stuff? This book is an eclectic collection of laugh-out-loud hilarity, the type of book I enjoy. I don't understand why publishers shy away from books like this unless the writer is famous.
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Sounds like a fun read. "collects Mike Sacks’s unique humor pieces — Craigslist ads, lesser-known tantric positions, letters to famous authors, lists, jokes, and the occasional illustration — into one handsome volume"
