I Loved It ... I Hated It

Book Review: The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race by Sara Barron

Sara Barron's The Harm in Asking is a particularly balanced piece of humor writing: half funny, half not. If a book had a personality, this one would be bi-polar.

Admittedly, as a 60+ year old hetero male, I am sure I was not in the target audience that Ms. Barron had in mind when she wrote this. I am equally sure that the 20-something metrosexuals that she IS targeting would agree that some middle-aged guy is no way hip enough to understand; just too old to GET IT.

Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. I am a firm believer that you shouldn't just read books you know you will like, so I set aside my initial reluctance and dove in. And found myself laughing out loud. Repeatedly.
And then I turned the page.

I have been around the literary block a time or two. I was not shocked. I was not offended. It was not funny. When I was 12 I loved Mad Magazine; I thought it was hilarious. It can still get a smile out of me, but it's certainly not as funny as I once thought it was. Fart jokes lost their shine about four decades ago. They have been done - over and over and OVER.

Reading The Harm in Asking is a constant battle between humor and boredom. At times I fought to stifle my laughter, the rest of the time I struggled to keep reading, fighting the urge to put it down and never come back. Sara Barron writes intelligently, concisely, and directly - all good things. I enjoyed half of the book immensely. Bodily functions don't offend me; at my age I'm pretty used to them, but I stopped laughing about them a long time ago.