Despite her book’s title, Brosh’s stories feel incredibly-and sometimes brutally-real. It’s based on her wildly popular website.īrosh has quietly earned a big following even though, as her official bio puts it, she “lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon.” The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. The book consists of brief vignettes and comic (in both senses of the word) drawings about Brosh’s young life (she’s in her late 20s). I must have interrupted Melinda a dozen times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. You will rip through it in three hours, tops.

They’re long nonfiction books that might look a little out of place beside the pool or on the beach.īut Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened, by Allie Brosh, is an honest-to-goodness summer read. Some of the books I’ve recommended as summer reads really aren’t. This review originally appeared on Bill’s personal blog the Gates Notes on May 19th, 2015. Today, Bill and Melinda Gates co-chair the charitable foundation bearing their names and are working together to give their wealth back to society. He married Melinda French in 1994 and they have three children. He dropped out of college to start Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, with an amazing and supportive family who encouraged his interest in computers at an early age.

Mari Malcolmīill Gates is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. Neurosis has rarely been so relatable and entertaining. Brosh has a genius for allowing us to channel her weird childhood and the fits and starts of her adulthood through the manic eyes, gaping mouths, and stick-like arms in the panels that masterfully advance her stories, and she delivers her relentless commentary with deadpan hilarity. If you just stumbled across Brosh and can't yet grasp the allure of a Web comic illustrated by rudimentary MS Paint figures, believe the hype.

If you're suspicious of books because you live in a world of the INTERNET FOREVER, this is where you make an exception. An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: Who among us has not, in moments that sometimes bleed through years, even decades, felt weird, desperate, and absurd-wishing we could turn all the lamest, most shameful episodes in our lives into hilarious illustrated anecdotes? If youre one of the millions hanging on Allie Brosh's every blog post, you already know you'll love Hyperbole and a Half in book form, especially since half its hyperboles are new.

Hyperbole and a half goodreads