Calculating How Big Of a Tip To Give Is the Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out To My Family & Friends by Steve Roggenbuck
Roggenbuck is so good at reading these stories out loud that I'm not sure you get the full impact of this book until you hear him perform it. This book is uniquely Steve's, I could never mistake it as being written by someone else. There's a conversational flow and inflection to the prose that is perfectly tailored to his voice and how he says things. That's also true of how the prose looks, with its grammatical and typographical idiosyncrasies. Roggenbuck has created a unique literary style, and that's a huge achievement in and of itself.
I think it's also good to hear the audience laughing while Roggenbuck reads because this is a funny book. One story is about a person who builds satanist dirt bikes. There's a story about someone who has been living alone in a basketball arena for 1,000 years. There's a story about someone who writes a math book called 'i love calculator.' One story is about mole rats. One story is about a house that gets attacked by two hundred and fifty thousand woodpeckers.
The book reminded me a little bit of a Harmony Korine movie in the sense that his films almost always take place inside a world where all the characters are equally bizarre. In a Harmony Korine movie everyone is an outsider and when Korine is at his most joyful this creates an equality and a sense of shared communion among the characters. There isn't an idea of 'normalcy' to play off against because everyone is uniquely weird.
The book also reminded me of this Roggenbuck video, which in my mind could be the book's trailer:
Praise Baphomet
