Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Wonderful writing, a weird life - he's so brilliantly comfortable about how uncomfortable he is in his skin.
Enjoyed this and found myself chuckling out loud. That being said, I didn't finish it.
Totally unpretentious clear and direct writing. Very enjoyable inside account of screwing up a life. Sex and drugs without the rock and roll. I wish there were more writers like this.
From the first few pages I was in love!!! His brutal honesty combined with his talent for writing makes for a fantastic, at times titilating, edgy, read!!! Having lived in Manhattan, I can relate to the setting of most of these stories. And being an aspiring writer, a broke teacher, searching for myself through my career, I can definitely sympathize with this author and it makes me feel a bit less sorry for myself ;-)
DNF. Stopped reading halfway through. Not that funny and not particularly interesting. Like a poor man's Sedaris. Blah.
What, indeed? I suppose i'll never know what I would've thought of Jonathan Ames' writing without first seeing his fiction and fictional self in TV's "Bored to Death." This book is madcap, graphic, onanistic in a variety of ways. Luckily, through the glare of all that (and the lens of knowing that however down/dirty his life was, he almost certainly is worrying less now about moving back in with his parents with three seasons of a hit show under his belt), it's his writing that wins out. Deliber...
This book is comprised of a collection of articles the author wrote for a newspaper (the name of which escapes me). Strung together in book format like this, it resembles an autobiography but every now and then he’ll write something that reminds you that wasn’t the original intention.This book is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. In fact, the title would benefit from swapping out the word ‘mildly’ with the word ‘extremely’. Ames’ self-professed perversions include lusting after
Brutally honest and personal, but entertaining, keeping a sexual thematic. It does bring to light the social status and story of certain social groups like the drag queens, or describes social situations of which feelings of embarrassment or insecurity we all come to feel at some point.
These first appeared serialized weekly in the New York Press. I decided to break off one or two a day and it served me well. The usual Ames subject matter is here, drug use, literature, his blurred sexual identity, and his relationship with his parents, etc.
Memoirs and strange tales. Very engaging as an audiobook! I raced through this, sometimes appalled, but more often amused by the adventures and the extreme over-sharing. His friends must be very tolerant to be featured, especially artist ‘Harry Chandler’.
I'll think about his undescended left testicle forever and in a way that's beautiful
Hard to explain. An interesting collection of stories. Some really weird, others funny and touching. Inconsistent and not quite what I was expecting.
More pandemic comfort rereading - I think this is his best.
Funny, clever and often scatological. The perfect read for a Jewish male (which I’m not).
“I felt myself falling asleep; I closed my eyes, and then I thought, maybe I should just kill my self. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don’t mind them. They’re like aspirin. They calm me down.” What’s Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer is a collection of Jonathan’s columns for the New York Post back in the day — columns about odd happenings in his life, ranging from how he lost his virginity to a prostitute to how he discovered he had a son in...
Nowt
I think one of the real unfortunate advantages of Jonathan Ames is that he recycles alot of his stories. I was really fascinated after Bored to Death season one (still anxiously awaiting season two to become available on Netflix grr...) In any case, Ames is funny and remarkably honest but between his books and the HBO series, I'm not sure fans really need to read a ton of his novels to get about 90% of his life experiences. These stories do tell as much about NJ and NY as they do the inner chara...
Maybe it’s reading this against the backdrop of all the bullshit that’s going on right now, but I really couldn’t stomach all the ogling of teenage tits and public exposure of testicles in these stories. That may have been funny 20 years ago, but now Ames and his friends just seem full-on perverted, not mildly, as the title indicates.
Horney, yet endearing.
Hilarious, perverted, maybe slightly problematic, but I loved it.