Here’s Your Review, (Not That You Asked)!

Steve Almond is a former adjunct professor at Boston College. As the author of several books, he taught creative writing with good reason. I wonder what his professional opinion would be about the use of commas in the title of this review. I hope he would find it as delicious as he finds candy*.

Anyway, the reason why I know so much about Steve Almond is that I just finished his latest book, “(Not That You Asked)” (Random House, 2007), a collection of essays full of too much information that no one explicitly asked for (except, apparently Random House, though I doubt they chose the content). The book begins with a series of fake letters from a fictional Steve Almond to a real Oprah Winfrey, giving her hell for her place in the publishing world and the real world. It’s a bit of a weak beginning, though I do find it entertaining.

Though the Oprah letters started me off on the wrong foot for things to come, the remainder of the book is pretty strong. The second chapter of the book is a three-essay-collection about Kurt Vonnegut, and Almond’s connections (physically, inspirationally and otherwise) to the author. It’s a fun few essays that I think should have started the book. In fact, Almond originally wanted to write a book about Kurt Vonnegut, but apparently his publisher preferred for him to write a collection of essays instead (hence Random House’s explicit requests).

My biggest problem with the book is that its pretty clear Almond wanted to write about one thing, and was told to do something else. Where many of the essays are fantastic to read, oftentimes hysterical or thought provoking (like his essay about dealing with a conservative backlash and comparing it to Dante’s Inferno), others seem like filler (like the essay on Tesla).

To Almond’s credit, even when the essay feels forced, or just seems to be out of nowhere and not necessarily fit into any of the themes that lead off each chapter, it’s still incredibly well written. Almond has a style of writing that proves that his heart’s in it, no matter the content. He can make me care about things I absolutely have no interest in. Case in point: one of the longest (if not the longest) essays in the book is about baseball, a sport that I’m quite vocal in hating**.

Knowing that Random House was the catalyst to this collection, I don’t hold the filler and random essays against Almond—especially since they were a joy to read just because of the way he writes. Being all over the place in the book makes it hard to characterize, and even though this book can be found in the humor section at Barnes and Noble, don’t expect knock out laughs the whole time (I’d venture to say that if Almond had written his Vonnegut book, any laughs would have been just happy coincidences). What you can expect is a decently quick, fairly easy, and extremely fun (and yes, usually funny) read.

* See another of Almond's non-fiction works, "Candyfreak" (Heinemann Group, 2006)
** I hate baseball.