My Holiday Pick - Hyperbole And A Half by Allie Brosh

Please buy the book at your local bookstore if you can - or from Allie Brosh's blog!

There are many gifts you can give this holiday season, but my pick is a warmly colored book of highly idiosyncratic cartoons, Hyperbole And A Half, by Allie Brosh, whose autobiographical blog of the same name has featured on this blog at least a couple of times in the past.

Brosh, who appears in the cartoons as a funny squiggly creature with big eyes and stick limbs, examines her life with enormous honesty and humor, ranging from everyday situations that we all recognize to poignant childhood memories and an exploration of her devastating experience of serious depression.

Allie Brosh: "It's me on the inside."

In an interview with Terry Gross for NPR's Fresh Air, Brosh explained how she came to draw herself as a strange tube-like being with a pointy triangle for a ponytail:

"The reason I draw myself this way is that I feel that this absurd squiggly thing is actually a much more accurate representation of myself than I am. It's a better tool for communicating my sense of humor and actually getting across what I'm trying to say than, say, being there in the flesh...

It's me on the inside. That's what I'm like when I view myself. I am this crude absurd little thing, this squiggly little thing on the inside. So it's more of a raw representation of what it feels like to be me."

That tube-like being clearly connects with a lot of people. Hyperbole And A Half (the blog) has been picked as one of the funniest sites on the internet (by an editor at PC World), and it receives several million unique visits per month.

Hyperbole And A Half (the book) will only increase that number. My pleasure at seeing it in a bookstore was instructional for me, because I love digital formats and read mostly ebooks and online - but seeing the blog become paper and hard (or paper) covers, something I could hold in my hands, gave it a new life and energy.

It's also very funny. And it's also available as an ebook.

So please visit your local bookstore and check it out. Buy it, give one, keep one, give several. You won't be sorry. And then maybe you'll clean ALL the things!

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Alexander Stuart

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