Bossypants/Tina Fey/275 pp.

Tina Fey is one of the best writers Saturday Night Live ever had, the producer of the hit NBC show "30 Rock", a seasoned improv actor, and my friend Katie's secret lesbian crush. (OK, it's not really a secret; Katie told her husband she had a crush on Tina from the first time she saw her on SNL.) Bossypants is Fey's funny memoir of her childhood, her first forays into improv comedy, her stint in Second City and her run on SNL, how she got her own Emmy award-winning show, and (most importantly for her) the story of the birth of her daughter. She relays some of the wisdom she received from Lorne Michaels, executive producer of SNL, and answers some of the hate-mail she's received online. She explains how the whole Sarah Palin impression thing got started, and gives us behind-the-scenes glimpses into how SNL gets put together each week. All throughout, she maintains the quirky sense of humor that has made her such a success.

The Perfect Solution to Absolutely Everything/Arthur Hoppe/303 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder!
This volume consists of essays by Hoppe, previously published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on a variety of topics, including politics, the Vietnam War, birth control, Mother's Day, the arms race, and rutabagas. (Yes, rutabagas.) All of the essays were written in the mid-1960s, so a large portion of them deal with Vietnam and the Johnson administration.
Hoppe starts off, tongue firmly in cheek, by stating that the solution to overpopulation is... total birth control. As in absolutely no babies being born, period. He goes on to say that Mother's Day should be a national day of mourning, since mothers are to blame for every single bad thing that has ever happened. ("...extensive historical research shows that every evildoer, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler, had, somewhere in his background, a mother... If we wipe out Motherhood, we will unquestionably wipe out not only overpopulation, but war, soil erosion, dental caries, air pollution and people who cough on buses.") He warns against trusting anyone over thirty, as well as anyone under thirty, and advocates drinking courses for teenagers, as well as the legalization of bananas and other psychotropic drugs.
This book is a hilarious demonstration of how ridiculous so many things are, from politics to bigotry to xenophobia, and how we, as a people, take ourselves waaaay to seriously. If you're not familiar with the 1960s, some of the topics may be a bit confusing, but otherwise the book is very enjoyable.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk/David Sedaris/159 pp.

This little volume took me all of one day to read. It consists of sixteen short tales, fables really, populated by talking animals and meant to comment on various human foibles and shortcomings. A parrot tabloid reporter interviews a pot-bellied Vietnamese pig, and uses the resulting article to stir up feelings among Vietnam-war vets. The pig, in contrast, is only upset because the reporter referred to him as "pot-bellied". A crow convinces a mother sheep to try meditation, so that the crow can attack a baby lamb without the ewe being aware of it. A toad, a turtle and a duck wait in a government-office line, complaining to each other about bureaucracy and government inefficiency. Various animals take part in an AA meeting in prison, including a mink who had swapped his pelt for a bottle of Kahlua.
All of these stories are good for a chuckle. Although I prefer it when Sedaris is telling stories about his own family, his dry wit makes these tales enjoyable. The text is accompanied by illustrations drawn by Ian Falconer (author of the "Olivia" series of children's books).

Enough's Enough/Calvin Trillin/251 pp.

Syndicated columnist Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native and sometime visitor to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, offered this 1990 collection of some of his best columns from the late 1980s. While Trillin is not a political columnist per se, some of these columns do deal with the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) administrations and political campaigns, along with such 80s figures as Michael Milliken, Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Imelda Marcos, and Manuel Noriega (not to mention Noriega's red underwear and his evil voodoo tamales). Trillin also covers more everyday topics, like family vacations (and Packing Greatness), empty-nest syndrome, and three a.m. car alarms. Since this was written over 20 years ago, some of it was a little out-of-date, but some topics were strangely similar to issues being dealt with today - the invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration, and of Noriega's Panama by the Bush administration, bring to mind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in our recent history, for example.
I enjoyed Trillin's easy-going, dry sense of humor, and the shortness of the columns (average of 2-3 pp.) lends them to easy reading. Trillin is one of my favorite columnists, and I recommend the book. By the way, this was another MULSA book sale remainder!