Mark LeynerReseñas

Leyner is definitely trying to push the boundaries, but he succeeds only to the extent that he makes this book somewhat irritating to read.

A complete waste of time .Punishingly repetitive.

This book feels dated and the short messages embedded are just bizarre and totally unrelavent.½

Not as good as the books of awesomeness. The layout meanders through stories rather then get straight to these hilarious questions. Didn't really like it.

Honestly, I read it over 25 years ago and can't really remember the plot, but I remember it was bizarrely funny. Even if I don't remember the details, if I recall how much I enjoyed reading it after 25 years, it's a good book in my opinion.

Here's a thing about Mark Leyner and his books, which are becoming increasing idiosyncratic even as his plotting becomes more focused and his skills more honed. The Venn diagram of readers that enjoy the slightly transgressive tales-told-out-of-school story-telling of David Sedaris, as well as the metafictional pyrotechnics of David Foster Wallace at his most precious, and the whimsy of somebody like Terry Gilliam, is vanishingly small, one suspects.

That said, if one is there for it, then Leyner nails it.

Parts are laugh-out-loud funny, and it is weirdly propulsive for such a strange "autobiographical" project that is almost the opposite of a traditional biography in that it lets you know many things about the mind of the author, but very little about what he has actually done.

"Brilliant, but not for everyone." undersells both sides of that sentence.

The thing about early Leyner books is that you can never relax for a second; Joyce and Faulkner are the only two authors I can think of whose books are more intrinsically challenging than this, Leyner's second full-length narrative. Even calling it a narrative understates the complexity of the second half, ostensibly a written review of a non-existent movie that the character, Mark Leyner, must write by some time the next day.

Leyner is just so insanely smart and intellectually funny; he not only posits a island despot building the Petronas towers as, instead, naked lovers, but then creates the New York Times reaction to it and discusses which sections would be featured in German style magazines, all in one throw-away paragraph.

When combined with double-backs, curlicues, and recursive prose, it creates the effect of looking into an actual madhouse of creativity. If it's this intense to read, how crazy must it have been to write?

What Leyner hadn't quite gotten a hold of, in these earlier novels, is the need for emotional resonance to make things both more engrossing and less exhausting. Page for page, I can't imagine you'd ever find a more dense hyper-meta-fictional achievement. Also, I'm not sure you'd want to.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has the distinction of being as close to "metafiction" in a pure sense as one is likely to ever get, with recursive fractal curlicues redoubling constantly such that, as with some poetry, you can anticipate entire stanzas, but also constantly filling in more detail, as in discussions of Mandelbrot and the infinitely long coastline of Great Britain.

But there is also a heart at the center, suggesting that the closest movie analogue is actually Mulholland Drive rather something much more obvious at first glance, like Detention.

Or, to put it another way, as it moves from a story of a character struggling to be an individual, and heroic in his own way, to the story of everybody trying to frame that story, it lends heroism to that character simply by dint of his being the center of the constantly re-framed story. Does that make sense?

Further, it references this by offering that some have postulated that that character has, in fact, been a statue the entire time, thus auto-critiquing its own narrative point and structure.

And it has all of the wacky Leyner hijinx his other fiction does: too many pop-culture references to count, a genuinely astounding vocabulary and breadth of knowledge that seems almost wasteful, and astonishing imagination matched with descriptions that manage to convey visual imagery pretty much unmatched anywhere else.

As with everything that is so successful a deconstruction, though, it ends up empty except for the experience.

This is the ultimate audio book, quick stories that are easy to follow. It really makes you laugh and fills you with a lot of random information that you can share with people around you, whether they're interested or not.

Pretty much what you'd expect from a book with this title. A few amusing facts tied in through a dinner party storytelling approach.

3.8 stars

Writer as rock star...

A pantheon of hungover deities roll into the universe on a bus playing something that sounds a lot like the Mister Softee jingle, take residence in Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and turn their collective gaze on Ike Karton, a 48-year-old, 5'7", unemployed, Jersey City butcher.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is exactly the sort of next novel you might expect from Mark Leyner, in that Mark Leyner's indescribable, hyper-experimental, postmodern fiction generally defies the notion of expectation. If you expect however that it's hilarious, you wont't be disappointed.

Amusing fluff..very much a bathroom reader. Book would have progressed along far better without the interweaves of conversation between authors before the chapters.(Skipped all of them.)

Good for a laugh and a few 'hmmm' moments.

Transgressive juvenalia straight from the id. Snapshots into the mental instability of the author, who fails on every page to be half clever or gonzo as he thinks he is. Mucho product placement in lowercase for anti-capitalist value, and plenty of reminders that he has indeed, really, encountered female genitalia and has a laundry list of gross ways to describe it.

I enjoyed the different questions and answers in the book. I thought that the chat in between questions was funny and way to break up a book so there was a little more of a story to it.

*****PLEASE NOTE THAT I WON THIS BOOK THROUGH GOODREADS FIRST READS PROGRAM****

This review was originally posted on Melissa's Midnight Musings: http://midnight-orchids.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-sugar-frosted-nutsack-by-mar...

One of the most bizarre, utterly ridiculous books I've ever read.


I don't even know how to begin this review. First off, let me tell you that this book is one of the most ridiculous, pointless things I have ever read.

The first thirty pages talk over and over about various gods who are in charge of random things, like chicken tenders and fibromyalgia, and who are all in some sort of weird lust competition with each other. Honestly, I don't know why I even kept going beyond the first 30 pages.

As you read, you learn about XOXO another god, who secretly is trying to sabotage this whole epic story, by inscribing on your brain whatever it is that he wants you to know. (Where the epic of it is, I honestly don't know. I'm not being snide or snarky here either, it's just the fact that this 'story' makes no sense.)

The story then gets into the background of Ike Karton, a strange man from New Jersey, who already knows that he's going to be assassinated in a week's time by some secret militant group.

Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this. It resembles the ramblings of a highly schizophrenic person. If not that then another way I could describe it would be to say that maybe it's someone on a bad acid trip or something. The main character Ike, smokes highly potent gravy, (not a code word for drugs here, it's actually described as normal brown gravy) throughout the book, so the bad trip theory is at least feasible.


I don't know if the author was trying to be somehow philosophical or deep with all of this mumbo jumbo and these random references, and just failed miserably, or if it was just supposed to be funny. Also a big fail there, by the way.

It's described in weird fits and starts that really make no sense and seem to have no real connection to each other. There's A LOT of name dropping, particularly famous name dropping. There's probably well over 100 famous people mentioned. Since Ike has a list of celebrities that he hates, maybe this is the authors personal celebrity dislike list?

The fact that the book is so repetitive really made me want to bang my head against the wall. I put this down several times because I just couldn't take the nonsense. I would give you an example, but I don't even want to open this book and read any of it again, it's that strange. Just trust me when I say it'll give you a headache.


One of the definitions of insanity is : a foolish or senseless, action, statement, policy, etc. Let me tell you this book is full of insane statements. Some people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In this case it would be reading the same thing over and over and expecting something different to happen the next time you read it. Maybe that means I'm insane for reading this book, I don't know.


This book only made me laugh once. And the joke wasn't even all that funny. I won't ruin it, but I will tell you that it has to do with Dick Van Dyke.


At this point you're probably wondering why I even finished the book. For one, I hate not finishing books. For another thing, I was really hoping this book would redeem itself somehow. Maybe there would be some deeper meaning, some lesson to be taken away from it. (If there was one, I didn't find it.)


Plus, I'd never read anything by Mark Leyner before, and I heard he's really funny. But, I guess his sense of humor is the kind that you "just get" or you don't. It appears that I'm in the "don't get it" group. I might try another one of his books at some point in the future but that won't be anytime soon.


That's what I get for picking the books with the quirky titles I guess.


I'd recommend this to anyone who's looking for a challenge, or who might like a lot of random name dropping in their books. Just a warning to anyone who might read this, there's some language that might be offensive and a lot of sexual references.

Read Et Tu, Babe instead.

First off, this is not a book I would normally read. The hubby picked it out and so I thought why not? I struggled to get thru this book. There were a few parts that I thought were funny but I felt like it read like a health book written by 2 high school/college frat boys. I almost gave up on it. I give it 2 points because there was a slight few parts that I laughed at.

I don't remember when I read this, but it was definitely one of the early popsci books that hooked me.

I enjoyed the answers to the questions. Sometimes you don't think to ask why your body does certain things. I did not like the format though and found myself skipping over the chat sessions between the two authors that were included as they were boring. I didn't want to read two people having a chat, while funny to the chatters, the humour is generally lost to those peering in from outside. This book would have been better without the little asides.

Why the authors decided this needed a frame, in the annoying form of an imaginary cocktail party, is beyond me. I was hoping for more substance and much less "look how funny our chat transcripts are."

bad. really bad experimental meta-fiction. I couldn't stomach more than the first quarter.

This is probably the weirdest, most absurd novel I have ever read. It is self-referential, insane, imaginative. I have never read anything like it, and I couldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't like the strange. It has created its own mythos that mocks myth and storytelling and itself. I can completely imagine most people who read this absolutely hating it or not making it through. I guess I'm one of those few who found it funny.

I love trivia books but I couldn't get through this one. My first issue was that the authors didn't take themselves seriously. I didn't want jokes. I actually wanted to know the answers. By the second issue, which made me stop reading, was that some of the answers were wrong. "Why does your pee smell when you eat asparagus?" Is an old answer to the question. The more recent research showed that everyone's pee smells, but that only some people have the ability to detect the smell. Once I realized they got that answer wrong, I figured why read on, they might be giving me wrong information.