audio book ( )

I like Keillor's radio show for the most part, but this is the second book of his I've tried and I haven't enjoyed either one. I quit reading this one because I found the stories depressing, no humor, and rather foul. Your mileage may vary.

The story of Dionysus rambled on about a god hitting middle age. I suppose that was meant to be funny, but it fell flat for me. Then the story of a boy who had leprosy. No. Just no. Somewhere I'm missing the point to his writing, but nothing in these stories makes me care enough to find it. ( )

The Book of Guys by Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor is surely best known for his multifaceted role with "Prairie Home Companion," the long-running NPR show. Material created for the show—for example, the letters from Lake Woebegone—has been collected into books. [The Book of Guys] is a 1993 collection of short stories written primarily for The New Yorker.

A bought a jacket-less hardcover edition at a library sale, figuring it was cheap and would be good light reading. I alternated reading chapters in [The Red and the Black] and [The House of Mirth] with stories in this book. Between meal snacks, so to speak. Ease to read, no heavy intellectual lifting, many chuckles.

My mind's ear heard many of these stories being read/performed on PHC. "Lonesome Shorty" is one:

The summer before last, I was headed for Billings on my horse Old Dan, driving two hundred head of the ripest-smelling longhorns you ever rode downwind of, when suddenly here come some tumbleweeds tumbling along with a newspaper stuck inside—I had been without news for weeks so I leaned down and snatched it up and read it trotting along, though the front page was missing and all there was was columnists and the Lifestyle section, so bouncing along in a cloud of manure I read an article entitled "43 Fabulous Salads to Freshen Up Your Summertime Table" which made me wonder if my extreme lonesomeness might not be the result of diet. Maybe I'm plumb loco, but a cowboy doesn't get much fiber and he eats way too much beef. You herd cattle all day, you come to despise them, and pretty soon, by jingo, you have gone and shot one, and then you must eat it, whilst all those cattle tromping around on the greens takes away your taste for salads, just like when you arrive at a creek and see that cattle have tromped in the water and drunk from it and crapped in it, it seems to turn a man toward whiskey.

I thought to myself, Shorty, you've got to get out of this cowboy life. I mentioned this to my partner, old Eugene, and he squinted at me and said, "Eeyup."

There's some verse, such as "Casey at the Bat (Road Game)", with Casey playing for the visiting team. For those of us who remember when George H. W. Bush was president, Keillor imagines him dealing with an invasion of Chicago by "hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Hloths, Wendells, and Vandals." He has fun bringing Greek gods up to date in "Zeus the Lutheran" and "The Mid-life Crisis of Dionysus."

…He heard the unmistakable clip-clomp-clomp of the sensible shoes of the Muse of maturity, Gladys, clambering up the steps, clipboard in hand, knapsack on her back, wearing a frumpy brown dress with sweat stains under the arms. She blew a hard tweet on her whistle and cried, "Climb off that girl, Gramps, and put down the beverage. And brace yourself for a major news item," and then she broke it to him hard. He was fifty. Fifty years old.

Dionysus sat up—"What?" he said, letting go of the supple young woman. "Fifty. Ha! I'm immortal! Ageless! You can look it up!"

This book is a great example of why I have a non-sexual crush on Garrison Keillor. He's a wonderful writer! ( )

I did not enjoy this. You know the scene in Roxane with Steve Martin, where he comes up with twenty jokes about big noses? That is what this feels like, without the laughs. Someone came up to Garrison Keillor with a list of off the wall categories and said "Write a story about guys, one for each topic." Some of the stories are clever, but mostly, it just portrays guys as oafs. As an oaf of a guy, I can appreciate the humor in that, but it got old fast. I enjoy many of Garrison Keillor's works, and think that he is a great storyteller, but I did not really enjoy this. ( )