Very moving4-ish, and I fully had expected this to be a resounding 5. I saw Jonathan Ames in a live show in NYC when I lived there (maybe 2001/2002), and I laughed so hard that I had to take off my shirt to wipe off my streaming teared-covered face. While this book definitely got me laughing, there were many essays that spoke to the other aspect of comic genius, i.e., depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and/or suicidality. Very well articulated and genuine. And I suspect the only reason this d...

this book was very entertaining!!

The recommended way to take in this book is to have someone read it to you through a glory hole in a public restroom. Don't put your ear too close to it.OK, so he’s not as funny as David Sedaris. David Sedaris has the intellectual depth of a TV commercial so why would you invite that comparison? Actually, I didn’t find this collection of essays funny at all but I did enjoy its vast range, at least in those that aimed higher than his butthole. You wonder how the guy ever got around to actually pr...

Season two made me a big fan of Jonathan Ames' "Bored to Death" TV series, and also made me eager to check out some of his prose work. I didn't so much pick this one as it was the only one Borders had, so there we go.Being a collection of short stories, it's not too surprising that I liked some stories more than others, but I really found this one uneven. There was a lot of variety here, but it wasn't necessarily that I liked one type of story more than another -- the stories of Ames' loving rel...

Another collection of humorous and painfully honest essays by Jonathan Ames. If you're a fan, this will surely satisfy. If you're not, this is unlikely to convert you.Personally, while I do find Ames funny (I wouldn't be reading his books if I didn't) I do find his sexual obsessions tedious. It's a bit like listening to a thirteen-year-old boy with a very good vocabulary talk about his sexual obsessions; it's eye-rolling material. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of other subjects covered he...

Who is this lanky stud running down a street in his underpants (the book cover)? I had to find out. Ames' amusing collection of revealing personal essays and oddball experiences, combined with some too-often repeated bodily function problems and obsessions, made for a fun read, and one that might make the reader feel more normal by comparison. There is a lot of warmth and vulnerability in the stories, which are probably laugh-out-loud when read aloud. But reading them all at once was like bingin...

I picked this book up on a whim. I was searching for a birthday present for my mother. We had recently discussed our love of essays, mostly our admiration of Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, so when I saw the blurb on the front of this book that claimed Ames was an edgier Sedaris, I bought the book. Ames is not an edgier Sedaris. He is a competent writer who fills his diary with sentimental drivel and name-dropping. On top of that, his musings on sexuality are "edgy" only in the sense that they m...

Jonathan Ames is a yeoman writer. His sentences do the work, his essays tell a story, and leave it at that. So why am I so unhappy with this collection of essays? I guess it's because the essays about unremarkable events (his visits to his great-aunt, for instance) lack any lyrical elegance and his many, many essays about being perverse don't interest me and they're not funny in spite of their effort to be so. I don't remember chuckling once. All that withstanding, your average bear can't write

Honest and HilariousThank you, Mr. Ames, for rekindling my love of reading. I've been putting books down halfway through for the past few months (overwritten, too dreary, too serious), so it was a pleasure to read this collection of essays. On multiple occasions, I laughed out loud, to the point that my wife had to ask me to please be quiet because she was trying to sleep. At the root of this humor is a deep honesty, as one man reflects on his own estimation of himself. Mr. Ames, my only disagre...

Visits to prostitutes, dominatrices, swingers clubs, tranny clubs, the Tyson-Lewis fight, and the Banana Bar in Amsterdam (non-culinary innovations with bananas); cockroaches in bathtubs; an adorable farting English child in the next bathroom stall; and endless discussions of bodily effluvia, irritable bowel syndrome, and ass-itch - such are the topics of these essays by the man who once called himself "the George Plimpton of the colon." There is some extremely funny stuff here, and there is no

After furiously cramming for the New York bar exam like a maniac for two months, I decided to start this a week before the exam, as I was in desperate need of a light palate cleanser and some comic relief. And it was just that. Light, sometimes funny and sweet, (but not overly twee) but also sometimes kind of boring - hence the three stars. Yes, he’s self-deprecating, but at times it seems a bit disingenuous - like it’s a ploy to make you like him. Thus, I vacillated between rolling my eyes at h...

The blurb on the back cover of Jonathan Ames’ essay collection, I Love You More Than You Know, reads “Whether it’s chasing deranged cockroaches around his apartment, kissing a beautiful actress on the set of an avant-garde film, finding himself stuck perilously on top of a fence in Memphis in the middle of the night, or provoking fights with scarred German men, Jonathan Ames has an uncanny knack for getting himself into outlandish situations. He’s also quite good at finding himself in banal situ...

I have no idea how I feel about this.a) I was upset to find out how much of my life resembles his in ways I do not want it to (credit card useage, life station, being cheap)b) I was upset that related to a) (because of a?) he like...sees hookers and talks about his ass?c) There was a point that I hated this book and felt like humankind is a despicable pile of garbage and I should be a hooker and everyone goes to hookers and no one is responsible for their bad habits or anything and "well, I gues...

I did like the part about him meeting David Sedaris (and Hugh!), that's because I love Sedaris. Also, I liked the one about why he loved Jack Kerouac. But mostly I am happy I read this because now I know a great book to add to my wishlist - Paula Fox's "Desperate characters". So, thank you, dear JA.

The dirty fun of Ames' irreverent personal essays does not make up for shiteous writing.

Bored to death creator is awesome. A dirtier David Sedaris, a more scatological transfriendly Charles Bukowski.

I picked this up because I’m a big fan of Bored to Death and found Ames’s essay “The Mess I’m In” amusing. To sum it up (and this is not necessarily an insult), the book is filled with self-deprecating navel-gazing. Sometimes the humor really lands, and other times he's too indulgent. If you’re completely unfamiliar with Jonathan Ames, you might think of him a bit like David Sedaris’s more neurotic, more literary, more sexually-explicit cousin. He sure doesn’t mind baring unflattering aspects of...

Neurotic and scatalogical at its core, and funny, and that alone makes this fine (if you like those things), but Johnathan also can drops hauntingly beautiful sentimental memories among the self-hating alcoholic madness.

Hilarious and almost entirely trueI love this author and I've only read two of his books! I am definitely going to be buying more in my future!

I was drunk at my friend Sam's place one time. We were drinking and having a merry time as usual, and also as usual I was glancing through her book collection. "You should read this." She hands me this random book with a guy running in his boxers. I thought the cover looked like some long forgotten memoir from the eighties. "Why's that? I'm reading Vonnegut, can't you tell?" I say to her. And it's true I was, I believe it was Cat's Cradle. "Ok, for one, you should never read while you're drunk.