Happy almost-Valentine’s Day! To everyone who is tired of seeing these Books of the Year posts, fear not! They’re nearly at an end, and then I shall return to my mediocre posts on random topics.
Today I’ll be sharing the humor books that I read this year. I was disappointed with most of them. I always hope to find good, clean humor that is pure joy (like A Sidekick’s Tale by Elisabeth Grace Foley or even some of Charles Dickens’ stories). It’s rare, even in supposedly Christian humor genres. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!
Books Read: Ten
Average Rating: 2.4 stars (that has to be the lowest average rating of all the genres I read in 2024)
Best: Stuff Christians Like by Jon Acuff
Worst: The Very Worst Missionary by Jamie Wright
Stuff Christians Like by Jon Acuff – 3 stars
“As a child, when his mother would pray that he would have a hedge of protection or a hedge of angels around him, he would think, ‘Anyone can jump a hedge. How hard is that? Forget the hedge of angels; I’m praying for a dome of angels.’”
Acuff is funny because so much of what’s in this book is true, and sad because it shows just how shallow the church often is.
“What if this year we set our sights on something reasonable, like, “Let’s send less hate mail than devil worshippers”?”
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson – 3 stars
“That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”
Bryson set out to hike the Appalachian Trail in his forties, with his goofy sidekick Stephen Katz. It was funny in places, crude in others, and full of incredibly long and boring ramblings about the history of the trail and the areas that they passed through. I guess when not much goes wrong on the hike, there isn’t a lot to write about.
“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”
My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself by A.J. Jacobs – 2.5 stars
Jacobs’ is undeniably funny, though his humor is crude at times. This book was a collection of articles written on various experiments he did – pretending to a beautiful woman, becoming George Washington, outsourcing all his work (and family problems) to India, becoming rational, and other interesting ideas (one that included public nudity).
I laughed through a lot of this book, cringed at parts, and – shockingly – learned a few things (mainly from the George Washington chapter. That made me want to be a better person…)
My favorite part of the book was the chapter on online dating. Jacobs pretended to be a beautiful woman and had a great time responding to horrible messages from scum online. That’s why I don’t want to meet my future husband online… It proves my theory that there are few, if no, good men on dating sites.🤮🤮🤮🤮
It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A.J. Jacobs – 3 stars
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
One day Jacobs got an email from a man in Israel saying that he was Jacobs eighth cousin, and that he had over 80,000 of his relatives logged in a database. This odd message sent Jacobs into a flurry of family research, and a wild idea to host a family reunion…for everyone in the world.
Like all of Jacobs’ books, this was both hilarious and repulsive. Half the time I was bent over laughing, and nodding in agreement, and the other half I wanted to throw the book across the room. I loved the idea that everyone in the world is, albeit distantly, related. We’re all cousins, and we should treat strangers with the same love that we treat those nearest to us.
Over the course of the book, he did so much research not only into his own family tree, but also into genealogy in general and learning how to learn. He discovered unknown relatives and long buried stories. It made me ache to know my own history and where my roots are.
Jacobs promotes the idea that the traditional family is a hinderance rather than a gift and isn’t opposed to seeing it thrown away. Much of the book was also dedicated to how we were related to monkeys and apes and lots of talk about evolution. How depressing it must be to think that you were really descended from nothing but slime, instead of knowing that you are the descendants of people formed by God’s very hands, with His breath in your lungs.
Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing by Reba Riley – 2.5 stars
“This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you are to who you will become.”
Reba Riley grew up Pentecostal. She attended Bible college. It was prophesied that she would be a great healer. Yet on her twenty-ninth birthday, sick with an unknown illness, she found herself wresting with PTCS – Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome. She decided that before she was thirty, she would experience thirty different religions in an effort to make peace with her faith and find the God she had lost.
It was a fascinating memoir, if only because PTCS was strangely relatable. If I’d read this book a few years ago, I would have been nodding along with everything. I was sick of the church, angry with God, and full of rage against His people.
I enjoyed seeing Riley’s journey as she stumbled her way through several different church denominations and various religious traditions (from visiting a mosque to an Amish church to a wiccan fertility ceremony). She ended with the conclusion that all religions are equally valid ways to get to Heaven and that God is “all around us and exists as each of us”. Which I don’t agree with at all, but her search for religion was interesting, and it was crazy to see the ways that God chased her, even if she couldn’t see it.
Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York by Elizabeth Passarella – 2 stars
Passarella is a Christian democrat living in New York, and this is a humor book about her various experiences. Was it funny? Sometimes. Was it interesting? Not terribly.
The Very Worst Missionary: A Memoir or Whatever by Jamie Wright – 1 star
This is not so much the story of a bad missionary as it is of a woman who was once on fire for Jesus falling into apathy and the pressures of modern culture. Raised Jewish, Wright became a Christian in high school. After she married, she, her husband and children sold their possessions and went to Costa Rica to become missionaries.
This is the story of what a disaster that decision was, and how all the work she and her husband did there was worthless (her words). I enjoyed some of the stories, and there was a lot of truth in what she said about how the US views missionaries (and the poor ways that missionaries act at times). But bitterness, anger, leftist culture, and swearing seeped into every chapter, every sentence, and it was very sad to see the descent from who she once was to who she became.
Sweet Tea Secrets from the Deep South by Jane Jenkins Herlong – 2 stars
I enjoy humor books – when they’re actually funny, which this one wasn’t. It was a whole bunch of random, laugh-less stories cobbled together.
Sparkly Green Earrings by Melanie Shankle – 3 stars
“Friends are God’s way of apologizing for your relatives.”
I read this book for the first time in in 2022. It’s all about parenting and the glories (and horrors) of motherhood. I remember it being a lot funnier back then…
Confessions of a Proverbs 32 Woman by Kerri Pomarolli – 2 stars
Maybe I just don’t get modern humor. I struggle to enjoy books that are based solely on making fun of others (and yourself). I also struggle to enjoy comedians who take the sacred parts of our faith and stab them for laughs. Call me boring.
~Hattush
Have you read any of these books? What are your thoughts on humor in general?
Daughter of the Light 