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lynnaeaowens 's review for:
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living
by Nick Offerman
Why I Read It: RON SWANSON!!!! I adore Parks and Rec and Ron is one of the most hilarious and lovable TV characters in my opinion. I'm a sucker for these celebrity/comedian works so this seemed like an obvious choice.
Premise: Nick shares his personal history and his personal ideology in a sort of "guide".
What I Liked: There were moments of laugh-out-loud laughter for me and I found some of the parallels between Nick and Ron surprising and funny. Some of his personal philosophies were actually interesting, apt, and well-delivered (especially about hobbies, passion, etc.).
What I Didn’t Like: OOO boy. These all kind of overlap but I've tried to organize this a bit.
- The writing style can only be described as SO OVERWRITTEN. It feels intentional too, like the voice Nick is going for is a pretentious, offensive, redneck caricature. At times that voice contributed to the humor (and the eerie parallel to Ron), but after a while the constant vulgarity, unnecessary verbiage, and super long sentences became painful. I felt like he was putting on a weird show that lasted way too long (maybe one chapter in that style would've been funny and less overwhelming?) and made it seem like he thinks he's more manly AND more intelligent than the rest of America.
- A lot of he book dragged for me. His stories about theatre (particularly in Chicago) were incredibly boring. I ended up skimming entire chapters because they just were not funny or interesting.
- Related to the super slow pace of the book, generally I find it fascinating reading people's faith systems (for a good example check out Rainn Wilson (who played Dwight Schrute)'s discussion of his Baha'i faith in The Bassoon King). However, when Nick goes into his history with Christianity and his current hatred of it my thoughts were "OK, Nick is anti-Christian, cool" then it cropped up again... and again! This became a common problem with the book. If you cut out the re-hashing or repetition you'd cut out half of it.
- Related to Nick's "manifesto" that is peppered throughout the book, it was weird, because I actually agree with most of his perspectives (separation of church and state, the value of hard work, etc.) but the way he presented some of them turned me off. Again, this is likely due to the vulgarity and this extreme arrogance depicted throughout the book.
- Finally, there is a fine line between disagreeing with something and attacking it. Nick sees the line, leaps 4 miles over it, then tries to claim he's still back on the other side. "I have no problem with Christianity/religion, I just don't agree with it BUT now let me bash it intermittently throughout my whole book". OK, Nick, if you'd explored why you don't agree that would be cool. But instead you decided to denounce all Christian as morons and pick apart their beliefs (based on very poorly researched arguments), so you don't get to pretend to be open-minded while being a passionately offensive asshole.
Verdict: 1/5 stars - not all celebrities should write a book.
Premise: Nick shares his personal history and his personal ideology in a sort of "guide".
What I Liked: There were moments of laugh-out-loud laughter for me and I found some of the parallels between Nick and Ron surprising and funny. Some of his personal philosophies were actually interesting, apt, and well-delivered (especially about hobbies, passion, etc.).
What I Didn’t Like: OOO boy. These all kind of overlap but I've tried to organize this a bit.
- The writing style can only be described as SO OVERWRITTEN. It feels intentional too, like the voice Nick is going for is a pretentious, offensive, redneck caricature. At times that voice contributed to the humor (and the eerie parallel to Ron), but after a while the constant vulgarity, unnecessary verbiage, and super long sentences became painful. I felt like he was putting on a weird show that lasted way too long (maybe one chapter in that style would've been funny and less overwhelming?) and made it seem like he thinks he's more manly AND more intelligent than the rest of America.
- A lot of he book dragged for me. His stories about theatre (particularly in Chicago) were incredibly boring. I ended up skimming entire chapters because they just were not funny or interesting.
- Related to the super slow pace of the book, generally I find it fascinating reading people's faith systems (for a good example check out Rainn Wilson (who played Dwight Schrute)'s discussion of his Baha'i faith in The Bassoon King). However, when Nick goes into his history with Christianity and his current hatred of it my thoughts were "OK, Nick is anti-Christian, cool" then it cropped up again... and again! This became a common problem with the book. If you cut out the re-hashing or repetition you'd cut out half of it.
- Related to Nick's "manifesto" that is peppered throughout the book, it was weird, because I actually agree with most of his perspectives (separation of church and state, the value of hard work, etc.) but the way he presented some of them turned me off. Again, this is likely due to the vulgarity and this extreme arrogance depicted throughout the book.
- Finally, there is a fine line between disagreeing with something and attacking it. Nick sees the line, leaps 4 miles over it, then tries to claim he's still back on the other side. "I have no problem with Christianity/religion, I just don't agree with it BUT now let me bash it intermittently throughout my whole book". OK, Nick, if you'd explored why you don't agree that would be cool. But instead you decided to denounce all Christian as morons and pick apart their beliefs (based on very poorly researched arguments), so you don't get to pretend to be open-minded while being a passionately offensive asshole.
Verdict: 1/5 stars - not all celebrities should write a book.