The Truth (With Jokes)

I bought Al Franken's new book, The Truth (With Jokes) today at Barnes & Noble before lunch. Wouldn't even wait a few days to get it shipped from Amazon. I believe it came out yesterday. I'm such a fanboy.

I haven't been reading nonfiction for the last several months. I was enjoying it for a while, but then it started to depress me. The last nonfiction I was reading was Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is REALLY depressing. I think I quit reading shortly after learning that the residents of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico turned to digging up corpses and eating them when farming could no longer sustain them.

That book now graces my bathroom, where I can take it in small doses of two or three pages at a time. In its place, I've been dividing my time between Shadow of the Hegemon by Card, and the long slog that is the "Dark Tower" series by Stephen King. (I kept hearing that this is something you're supposed to read. So far, at 3/4 through the first book, I'm not sure if I'm impressed enough to get the next one.)

Anyway, these will take a back seat as I'm already a couple of chapter's into "The Truth" since lunch. I didn't much enjoy reading a recap of election day, but he did manage to make it both dramatic and funny. He even laid out bits of the script they had planned for the next morning, based on the arrogant assumption that Kerry would definitely win by a lot.

An excerpt from that chapter:

A clap of thunder rumbled in the distance. Ah, I thought. A good omen. Mother Earth was about to be replenished, just like our drought stricken political culture.

My phone rang. Felt. Mark Felt.

(Footnote: "Mark Felt" is the alias I'm using in order to protect the identity of my real source, Judith Miller.)

Later in the book there's an entire chapter devoted to Terri Schiavo. That should be interesting.