Anyone else read David Rakoff's "Fraud"?

Cafe Society
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If you haven’t, you should. It’s tres, tres funny. A collection of essays on random topics. And not in a canned, trying too hard way…This guy is very genuine. He is a gay, Jewish, socialist, Canadian- whew. Yes, they pretty much all contain relevence. And according to this copy of the book, he does his own illustrations. Try topping that.

If you have read it, what do you think? My personal favorites are his essays about working on a kibbutz (the chicken one), the New England one, the wilderness one, and the last one, in which he talks about his experience with cancer. And the one about the comedy festival. Ah! And Christmas Freud. Regular Freud is cool enough, but Christmas Freud is just ingenious. He has the most random way of making something ordinary seem so amusing. The only thing I didn’t like- well, didn’t agree with- was that he hated the film “Life is Beautiful” which I really liked. But I can’t really fault the guy for his taste in movies now, can I? Your thoughts, fellow dopers?

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I am a huge fan of David Rakoff. I followed his work whenever it aired on This American Life, even transcribed some of it for use in speech competition. So by the time his book came out (I bought it the first day it was in stores), I’d already had parts of it memorized.

So yeah, I’m a big fan. Hidden People is my favorite essay, followed by I Used To Bank Here…, the one where he spends the entire essay searching for his thirteen-year old semen sample.

The guy is great. I describe him to people as “A Jewish David Sedaris”, and for the most part, that description holds.

The stories that aired on This American Life are among the best, since they have Ira Glass’ producing skills to compliment David Rakoff’s own talented writing.