Dave Berry meets Ray Romano in this quick witted satire on shopping
4 out of 5 stars
Shopping Survival Guide is a humor book written for men who are dating or married to the girl who loves to shop. Luckily I am not one of these guys, but I was at one point. It is full of funny tidbits on how to get through and the “history” of shopping.
The narration was done very well by Johnny Heller. He uses his tone to conjure up the humor that is written, and allows the reader to feel like he is getting his money worth while listening to this. The book is short, but there were no issues in production quality at all. I enjoyed his narration and look forward to listening to other work he’s done.
This is one of those books you could listen to while you and your shopaholic other half were out… shopping of course. It’s a quick 2.5-hour audiobook that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
Starting off the author explains his reasoning behind writing this book, and explains the way it’s going to go. It’s a pretty simple and easy to follow book. But, I’m glad that I got the audiobook, humor books always have a little more to them when they are read. Normally I’m listening to a memoir by a comedian read by the comedian, but this was similar enough that I enjoyed it.
This book will not be for everyone, it’s funny, short and to the point. The stories and tales from within conjure up a good chuckle of days past when I was dating a girl who just loved to shop. She would spend a hobo’s money if she could (I don’t miss her at all, can you tell).
Needless to say, Van Oss’s writing style reminds me of a Dave Berry and a little bit of Ray Romano. It was a quick painless read that helped me get through this week. Now… off to go shopping! Just kidding.
Dan Van Oss grew up reading just about everything he could borrow from the town library, although admittedly sometimes just to get the sticker segments to paste onto the Reading Centipede for each book he finished. Raised on a diet of Dave Barry columns, Douglas Adams radio serials and M*A*S*H reruns, Dan’s writing balances the line between laugh-out-loud hilarious and cleverly absurd.
Dan’s had pieces published on humorwriters.org, won 2nd place in the Mona Schreiber Prize for Humorous Fiction and Nonfiction, was a semi-finalist in the humorpress.com writing contest, and was mentioned honorably in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition for Humor. He started writing during college, where he enjoyed getting red lines mercilessly drawn through his Creative Writing projects by his professor, and where he also penned a weekly column in the school paper under the pseudonym “Fletcher Ford”. You can catch his weekly humor column, the “Dubious Knowledge Institute,” at dubiousknowledge.institute.
