I, Tania by Brian Joseph Davis

Category: 50 Books

21. I, Tania by Brian Joseph Davis

This is by far the most creative thing I’ve ever read (okay wait, first House of Leaves, and then I, Tania. They are so different from each other but both so clever you wish you’d written them.) Also, this is my favorite book so far this year. While I was reading this I was thinking about the author, and I kinda thought that the author was probably not so much a writer but an artist who was writing. When I looked up the author on the Internet I found that I was right, he is an artist. I can’t really explain how I knew that from his writing. It just seemed obvious.

How to describe this book. Here’s what it says on Amazon:

America lies in ruins during an age of decline, despair, and death. The year is 1975 and a radical far-left group has kidnapped a young woman from one of America’s richest families. Using the memoir format just enough to spin off into a crazed, bawdy, and seditious charge through pop culture and politics, this is a highly fictionalized true story of the rise and fall of the Symbianese Liberation Army, as it never happened.

So basically it’s supposed to be Patty Hearst as her SLA personality, Tania, writing a memoir. That does not describe at all the hilarity of this book. There’s not really a plot going on here, it’s more like one over-educated joke after another. The chapters are very short and some of the chapters could be taken and made into novels on their own. I’m not describing this well. My favorite chapter was the one that was just a critique of the movie The Bad News Bears as a social commentary. The review is called It Takes a Bear to Defeat a Pig: A People’s Reveiw of The Bad News Bears. I also loved all the quotes. Mr. Davis steals dialogue straight from Airplane!, The Wizard of Oz, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (who doesn’t quote that one?)

Check it out for yourself. You can read an excerpt here. This book is so clever it’s almost too clever. Almost. I enjoyed it so much it gets 0 Cansecos.

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