Solutions and Other Problems
Ratings114
Average rating4.2
This has been on my list for years and i'm glad to finally get around to it. It's incredibly sad and it's incredibly funny AND it all hits you like a truck.
Big book for fans of weird-looking-dogs-in-silly-poses and existential loneliness.
Pas vraiment drôle ni intéressant, je ne sais pas trop quoi penser de cette suite.
La qualité d'écriture du premier tome n'est pas là : les dessins ont rarement d'intérêt et sont moins drôles qu'avant.
Les thèmes drôles et tristes sont mélangés au sein d'une même histoire alors que le premier livre séparait clairement par chapitre.
La lecture est assez fastidieuse, je suis très triste de ne pas avoir retrouvé le charme du premier livre !
I burst out laughing so many times with this book. Allie Brosh is a genius. There were many moments of discomfort, sadness and introspection while reading this and I'll remember every single story for a very long time.
Hilarious and devastating. Her first book was all humor (with some brilliant observations thrown in). This is much darker, but also much truer.
(I still made Daniel read sections that were so uproariously funny that I was uncontrollably laugh-crying.)
I laughed so hard that I had coughing fits. I also was so bummed out at some points I had to take a break from this book. What an adventure Ms. Bosh is such a great story teller.
Didn't hit me the way the original Hyperbole and a Half book did but there were still some great moments. I had no idea she'd been through so much.
No other comic artist has the ability to make me laugh so hard I'm crying—at dog and cat illustrations. The stories are the icing on the cake, but her MS Paint drawings? Just masterful. This book is existential, dealing with more serious subjects than you might expect.
It's been seven years since Allie Brosh's incredible Hyperbole and a Half. Turns out she's been going through some things. A cancer scare revealing a fruit salad of tumors, the loss of her younger sister to suicide, a divorce and the subsequent struggling with loneliness. Hardly fodder for hilarity.
But this is warm and funny and somehow avoids maudlin sentiment. Drawing yourself as an ambulatory tadpole with anime eyes really manages to leaven the mood. But don't dismiss the drawings as completely juvenile, Brosh with a deft line manages to invoke cringey awareness, reckless glee and stunned confusion. Somehow her Vegas party-bros are spot on and she most certainly deserves the most prestigious of awards she has given herself for “fanciest horse drawing.”
We are all stupid, serious, mad little animals, and that is nowhere more on display than in these crazy cartoon caricatures where a dozen or so pages of this can just break my heart.
...seriously, you've been warned.
Be warned that there is a bit of a gut-punch in the early middle. It's really nice to see Allie Brosh back again, I was sorry to read about how rough the past few years have been for her, and I hope she's doing well. There was nothing in this that really blew me away on the same level as her description of depression, BUT it was still enjoyable.
4.5 Thankful to have Allie back in my life. I'm still catching up on all of her personal backstory of the last 7 years that she's been sharing on FB, but much of what she went through is touched on here. There were a few stories that didn't work as well, but some were peak perfection - insightful, a little sad, brutally honest, and hilarious. Favorites were: Bucket, Cat, Fish Video, and the end essay, the uplifting gut punch of Friend.
I originally wasn't going to pick up this book. I read Hyperbole and a Half The Book, and it was fine, but I found that what I loved about Brosh's work — the weirdness, the silliness, the seriousness — it all seemed to work better in the blog format, where I wasn't just reading post after post. There was a break between each of the blog posts, and you had to WAIT, and that made every reading experience magical. So I expected that would happen going into this one too, until I read the chapter of this book she posted on her blog as a teaser, and it made me laugh until I cried.
And sure, Solutions had those moments at the beginning where I wondered if I wouldn't enjoy this more in blog form, but then. Oh. I can see why this needed to be a book and not a series of stories on the internet, and why it took so long for this book to come to fruition. This is HEAVY with grief and loss, and depression, and struggling to find meaning, and yet somehow Brosh still made me laugh until I cried at several points; at her stories about buying bananas with her ex-husband, and the little neighbor girl who desperately wanted Brosh to come over to see her room??
And sometimes we just need to laugh until we cry.
DNF at 55%.
It pains me because I never thought I'd have such a reaction to an Allie Brosh book, but I can't help how I feel. I loved “Hyperbole and a Half”, it was funny and relatable. This book feels like a very different beast from “Hyperbole and a Half” and it's very understandable considering the events in the author's personal life.
Having said that, I think it's best to stop reading this as it's sending me to a very bad place and I can't afford that after what a year 2020 has been.
I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe at the chapter about the fight in the grocery store. That was definitely my favorite part. But the whole thing was great. I laughed (a LOT) and I cried (a LOT in one particular spot) and it was just a really good, quick read. Brosh has a heck of a way of talking about all kinds of things.
I'm so very glad this book finally came out and things seem to be looking up for Brosh. Her unique perspective on life as a millennial was sorely missed. This was also very much worth the wait (and weight, what heft). I am also amused at the feeling of accomplishment I have for having finished it in one sitting– not at all unusual for me with webcomic anthologies, but none I have gone through were this long or had quite as many written words outside of the comic itself. Nothing was lost with the length, though, and I still crave more from her mind. This is viscerally funny, keeping it moving while not glossing over the complete chaos and darker moments of life. At times she's harsher on her mind than she needs to be– sometimes we are all out of logic, and as creatives sometimes that's where the best stuff comes from, but all in all I'm glad we have her contributions to the written – and doodled – word.
Not only will you laugh so hard you will cry, you will cry because it's so relatable about grief, trauma, and depression. A must read for anyone who is a human.
CW: sudden death of family member, divorce, death of a petA lot has happened in the world, and in Allie Brosh's life, since the mind-bending [b:Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened 17571564 Hyperbole and a Half Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened Allie Brosh https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409522492l/17571564.SY75.jpg 24510592] was published. She has several suffered traumatic losses that kept her out of the public eye, while at the same time the world went to hell in a handbasket. So how does another collection of her unique cartoons and intense self-reflection feel in 2020? At first I thought the book was weaker than its predecessor. The stories about dogs and kids seemed less developed and funny than the ones in Hyperbole. And hey, we are dealing with so many more important things these days than one person's neuroses. Then I got to the chapter entitled “Losing” that explained what happened to her immediately after Hyperbole became an unexpected bestseller, and my heart broke. Suddenly I saw her stories through a new lens, and they became so much more impactful and meaningful. Brosh is all about trying to figure out why weird or bad things happen, and how to find meaning in a seemingly cruel, random universe. And you can't get much more cruel and random than the events of 2020. So her observations are at once very personal and extremely universal. The best we can do is to just keep on going and to be nice to everyone, especially ourselves. Or as she puts it, “if you can't win, start playing a different game and score just as many points.” So in the end, I still don't think this book has quite the same impact as her first one, but Hyperbole was such an out of left-field surprise blockbuster that it would have been hard to top. I hope Brosh has smoother sailing from her on. We need her.
Like a lot of internet-users, I loved Allie Brosh's blog and wondered not-infrequently what had happened to her after her first book came out and her blog was abandoned. I hoped she was OK. It turns out that maybe she was not totally okay. This book is a real roller coaster of the kinds of laugh-out-loud random weirdness of the first book/blog but also some really dark moments (which her earlier volume had as well but definitely moreso here. Which, you know, 2020 mood.)
Unlike her last book, this isn't just a collection of funny anecdotes (although there are many). A fair amount of her stories and musings are centered on her struggles with depression, and her fight to learn to like herself and find some meaning in life when everything hits the fan. Depending on your own relationship with depression, this book might not hit you quite as hard.