Straight Outta Crawley

I enjoyed this book. I had no clue Romesh wrote a book until like a week or two ago when I watched him on Taskmaster, then in an interview where he was talking about this book, back when it was released. I think he's funny so I thought I'd give the book a try.

For some reason I was surprised to see how down to earth Romesh Ranganathan is. To be fair I had no other opinion on him apart from funny guy, so I don't really know why that came as a surprise, but there it is.

The book was not as funny as I was expecting it to be, but that's fine. I enjoyed reading about Romesh's journey, what he went through to get to where he is now. And Leesa sounds lovely, it's obvious how much Romesh loves her and their kids.

I don't know how much I should take this book seriously, so I'm not going to comment on the stuff I didn't enjoy; I will just say that I actually managed to stay more into it for the first two thirds of the book and I thought the ending was rather abrupt—not totally unusual since, well, the memoir is a work in progress I'd say—but I did like the pictures. Actually, no, the pictures were a nice touch, but what I actually liked was the little description on each of them.

I'd describe the book as a pretty decent read, I got used to Romesh's way of going on a tangent (the warning helped), and it is definitely a must for any of Romesh Ranganathan's fans.

I've enjoyed watching The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan on BBC so I was excited to read this book. It didn't leave me cold as I didn't know much about his history other than “he's done some comedy”. This book is not made out of jokes and funny stories, but stories about life, told in his signature style: wry, sarcastic and a little bit self-loathing. Something many of us can very much relate to. At least I can. I don't know about you.

The mystique is obliterated. I was disappointed by his shallow, regurgitating defence at the end of chapter nine; punching down subverts nothing. I am however heavily into self-deprecation and anecdotes of social inoperativeness (plus laid-back veganism) so this book had the highest laugh rate out of any comic memoir I've read so far. That's excluding when he's slagging off his loved ones as part of his routine and for the most part excluding his recounting a succession of humiliations contained within a single ongoing lifetime.