HPPR Radio Readers Book Club

I was somewhat filled with trepidation when we selected Humor Me! as the theme for the 2025 Spring Read. Perhaps it was a career working with troubled kids and families or maybe I am “just one of those people” but I find my personal humor somewhat dark.

Greetings from Goodwell in the Oklahoma Panhandle! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for the Radio Reader’s Series. Words are important. The words we use reflect how we perceive the world and how we react to it. We can choose whether that perception is positive and accepting or negative, rejecting people and experiences without really giving them much consideration.

In his seminal work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud argues, “We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it’s like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel.

Hello High Plains listeners.This is Stella for HPPR’s radio reader book club.I recently read Allie Brosch’s graphic novel, Hyperbole and a Half which is the fourth book included in our spring read.

Hi there. I’m Jenny Inzerillo, HPPR’s Music Director and host for High Plains Morning. Today, for HPPR Radio Readers Book Club, I’m going to review the fourth book in the Spring Read. The full title is Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by beloved underground blogger Allie Brosh.

Like many of the books in our series on humor, Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half is so specifically temporally located that a less generous person, or even my younger college-aged students, might call it "dated." There is something about the freneticism, vulnerability, and seeming universality of "adulting," to crib a similarly dated phrase, that calls to mind BuzzFeed quizzes, Onion horoscopes, and the early days of YouTube virality.

Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Julie A. Sellers, author of the novel Ann of Sunflower Lane. Welcome to this High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers Book Club BookByte of Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh.

Hello! I’m Tito Aznar for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2025 Spring Read. Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half is a book that thrives on failure: funny and painfully relatable failure. Whether it’s failing at adulthood, failing at self-improvement, or failing at simply understanding why she is the way she is, Brosh embraces her imperfections in a hilarious and deeply honest way.

Sometimes, being an adult just means being a larger version of the tiny little monsters we were when we were children. In Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, the book-length collection of Brosh's popular mid-aughts webcomic and blog, readers encounter the familiar struggles of getting up in the morning, compulsive behaviors, and everyday absurdities.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Club, I’m Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we are talking about What’s so Funny – A Cartoonist’s Memoir by David Sipress. You know, I’d never heard of David Sipress before this book and at first, I had a problem.