Everything Old is New New Again

Since yesterday I reached the end of a day in my London trip recap, I figured tonight's blog would be a good time to pause and throw in some non-vacation content for a day just to mix things up. Well, mostly non-vacation, anyway. As I've noted, the flight to London is a long one, affording you plenty of time to catch up on your reading. I read two books on the way to vacation and back, along with a handful of Sherlock Holmes stories (which seemed an appropriate selection for the occasion).

The first of the books was The New New Rules by Bill Maher, a book lovingly subtitled: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass. I think I was hoping that there would be more significant new material here, that the "New New Rules" title was simply a way of branding the book for fans of his HBO show, Real Time, fan who wanted "even more from the mind of Bill Maher." But no, the book is a actually a collection of material he's performed at the end of Real Time over the last few years. There are a handful of short bits that are new here, reportedly cut for time from the show itself, but really it's only the introduction that represents wholly new material.

So on that level, the book was a bit of a disappointment. I don't maintain an HBO subscription just for Bill Maher, but I watch his show every week while I do subscribe to the channel for some other reason (Game of Thrones, True Blood, The Newsroom, what-have-you), so I remember a lot of this material from the show itself.

But on the other hand, it's material that I am entertained by and am to a very large extent in agreement with. I watch Bill Maher because he is very skilled in calling a political spade a spade, and doing so in a truly funny way. This book includes several of the longer monologues he performed that made me practically want to stand up and cheer when I first heard them on the show, and the content is just as true, relevant, and funny today.

The bottom line is this: I do wish this had been a truly new book. But even as a "best of" collection, it's a solid read. I grade it a B.