The vagaries of the reading life are a funny thing. Sometimes you’ll blow a big wad of cash for a hardback and the thing will suck raw eggs. Sometimes you pay a buck or less at some Library book sale or garage sale and discover an absolute treasure that stays with you for the rest of your days(My favorite example is The Collected Poems of Philip Levine, a just a criminal inversion of cost vs. worth-which I paid a buck for over 15 years ago and have read with great joy over and over again). A variance on this is the books you don’t even pay for, that you just pick up and leaf through at a store.
All my friends are Dead is an example of this. I stumbled across this while I was weighing the relative merits of some heavier tomes on the display table at my local B&N.
The cover shows some dopey cartoon dinosaur along with the title. I thought maybe it was some charming kiddie tale of some resurrected dinosaur coming back to life in the 21st century and being all alienated and mopey and suffused with ennui because all his dino posse from the before times have been dead and morphed into fossil fuel these many years.
But that’s not the deal here or the whole deal. It does feature a dinosaur trying to grok the message of death as a comet hurtles towards him. But it also features many other funny and forlorn characters wrestling with that biggest of all philosophical stumbling blocks.
There is some beatnik looking oldster who is lamenting his passing days, there is a tree talking about his friends all being end tables and there is a tube sock fiercely missing his only friend. Funny shit. I stood and read the whole book, not long, but I stayed to the end. The only happy person in the whole book? The Grim Reaper himself, whose caption read “Man, this job makes me feel alive!”. Boy, I laughed at that one.
So, laughter, real smiles. A cute book and a little poignant too. Is there anything more noble, more foolishly brave and human, than laughing in the face of death? It’s a sad fact of my reading life that this little cartoon book had more to say, and said it with more grace and panache than many huge tomes I’ve picked up over the years. The vagaries of the reading life…