Book Review: How I Paid For College
Book #77
“I put on my new glasses to heighten the effect. The glasses have a sort of pinkish tint to them that bathes everything I see in a rosy glow, and I’m pleased with myself for buying something that doesn’t necessarily make me look good to the world (they are a little faggy, I guess) but which makes the world look good to me instead.” — Marc Acito, How I Paid For College
Let me say this from the get-go: if Philippa hadn’t handed me this book, I wouldn’t have ever picked it up; if she hadn’t then hovered to make sure I read the first couple of pages, it would have gone straight back on the shelf. But she did, and I read two pages and was laughing out loud in the middle of Waterstone’s. The cover, although attractive, wouldn’t appeal to me as a reader, and the title certainly wouldn’t. In fact, the title, and the subtitle “A tale of sex, theft, friendship and musical theatre” are the first things I’d change if I were the publisher. I don’t know what I would’ve picked instead, but I really don’t think it did the book any favours.
But when I started reading it, as I said, I was pleasantly surprised. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, which I don’t find often. When people say “this made me laugh”, they actually mean they found it amusing and smiled, or chuckled for a second. What I mean is I laughed out loud, in the bookstore, on the train, in the park, in my apartment. I tried to suppress myself in public but in private I was gleeful.
It’s well written, funny, and more than a little outrageous. Some of it is far-fetched (you probably would not enlist your friends to help you drug your stepmother and take naked pictures with her as blackmail, for instance), but the relationships between Edward and his friends was a good one, and even the scenes that feel improbable in real life, have a progression in the book that make it believable.
In the end, the only thing I wanted to strike out completely was the final chapter — not because it had anything outrageous in it but because it was entirely unnecessary, as it was there simply to tie up loose ends that didn’t need to be tied up. And that’s exactly what it felt like. In fact, if I tore out those pages and handed someone the book, I bet they would think the penultimate chapter is the final one.
It’s a light-hearted book, filled with sexual conquests and exploration, unlikely friendships and modern life, and it will be a book I revisit when I want a good laugh.
