Daniel O'Brien's Newsletter: August '23!

Hello!  This is the official substack of me, Daniel O'Brien, four-time Emmy-winning Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents and its adaptation Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, Head Writer for the Cracked De-textbook and editor and contributing author for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (a New York Times Bestseller), co-host of the popular nothing podcast Quick Question with Soren and Daniel and sole host of the less popular podcast Dead Presidents. I co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Cracked After Hours, which is easily the most popular thing I've ever done, but that's in the past. This is the sixth dump(?) of my substack, a thing you signed up for on purpose. 

Once a month I will send an email with: 

-Three-to-five book recommendations;

-Updates on whatever I'm working on*, if applicable;

-That's really it! 

The "whatever I'm working on" section continues to be "a large pile of nothing" as my union-- the WGA-- is still on strike until the studios decide to give us a fair deal, a thing they can do literally whenever they want.

Maybe it'll be over soon. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice if they gave us a contract that compensates writers and actors fairly while also protecting the future of our industries? (Something-- once more-- they could do tomorrow if they felt like it.) I think that would be nice, Any friggin' way, on to da books.

3 BOOKS I RANDOMLY PICKED UP AT A STORE OR AIRPORT BASED ON NOTHING

Boy, wandering into a bookstore with no plan sure can be dangerous. I finished a book earlier than anticipated and needed a new one for a recent trip and I absolutely had no idea what I wanted. There was nothing sitting in my recommendations-from-friends list and as far as I knew none of my favorite authors put out anything new, so I found myself in the thrilling but daunting position of entering a bookstore (a NEW ONE I'D NEVER BEEN TO, at that!) without having a single clue of where to begin. Would I end up with a dense, history book brought on vacation just to appear smart, knowing I would probably never actually read it? Would I bring several copies of Catcher in the Rye, as a bit? Bartending for Dummies, a book I actually brought to the beach one summer to read every day even though it was essentially a list of ingredients? Ingredients who thought I— it’s dear, sweet reader— was a dummy? Everything was on the table.

For vacation-reading, I tend to gravitate towards novels that have "hilarious" or "darkly funny" somewhere in one of the blurbs, but this is always such a fuckin' crapshoot; publishers love to describe books as "hilarious" when most of them are more accurately "funny for a book" or "funnier than you might think." (I've written about this before. This is a hill I will die on.)

My fifty-percent-of-the-time effective strategy of looking for the word "hilarious" plus an intriguing-sounding title/summary brought me to the first book on this list.

Hurricane Girl (Marcy Dermanskyl- Guys, good news: It's actually hilarious. And dark. And weird! A woman (Allison) moves to a beach house shortly after her father dies and a week later her house gets destroyed in a hurricane and-- friends-- it gets worse! Allison is so funny and heartbreaking and lovable and I can say with complete honesty that I had no idea where this book was going but it all made sense at the end, and the journey getting there was a damn blast.

Killing Yourself to Live (Chuck Klosterman)- Genuinely shocking that I've been writing this newsletter for months and this is the first time Klosterman has been mentioned, as he's had a greater impact on my creative life than almost any author in history. Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto is a series of essays, each of which examines mostly disposable pop culture-- reality TV, Saved By the Bell, etc-- through a serious, academic and yes funny lens. You can trace a pretty direct line from me studying close reading in college as an English major to me reading this book to me writing about pop culture through a (debatably) academic lens for Cracked doot com. Thanks to Klosterman, I learned "Oh there's value in talking and thinking and writing way too much about pop culture," and I wouldn't be where I'm at-- real quick, four Emmy's and a NYTimes Bestselling book-- without it.

I know what you're thinking: "Congrats."

Thank you.

I know what ELSE you're thinking: "That's a lot of bullshit about Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs when this entry is supposed to be about Killing Yourself to Live."

You're right!

Even though S,DCP ended up being more important to me as a writer, Killing Yourself to Live was the first Klosterman book I read (I've read them all) and it's purely because the title and cover looked cool to me.

I was in high school, wandering around Barnes and Noble like always and I saw this cover and "killing yourself to live" sounded like a very profound sequence of words to my 16-year-old ears, so I picked it up. After the briefest of skims, I learned that it was a memoir written by a nervous writer with glasses who talks about Star Wars too much and yet still has sex and I thought "Yes this book is for me, this will be a helpful text for me going forward." Klosterman's memoir is a pop-culture-infused tour through all of his past, milestone romantic relationships-- basically he's doing his own, personal version of High Fidelity, something every male writer I have ever met has wanted to do for at least a little while.

Arguably fun fact: the week I picked this book up, my best friend Joe picked up Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs at the same Barnes and Noble and for the same reason (because "the title and cover seemed cool"). We finished our respective books, swapped, and it's possible I still have his copy. 

Everyone in this Room Will Someday be Dead (Emily Austin): Obviously, I read this title and didn’t need to learn anything else before purchasing, but in case you do:
”Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.”

I guess I’m a sucker for books with anxious protagonists who consistently make bad choices.

And that's it! That's the sixth chunk(?) of this thing. Read books, run, volunteer at your local food pantry and call your parents. Bye.