I love it when the right book comes along at the right time. Sitting here in Kuala Lumpur with my visa nearly expired, waiting for the Taiwanese consulate to open so I can get my work visa done and move on, peppered with lockdowns and other pandemic induced stress, I needed to laugh. This book helped me do that.

Bukowski doesn’t appeal to everyone, but as Kurt Vonnegut advised: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” Reading Ham on Rye right now honestly felt like Bukowski was writing for me. That’s a nice illusion to have.

I don’t know what it is about Bukowski’s work that makes it so funny. Others have described it as sad, and certainly some of it is. The guy had a very troubled childhood, which you learn about in this autobiographical novel, and I do think many times he bleeds his pain onto the page. Maybe its his craggy face, wry grin, and voice raspy from cigarette smoke that I picture when reading his work. Perhaps that vision sits in the back of my mind, and I can hear him speaking, or imagine what it would be like if he was there reading the book aloud to me. For sure it’s also the gallows humor in some of the things he has to say; humor and tragedy are after all flip sides of the same coin.

Whatever it is, this damned book made me laugh, and I think it’s often easy to forget how much that means.