Coming home from Anna’s wedding in New York this weekend, I was stuck in the airport for a long time. Between the delay and the flight, it was clear I didn’t have enough reading material. So I was forced to go shopping in the Newark Airport terminal B books & news store.

I made a really bad choice.

The choice was so bad, I actually couldn’t finish the book. If I hadn’t thrown away the reciept, I would have returned the book before I even left the airport. That’ll teach me.

I bought Ellen Degeneres’s new book, The Funny Thing Is.

Now, I like Ellen. I think she’s funny live. I had high hopes for this book.

And normally, I believe in the idea of writing using the same style in which you speak. I like that conversational tone.

Unfortunately, Ellen’s aside-filled banter, while very funny as verbal monologue, just doesn’t work in essay form. It fails so completely that I could only force my way through about 30 pages of the book. I can imagine Ellen telling some of these stories and them being funny, but in writing, they sounded flat, forced, and boring.  After roughly 30 pages, I decided that I’d rather go buy some magazines, or maybe finish re-reading Snow Crash and then just sleep on the plane.

Bottom Line: Just watch her on TV.