Snag House Of Cards: The True Story Of How A 26-Year-Old Fundamentalist Virgin Learned About Life, Love, And Sex By Writing Greeting Cards Generated By David Ellis Dickerson Format Kindle

off, the blurbs on the book liken David Ellis Dickerson to David Sedaris, David Sedaris is laugh until you cry and snort funny, David Ellis Dickerson is funny, but not David Sedaris funny, Dickerson is funny in a cynical, self effacing sort of way,

I won this book off of goodreads first reads, It looked interesting. It looked funny. It is interesting Who knew Hallmark was such a horrible place to work and it has it's funny parts, but when you read these parts, you mostly just cringe for Dickerson in his inability to socialize with the nongeek crowd.
He seems to constantly be at the low point of his life, You read on expecting it to get better, and then, it doesn't, He deals with all of this in some unusual ways hiring a prostitute, turning into a peeping tom and in some more 'normal' ways seeing a shrink, exercising, I was somewhat surprised so much of the book dealt with theology and Jesus though he is a guy who went from Fundamentalist, to Catholic, to Atheist.


If I had to sum it up I'd say it's kind of an Office Space take on the Hallmark Company, It's almost painful to read about his naivety amp virginity!, He's a selfprocalimed geek and he doesn't shy away from telling you anything, I learned a lot about Hallmark and card making in general there's much behind it all I'd never thought of, I've been to Kansas City, the Plaza area, Nelson Atkins Museum, and he does it all justice,

Overall, it was a really nice change to read a memoir that had nothing to do with drug abuse, molestation, and/or alcoholism, I liked this book a lot even though, at its core, it is hollow, It is funny and witty, it follows the adventures of an altogether likeable buffoon, but it lacks real insight, and while it alludes to insight as being a thing that happened, it never really shares it with us, even as as allusion of what is to come.
It's a shame because it has the opportunity, but it fails to understand, fully, what was happening and what has happened as a result,

It's frustrating, to see, for instance, a massive, lifechanging event, in which the author acts cruelly to a kind human being and fails to make note of any of a half dozen HUGELY IMPORTANT flags regarding himself, the other person, and the relationship that they inhabit, that kept flying high, drawing attention to themselves as problems, never to be addressed.
That the author also complains of passive aggressive bullshit from his coworkers would have been a marvelous piece of irony regarding the problems that people have in navigating the emotions of others while pursuing their own egocentric desires, but Dickerson misses it entirely.


These kinds of missed opportunities are rife, We get his thoughts at the time, but there is almost no real reflection from the person who is writing them, even though he makes notes about the fact that time has passed, he has insight from the future, it is just left behind.
What is left instead is funny and cute, an interesting perspective into a brilliant, but almost completely dysfunctional mind desperately trying to be more and to be better, I just wish that the book was both, I laughed, I cried, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, Dave has been hired for his creativity at Hallmark, It is is first real job after college, He learns the hard way that his coworkers and supervisors want him to be creative only on paper, While he is navigating the often backstabbing corporate world, he is also addressing issues in his "perfect" relationship with his fiance,

This book is full of hysterical greeting card sentiments and moments of painful selfawareness, It's well written and compels the reader to keep flipping pages,

On the religious aspect no one wants to hear anyone expound their religious views, But that is Not what the author is doing here, Part of what molded Dave into the person he was at the onset of this story is his fundamentalist upbringing which is why he was a virgin at the age ofand got engaged to the first person he ever dated.
Once he finds himself alone and friendless in a new city he tries to rely on his religion, As the book progresses, he talks less and less about religion because his views just aren't working for him anymore, By the end of the book he is mild spoiler stop reading if you don't want to know where he ends up in the religion dept

an atheist, He's still a sweet guy, just doesn't believe that praying will solve your problems he's more deeper than that but there is only so much to say in a book review.
Sometimes a book looks really, really interesting, and it turns out that the story being told is ultimately not one that should be presented in the form it is.
House of Cards is one of those books,

I won this from a Goodreads First Reads contest, and I thought the premise was interesting enough, That Dickerson is an NPR contributor certainly helped matters, Unfortunately, this book more made me hope I don't ever sound like him, and really brought the entire experience down, A significant portion of the book is the author telling us how significantly intelligent he is, how misunderstood he is, and how great he is, The flaws he presents are not necessarily flaws in himself, but flaws of the people around him in that they just don't get it, We all feel misunderstood from time to time, and we all have moments of arrogance, Most of us realize if/when we're wrong, though, and most of us don't publish it in a book,

The book is not completely bad there's a lot of fun details about working at a greeting card company even if our narrator hasn't proven himself to be totally reliable, and his story, while presented poorly, was still interesting enough to keep going with.
The problem is getting past the ego that the author has presented here, It really took me out of things and wasn't really a great experience overall, I thought this might be an interesting book about what it is like to write greeting cards for a living, While there is a bit of that here working for Hallmark in the mid's was both more prosaic and more weird than you'd expect, mostly this is just about Dave.


And Dave's problems, He's a relapsed evangelical Christian, He's been engaged to his girlfriend for six years, and they remain faithful even though for three of those years she's been away working on her PhD and they see each other once or twice per year.
He's an overeducated overthinking geek with an MFA degree who is struggling financially, He struggles with understanding and applying the social graces reading between the lines of his own autobiographical writing, he really creeps a lot of people out at Hallmark, but doesn't know or know why when he does find out.


And quite frankly, judging from the stories he tells on himself, he is creepy, He describes an episode of voyeurism, walking across a lawn to peer into a house like a common peeping tom.
He wonders through a department story perfume section staring at women's breasts, He prowls the halls of Hallmark looking for empty conference rooms, sleeping under a conference room table, then bursting out as a meeting is about to begin, He hires an "escort" with a wordy explanation to his fiance and her tentative approval to provide sexual favors his fiance refuses to provide, His career goal when he realizes that Hallmark is not it is to return to college for his PhD, and one of his major motivators as ayearold is to celebrate his newfound sexual liberation with willing and as neartonakedaspossible coeds at Florida State University chosen over two other universities because of the nearnesstonakedness factor.


He attributes this career and life change to his freedom from years of fundamentalist guilt over sex, I attribute it to his creepiness, Dave has serious issues. I have two daughters agedand, and I would not want him near them, and frankly I think they would instinctively and wisely steer well clear of him if he were at their school.


OK, so why would anyone read House of Cards Well, despite or perhaps because of his issues Dave is a smart and funny writer, and tells a good story.
The insight when he gives it of working at Hallmark is interesting,

In fact, I wonder if the story is too good sometimes, He tells us that before going to work for Hallmark he had a story idea and outline of a novel about, . . working at a greeting card company, When he tells us this, along with the prefatory note that the character names are changed and some are composites and some events have been compressed or modified, I wonder how much of his memoir is true, and how much of is a "nonfictionalized" version of his novel.
Not exactly what I expected, which was irreverent, honest, and laughoutloud funny, Which isn't to say that it wasn't all of these things, because it was just not to the degree that I had expected, I wanted to hear about the greeting card, life, and love part not so much the fundamentalist virginsex part, and I didn't like what he had to say about Christianity.
So not that this is a horrible book, just that it wasn't my kind of book,

House of Cards from Penguin via Goodreads, I met the author of this book, and as he says, he'sfunnier in person, It's not that the book isn't funny it is it's just unlike the real Dave, book Dave doesn't come across as someone I'd necessarily like to be friends with.
The book reminds me most of BORN ON A BLUE DAY, a memoir of a highly verbal autistic man with synesthesia and numerous compulsions, including the compulsion to memorize things.
Book Dave has scaryhigh levels of sexual repression, zero social skills, and a catalog of obsessive tics, such as the need to pace and/or lie on the floor before composing anything.


This is more a book about Dave than it is about life at Hallmark, though, there is a lot of that, Dave paints interesting portraits of the people he works with, and of his daily life, although there's more in what wasn't said than what was said, For example, his boss is furious with him because he talks too much, and because he's wandering too much, and Dave has no idea why, Book Dave presents it as a huge mystery, why were they all so passiveaggressive In my experience, when someone says soandso did something "for no reason" it really means "they did it and I don't know why," or "I know why but I'm hiding it" ie.
"my boss fired me for no reason" means I didn't know you had to show up every single day, sober, "My girlfriend was mad at me just for calling her to say I love you" for the twentieth time, drunk, at three in the morning, Book Dave comes across like the point of view voice from a Jonathan Coltoun song, They want so hard to be liked, but don't get that lurking and staring at people or kidnapping them and bringing them to Skull Crusher mountain is not the way to win friends.
RealDave didn't seem like that, but BookDave sounds like one creepy guy, BookDave also thinks about boobies far more than is really healthy, Also: never masturbate in the office, Just don't. Mmmkay

Book Dave figures out that people don't like it when you inform them of facts against their will, I had pity for him here, I've had people mock me for using "big words" and I eventually came to the same conclusion that Book Dave does: life is too short to hang out with stupid people.
Book Dave eventually migrates back to academia, the true home of brilliant eccentrics, I know a little of the story from then on from the Real Dave, whom I met, and I think there's another memoir either published or in the works.


Is it funny It depends on your tolerance for pain, Do you like supernerdy inside jokes Do you like seeing crippled kids kicked down stairs If you answered yes to either one, this should be hilarious, It's funny, but it tries for a "this is how weird these people were" kind of tone, and it fails, because I strongly suspect that the folks at Hallmark were completely normal if a little dull.
I don't like to laugh at other people's pain, I felt really sorry for him, crippled emotionally by a backwards religion, also hindered by a high IQ and very low social skills, but he went on so much about boobies that exact word and how much he wanted to have sex with every woman he saw his plan was to hang out with them until he "wore them down" that it negated my pity.
I could have done without some of the sexual details too those sort of squicked me out,

The feel of this book was like the clicheed script of the west Texas hick bumbling about in New York or some other equally exotic and foreign culture making lots of silly mistakes that we, the viewer, would know enough to avoid.
Except, I don't think that Dave is selfaware enough to realize that's how it comes across, because he left out the important details, "My boss was mad for no reason" or "she didn't want to go out with me" with utter bafflement, To me, it felt like if you were a neurotypical person, the reason would have probably been blindingly obvious, but book Dave never tells us why, because he himself doesn't know.
That he doesn't even know is the saddest part of all, But maybe you'll find it funny, And if nothing else, the poems are cute,

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