A review by whimsicallymeghan
Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live by from the WTF Podcast by John Oliver, Brendan McDonald, Marc Maron

4.0

This book is a ‘best of’ based off of Marc Maron’s podcast, the WTF Podcast. This was actually a really good and fascinating read. Each chapter had a theme, for example, sexuality, parenting, success, failure, etc. etc. and from there are pulled quotes from the podcast based on that topic. Even though this wasn’t a continued flow of conversation on the topics, everything still fit together really well as if it was a continued conversation and that made for a fast-paced read. It was really interesting to read celebrities’ takes on things like having kids or relationships. Sometimes you think celebrities don’t know what they’re talking about, but this got deep and vulnerable in a lot of different ways. It also felt really inclusive to the fact that they truly got all angles to different topics. For example, on parenting they had opinions on people who wanted children, who didn’t want children, those who adopted, those who used a surrogate; it even dipped into people talking about their own parents and their parenting styles and how you realize as you get older, they had no idea what they were doing. All the conversations were so open and honest, no one held back and it was refreshing and a little affirming to read. This didn’t make this reader want to listen to the podcast because this felt like it curated all the best the podcast has to offer and it got to the point without wading through hours of a podcast. Overall, this was a surprisingly good read that is worth the time. Not all topics will resonate with all readers, but there is definitely something for everyone in this.