I rarely get the opportunity to read an entire book in one sitting. There are only a few that have made the cut as well. Some books seem like they might be read in less than 24 hours, but most of the time I’m snoring before I crack the spine in the middle. Chelsea Handlers ‘My Horizontal Life’ is not one of those snoozers. I went in expecting it to be another Sex and the City book, but Carrie Bradshaw dissects the sex lives of all New Yorkers, not just her own. Handler wrote an entire book about some of the men she’s slept with. Not only was I able to read this in a 10 hour period but it has also made its way among the ranks of ‘books that make me laugh out loud. For real’. My husband was afraid. Handler is a comedian by trade so of course her slapstick humor made the book more entertaining. However, I’m thoroughly convinced that no man would ever find this book as hilarious. The most amusing chapters are about the men who were eerily similar to a few people I’d dated through the years. A good joke can make you laugh, but a good joke you can relate to makes you laugh even harder.

That’s not really why this book is so outrageously good. It starts off with light humor about some people from Handler’s early days. But around the middle of the book you start to see it slipping into something pretty disturbing. I half expected the book to end with her finding the man of her dreams. Instead she finds a coke addict who can’t get it up and she finally realizes where she is in her life, sleeping around at 28 with no real goals in life. That’s where the book stops being funny and starts being a tad too introspective. But I appreciate that part. A book that treats random sex as frivolously as this one starts to needs something dark and anchoring at the end.