After listening to Carol Burnett's other memoir This Time Together, I was interested in checking this one out.

If this is the first of her books you listen to that cover the years during The Carol Burnett Show, you'll likely like this even more than I did.  She narrates the audio herself and does a fantastic job, and the anecdotes she shares are funny or interesting and often both.  It was a bonus that the excerpts from interviews with Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence and Harvey Korman were actual audio excepts from the interviews conducted by the Television Academy.  

If you've listened to, or read, This Time Together, you'll find some stories (the best ones) overlap; there's enough fresh material in each book to make reading them worthwhile though.

Clearing my slate before the new Kill Your Darlings game and the Flat Book Society's March read begins.

I've read 19 books this month.  Real life in February was a cranky bastard and I just didn't have the luxury of time I usually do.  Still, 19 is a much higher number than I expected and I'm very satisfied, all things considered.

A few stats:

3 Five star reads

4 Four star reads

1 1.5 star read; my lowest rating of the month.

13 books by women

6 books by men

4 audiobooks

7 non-fiction

12 fiction

In an effort to curb my TBR piles this year, I'm only allowing myself to buy half as many books as I read in the previous month.  If I buy less than the month's budget, I can carry over the balance.

February cumulative balance:  19

Books bought in February: 13

Carry over:  6

March budget: 9

Total book budget for March:  15

In truth, I thought I'd have blown this by now; it helps that I accidentally missed the library sale last month.  Something tells me I won't do so well when the next one comes around.

Lucy, oh Lucy was a power to us all. Carol's honesty and lack of pettiness in her business is amazing

As I said in my recent status update, I loved this book.  The Carol Burnett show was such a staple growing up in the 70's; it wasn't until I started reading/listening to this book that I realised how much I missed the kind of comedy she and her cast served up every week.

The book is broken into individual anecdotes that cover her early life and career.  Almost all of them are light, interesting, amusing and often laugh-out-loud hilarious.  A couple towards the end will bring tears as she relates particularly heartbreaking moments, but mostly the tears are from laughing so hard.

I don't know how well this book's promise would translate for anyone who hadn't at least watched a few episodes of The Carol Burnett Show, but for those that have and enjoyed it, this is a welcome trip down memory lane.

Burnett herself reads the book, and she does an amazing job.  At no point did it ever feel like she was 'reading' anything; her delivery is as natural as if she was right there talking to you.

I'm thrilled to find out she released another book last year, In Such Good Company.  All behind the scenes stories from the show.  It's taking all my self control to not check it out and immediately start listening, but I'm going to make myself listen to a book from my shelves first.