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Friends Like These | 
 enlarge | Author: Danny Wallace
Publisher: Ebury Press
Category: Book
Buy Used: $12.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 590122
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0091896762
EAN: 9780091896768
ASIN: 0091896762
Publication Date: July 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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| Customer Reviews:
A Lot More Normal a Challenge for Danny Than His Previous Books November 4, 2008
If there were more authors who wrote books like these which Danny Wallace writes, the world would be a much better and funnier place. With Friends Like These, Danny takes on the quest of something a little bit more normal than his previous novels. Such as where he along with his flatmate and fellow leading writer in this genre Dave Gorman set out to find and meet 54 other people with the exact same name as Dave Gorman (Are You Dave Gorman?). Join Me!, the story of how Danny started his own cult by accident with a simple experiment of placing an advertisement in a newspaper asking for people to join him by sending a photo and seeing what happened). Yes Man where Danny takes a vow to say yes to any request for the rest of the year no matter what is asked of him. Plus his contribution to Quick Reads (short stories sold at train stations and other places to encourage people to read books rather than just magazines, graphic novels, newspapers and the like) which was called Danny Wallace and the Centre of the Universe where Danny travels to and explores the Idaho town of Wallace, which claims to be the centre of the universe.
So what adventure is Friends Like These about? Well Danny is about to turn 30, an age where he knows society will now expect him to be a man. Although happily married and everything, his house amongst other things now contains display cushions (not for sitting on) and he is just not ready to leave behind his life of playing online computer games against twelve year olds and drinking with his mates down the pub. But those mates are moving away and when his parents are clearing out their clutter and send him a box of stuff from his childhood he wonders what his childhood friends are doing now. Have they embraced display cushions and turning 30 are they like him, not ready to move on just yet? When a friend he barely knows invites him to his 30th where that friend has remained in contact with his friends from school to today, Danny realises his parents constant moving him around the world for his father's career and losing touch with friends at each stage, means he has missed out on something. Danny decides he will track down his first 12 great friends and update an old address box he found in the box his parents posted him.
Danny adventure will take him back to his childhood haunts of Scotland and Berlin, plus being Danny was friends with a Japanese exchange student, and Fijian boy he knows he will have to travel as well. He knows what happened with is ex girlfriend Hane when he undertook his in her words "stupid boy games". He is currently supposed to be fixing up his house and has a builder who seems to be taking advantage of his laid back nature. Will his wife Lizzie understand and support his quest to track down and hang out with his childhood friends one last time before he turns 30?
This book has a lot less travelling than Danny's previous ones so in turn has a bit less humour than those adventures. But there's still some great stuff here such as getting trapped in a Japanese toilet, being told his Ninja will be with him in a minute to start his training when thought he'd walked into a restaurant. Trying to blow a fly around him while he queues in a massive line while in Australia and realising the guy in front thinks he's blowing on his neck. It's more that when you read these travel chapters that you remember just how funny his past books were which were mainly encounters with locals. This is still a very good book, it's just that the bar was set so very high with the quality of his other novels, if you're looking to experience this great author for the first time I'd grab one of his former full length masterpiece adventures first then come back to this one!
Same situation with the fellow leader in this genre Dave Gorman's latest book America Unchained: A Freewheeling Roadtrip in Search of Non-corporate USA.
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