Go the F**k to Sleep (Audio)

by Adam Manbach
read Samuel L. Jackson
(Newark: Audible, Inc., 2011)
MP3 Audiobook, 3.3 MB, 6½ Minutes, Satire
ISBN: N/A, US$0.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as the voice of a father struggling to get his child to sleep. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s profane, affectionate, and radically honest verses perfectly capture the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, he opens up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations and laugh at their absurdity. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the F**k to Sleep is a book for parents new, old, and expectant. Due to its explicit language, you probably should not play it for your children. Go the F**k to Sleep is available free for a limited time. Feel free to share the link to this page with tired parents and other people who could use a good swear and a laugh.

My Review: So, what does it say about my reading habits immediately out of two years of grad school for a Masters in English that the first two books that I review are the amazingly so-bad-its-good Moon People: The Age of Aquarius and now Go the F**k to Sleep? This book has been circulating among my group of friends on Facebook for some time now (and yes, we are all parents) and we’ve all been discussing who we would like to read the audiobook. My votes were for either Denis Leary or Lewis Black, but that was before I found out that Samuel L. Jackson would be reading the audio edition, and I can honestly say that there is no one better suited for this book than Mr. Jackson.

Any parent who has tried to get a young child to sleep will love this book (provided your sense of humor is of the variety that doesn’t mind the occasional profanity). The book was released today and for a limited time you can download it for free on Audible.com. My wife and I listened to it and we could not stop laughing. Mansbach perfectly captures a parent’s frustration at trying to get a child to go to sleep, and there have certainly been moments in my fatherly career when I have just wanted to say “GO THE F**K TO SLEEP” but you just can’t do that … can you?

Anyway, I cannot recommend this book enough, especially as read by Samuel L. Jackson. Run, don’t walk over to Audible.com and download for free right now. You will not be disappointed.