cover image Ruminations on College Life

Ruminations on College Life

Aaron Karo. Fireside Books, $10 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-3293-7

""Always remember, college is a joke,"" declares Karo, who chronicled his alcohol-soaked college experience in real time via a popular e-mail newsletter. Now a graduate, he's collected his Ruminations to provide the skinny on the rituals of drinking and to terrify anyone who thinks college is for learning. It will be fairly astonishing for some readers to read that the University of Pennslyvania, an Ivy League school, ""has an obsession with naked men. If you get shut out in Beer Pong, you have to run naked"" or that ""the dry cleaners on campus suck. They're the worst. I wear a pair of khakis, I get some dirt on them, so I take them to the dry cleaners. You know what the guy says to me? 'I don't know if we can get this out.' What do you mean you don't know if you can get this out? It's dirt! What purpose do you serve?"" After a several similar items, readers will be asking themselves the same question about this book-unless fresh from Beer Pong. Yet there's also an odd poignance to looking on as the clock ticks down Karo's seemingly endless free time.