Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale

A very smart, engaging and entertaining read. Chris Ayres's charming wit and insightful writing puts him in the same league as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ricky Gervais. He sums up LA and our current culture of consumption in a way few people can. Laugh-out-loud funny all the way through.

It's the perfect description of Los Angeles in the early 00's. Also frequently laugh-out-loud funny, charming, and yet oddly hopeful, Ayres does a wonderful job with this book.

Chris Ayres the LA correspondent for The Times (London) has certainly lived an interesting life in this his second book he details his move to LA and the way he was swept along with the lifestyle and the creative mortgage broker who got him finance for his house. If you buy this book you need to get War Reporting for Cowards as well as they go well together and both are very enjoyable. How many journalists have been sent to LA and Iraq by their employer and then meets his wife via Craiglist while selling a sofa. If you like books and have a sense of humour then get this book.

Amazing book, hilariously funny, and so damn timely. I loved his first book, but really this one just blows my mind - his date at Neverland?!? met his wife on craigslist buying furniture? and the idea of our leisurely society and "yuppy" guilt is so timely.

When journalist Chris Ayres arrives in Los Angeles after his misadventures as a war reporter (see War Reporting for Cowards), he writes that his plan "was to max out on leisure (and) binge on self-gratification, until I could take it no more." He does a pretty good job of that, but ironically seems to enjoy retelling the early years and his escapades (including forking over thousands on Ebay for tickets to a hilarious bizarre Michael Jackson party at Neverland) more than he enjoyed the first had experiences themselves. Ayres was probably the ideal choice of reporter to cover a world as quirky and sometimes downright surreal as L.A. and Hollywood. And the memoir he has produced of his first few years in la-la land will make you laugh out loud while simultaneously wincing in agonized recognition: you realize that you and everyone you know has made at least some of Ayres's idiotic mistakes. Racking up credit card debt on food delivery services, spending so much on a high-definition flat-screen television so that he can't afford to pay his rent, and ultimately buying a house using some of that now-infamous floating-rate mortgage financing.... It seems there is scarcely a single foible that Ayres avoided. He even starts driving a block or two to pick up his morning coffee, instead of walking. But then, as Ayres cheerfully admits, he's a big fan of American culture - particularly the part of it that allows people to understand the risks of their behavior - and then ignore them. He's ruthlessly honest about his own mistakes. The ownership of his new HDTV, for instance, demonstrates to his (male) peers "my stealth in the retail wilderness, my mastery of advanced financing tools; my bravery in the face of certain obsolescence." And as he recounts his own antics, including his plot to meet girls while selling his furniture on Craigslist in order make that pesky rent payment, he's simultaneously chronicling the bigger picture for his London newspaper. He writes about obese bears getting fat on human food, cappuccino cows (cows bred to produce milk that froths better), the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson's pedophilia trial, and Scott Peterson. And the weird weather - wildfires, hurricanes, imported smog in California and suicidal giant squid in the Pacific Ocean. Gradually, Ayres makes the connection between his personal habits - consuming gargantuan amounts of electricity, gasoline and debt - and the slowly emerging economic and environmental woes. That epiphany doesn't always make him happy. "I'm a big fan of bubbles ... they're my idea of a good time," Ayres argues. A bubble is all about short-term thinking and human beings, by definition, are creatures of the extreme short term, he contends. So it takes a while for Ayres to adjust to the new realities. Even after meeting the woman of his dreams, he heads off to Vegas to try and gamble his way toward a downpayment on his house. Needless to say, he loses - but then his agent sells