This is a vacation read — something I wouldn’t normally pick up, but it was sitting there, and I was headed out to the beach to suck down some tropical concoction in the sun. So, why not?

Chelsea Handler has written an account of one-night stands that she has experienced. The cast of characters is interesting, and sometimes bizarre, and the situations range from laugh-out-loud funny to irritatingly off-putting.

I enjoyed it sporadically, as much as I simultaneously found it offensive. I don’t know how much the author has embellished, and how well she’s hidden the identity of some of her subjects, but I’d sure be sorry if I showed up in her book! She’s rather merciless and shallow, a hedonist who wants to have a good time and doesn’t even try to spare the feelings of men who, er, aren’t up to the task. I’m trying to imagine a book written with genders reversed, where a man takes a woman home from a bar, only to reject her in the bedroom because of, say, her breast size. Eeyuck.

It’s also a shame that Handler thinks that hedonism is cool when it extends to being an alcoholic. No, she doesn’t label herself an alcoholic, and maybe she’s not one. Maybe she’s exaggerating things for comedic effect, but if that’s the case, the unintended consequence was to make herself out to be a happy drunk.

That said, if you can accept the author’s total pursuit of her own pleasure (her feeble attempt at the end to portray this as a phase coming to an end doesn’t really ring sincere), the book does have some pleasure to offer the reader as well, with a couple of very funny predicaments and sexual disasters.

If you want a few sexually-charged laughs, you could sure do worse than this book. And it was okay as a vacation read. That’s as far as I can go in recommending My Horizontal Life.