Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III is hands-down the most fun I’ve had reading this year. With sharp humor and heartfelt insight, Madison takes us on a nostalgic ride through the pop culture moments that shaped him—and so many of us—growing up in the ’90s and 2000s.

From learning about sex via Buffy the Vampire Slayer to mourning Jennifer Hudson’s American Idol loss like it was a national tragedy, Madison’s essays are equal parts hilarious and relatable. His mix of memoir and pop culture criticism is spot-on, making you laugh out loud while sneaking in reflections on identity, race, and growing up as a Black gay man.

If you’ve ever loved something so much it shaped who you are, this book will hit home. It’s a must-read for anyone who lives for a good pop culture deep dive—or just needs a good laugh.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

As a millennial, so many stories brought me back to my childhood and the shows that so many of us watched. Each essay starts with a pop culture quote and then tying the stories to a social media/pop culture moment. It is an entertaining fast read!

Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III is a cotton candy read. Light, devoured quickly, and done. These personal essays are mostly funny but not that deeply personal. Madison is a talented writer but these essays don't go deep. Entertaining enough though. Thanks to #RandomHouse and #netgalley for the opportunity to preview this book.

Loved this collection of pop culture essays - I was entertained and brought back to an enjoyable time in my history. Very talented essays to get through at your own pace. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Ira got us through the first trump administration, and it looks like he’s gonna get us through the second!!! There is no better voice on pop culture today. If you love his substack and his podcast free order this book now!

Huge fan of Ira and a regular listener of his podcast Keep It!, so I was estatic to receive an ARC for this one (thanks publisher)!

I think I loved the idea more than the execution. While reading about pop culture from the last few decades was nostalgic and getting tidbits of Madison's own life interesting, I found the essays themselves to be repetitive and long winded. While they each truly touch on great moments in time, I feel like we could've found the point quicker and landed a more impactful ending. because after a few of these, I found myself questioning how we started in one place and ended somewhere completely.

Still an interesting interpretation with it's memoir and pop culture anthology mix that would've done better with a second editor.

Thanks for this ARC NetGalley! I was excited to dive into this - especially after seeing chuck klosterman referenced so early on. But this turned out to be just…fine. It was a Klosterman rip off of sorts with occasional peeks into Ira’s lived experiences. But so many of those experiences were all of ours so it felt almost trite. The writing was fun though!

OK but this cover? I was immediately drawn to it. Even on my paperwhite (so in black & white), it's gorgeous.

The essays themselves were hilarious. And I loved how well Ira combined pop culture with his own timeline of growth. We all have songs or celebs that even the mention of them, can bring you right back to when it was first popular. I'm on the tail end of the millennial cohort, so sadly a fair amount of references went right over my head (I forced my parents to listen to Top 40's BS and watch currently airing shows & movies since the day I left the womb). That's not Ira's fault though, so I can't knock him on that. And his perspective on the things I <i>did</i> recognize certainly made up for the things I didn't. I wasn't at all surprised to hear of how many of the things we look back on with nostalgia were actually racist and/or homophobic; I <i>was</i> surprised to learn exactly what some of those things were. As a little white girl in a little white town, it had gone right over my head then. Thanks to these essays, I learned some of it was still going over my head until this collection. The history and context of things is important, and Ira sheds light on that. Another way he does that is by spilling some tea, which I'm always here for too ;)

The essays felt very repetitive, both across the collection and within themselves individually. I was given the chance to read early thanks to NetGalley, Ira Madison III and Random house (thank you bunches!) so by the time final edits are made this may not be the case, but there were entire paragraphs rephrased and then repeated later on - sometimes even in later essays. If it was done by choice, to reference previous mentions, it doesn't come off that way at all. Had these not been so funny <i>and</i> this not been an ARC, I would have DNF'd at about 40%.

Because my issues with this book will hopefully be corrected with further editing (I was DMing w/ Ira and he said the galley version has since been edited a few times), I don't feel like my review is a very fair one to the book as a whole. For that reason, I'm only posting my review to NetGalley, not publicly.

as a long time follower of ira and his podcast, i knew i needed to check this book out. it was hilarious and nostalgic. each footnote had me cracking up. i feel like sometimes with books like these, they have some chapters that feel like inside jokes that i missed out on, but ira even made these parts feel more inclusive. a great book for millennials!

While I was excited to dive into this, the experience left me a bit underwhelmed. The writing felt like it could've come from anyone, missing that unique spark I was hoping for. Sure, the use of pop culture criticism gave it some grounding, but overall, the text felt bland and repetitive at times, like we'd already covered the ground we were revisiting. The voice came through in the occasional parenthetical or footnote, but I kept wishing for more of that personality throughout. I could see this working better as an audiobook, where the narration might bring more life to the words. There were moments of brilliance in each essay, things I could connect with, but in the end, it just didn’t live up to my expectations. Still, I think it might resonate more with others—it just wasn’t quite for me.

Continuing with my trend of not rating memoirs I didn't fully connect to... but please don't think that I didn't enjoy this.

The biggest issue I had was this felt like anyone could have written it? Sure, weaving in bits of pop culture criticism as a scaffolding to talk about your life did sort of ground it in why I was interested in this from Ira, but at the end of the day the actual text felt rather bland. The occasional parenthetical expression or the occasional footnote was really where the text felt that it had a voice and a point of few that I really found myself wanting from the rest of what I was reading. It certainly didn't help that at times the text felt repetitive. Not in a way that Ira was calling back to something, but almost as though the essay had already told us this and was acting as though this was new information never before shared. It was jarring in a way that often took me out of what I was reading.

It could be that this might pop more should Ira read the audiobook version, or maybe any narrator would be capable of finding the life within these words. As it stood the life described often felt like I wasn't being let in. The text being as lifeless as it read was in some ways a method to keep the reader from feeling as though they were really being let into the life of Ira Madison III; by being as impersonal as it was it could have been really easy to set this aside and not return to it.

It's not so much that this is bad. Mostly it didn't life up to expectations, but I did get something out of it. In each essay there is a moment of brilliance, something that I was able to connect to. I am happy that I managed to get all the way through this and I think that this might resonate more with other readers than it did for me. As someone that was really excited to get into this ultimately I left feeling a little let down moreso than I would like from this sort of storytelling.

As a long-time Keep It listener, I was thrilled to get an advanced copy of Pure Innocent Fun. It weaves Ira's life with pop culture in creative and relatable ways. The book, just like everything Ira touches, is a thought-provoking, endlessly entertaining ride.

A collection of sixteen essays by this critic, TV writer and podcast host (I did not know his name or podcast but may have come across him before) about pop culture and his own life. His personal bibles are/were “Entertainment Weekly” (I am never, ever getting over the loss of the print version of that great magazine, which I loved more than nearly everyone related to me) and Chuck Klosterman’s wonderful book SEX, DRUGS AND COCOA PUFFS so we definitely share the same heartbeat. I love him already.

Madison, who was born in the late 80s and is, therefore, younger than me, but could look on me as a wise, fun older sister type covers things like Newports, “Martin,” Coldplay, Tom Cruise (gag), Power Rangers, “Survivor,” “Passions,” Whoopi Goldberg and going to an all-boys, Jesuit high school, among other things. Oh, and he was never, ever cast in any role in any high school play. He’s still carrying a fair amount of bitterness about this and the longevity of this grudge? I AM HERE FOR THAT.

Reading this made for a fun couple of hours. Thanks, Ira!

I read this in one night! That shows you how much I loved it. I just really loved reading his take on major cultural events and how they shaped his life. Fans of Ira will not be disappointed with these essays!

I adored this lively collection of pop culture criticism. I have enjoyed the author’s podcasts and presence on Twitter, and this really captures his voice well. He is smart as well as clearly an enthusiastic fan of many of the subjects he writes about, a winning combination for me. I particularly enjoyed the essays that touched on fathers on TV and his relationship with Oprah.