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After a seven week layoff from reading or reviewing books, I was looking to break my fast with the literary equivalent of a French omelette cooked quickly in a greasy diner. No Shakespeare, no epics, no complicated substitutions and no delayed gratification. I wanted to finish something quickly and enjoy its deliciousness. The book I pulled off my reading docket was Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody.

For the youngsters out there, Diablo Cody, aka Brook Busey-Maurio, grabbed attention as author of the weblog Red Secretary in 2005, documenting the trials and tribulations of a surrogate office drone in Belarus. Cody's verbosity and style with a word processor belied a brief career as a stripper in Minneapolis, which became the basis for this memoir, published in 2006.

As a screenwriter, she hit the sweepstakes, winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with Juno in 2008. Never passing up an opportunity to spend time with strippers, even retired ones, journalists fell in love with Cody. At the height of her prestige, she authored the screenplays for Jennifer's Body and Young Adult, created the Showtime series The United States of Tara and made her debut as a director with Paradise, none of which hit the zeitgeist like Juno did. The media moved on to the New Kid in Town.

As a book designed to parachute all of us flyover state squares into the underworld of stripping and peepshows, then safely retrieve us with a happy ending, Candy Girl is A-team caliber through and through. Cody's experience as a blogger and columnist seem like the perfect field training for a mission like this, and if true, her fearlessness and threshold for skeeviness won me over. This is a sharp, funny and hugely entertaining book.

Cody's adventure begins with her leaving her hometown of Chicago to move to Minneapolis for her beau Jonny, a fellow vintage record collector and music lover she meets over the Internet.

Cody finds work as a typist in an ad agency and segues into the unlikely role of stepmother to Jonny's daughter. Faced with the prospect of becoming a real live adult in her mid-twenties, she decides to show up for Amateur Night at one of the city's handful of strip clubs, the Skyway Lounge. It takes her a year to get off the stage.

Shot glass wit on display:

-- I had always imagined all strippers as sinewy, exquisitely painted Jezebels, airbrushed by genetics and smelling of exotic fragrances like Elizabeth Taylor's "Passion". But there in the sallow light of the dressing room, I saw nails nibbled to the quick, prickly hedgehog vulvae, breasts that hung like worn athletic socks, and bodies of all makes and models, from Ford to Fuck'd.

-- The only thing I lacked was a stage name before I could be a genuine wind-up doll. I needed something cheeky, yet alluring. The kind of moniker that oozed molten sex, but satisfied my retro fix. I decided on "Roxanne," since that sounded like the kind of girl who lives in a boardinghouse, drinks Pink Squirrels and fucks old men for gold pocket watches. Easy.

-- There was one inviolate principle that even I came to recognize: Men dig white shoes. A girl invariably made more money when she wore shining white stripper-stilts instead of black. White shoes evoke summertime, innocence, the ruddy-chested ICU nurse bearing post-tonsillectomy marshmellow sundaes, the girl on the pier in seersucker shorts who remained 99.44% pure until college, new roller skates. Good girls wear white. Men respond in kind.

I think I need a cigarette after typing these excerpts, and I don't even smoke. I do not find sex trade workers alluring in the least. Cody compares the strippers she worked with to bank tellers: robotic, clocking in, engaging in dull and repetitive tasks, clocking out. I hardly find this sexy. As for whether strippers are feminists or an affront to feminism, Cody briefly addresses this topic as well. Either can be rationalized depending on the immediate needs of the worker.

What I did find thrilling was Cody's jetpack writing, which in addition to being very funny, involves very little moralizing. She seems well-tailored to zoom through a story like this in blog-sized bites, whereas if she were tackling an epic drama with this sort of Coco Puffs energy, I probably would've given up after fifteen pages. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a stylish, fast paced glimpse into the sort of dirty job that Mike Rowe has never gotten around to studying.