It’s that time of the semester where many students are looking for an escape from the piles of assigned reading. Student Body Shots, by Steve Hofstetter, could be just what you’re looking for.

This book provides an amusing, and very accurate look at college life. The 99 pages contain chapters full of brief observations about all the strange things that happen on a college campus.

Hofstetter’s book evolved from a column that he would write and e-mail to friends that just kept getting bigger and bigger.

“I started writing observation humor in January 2000-just as an e-mail to a few friends. Pretty soon, it turned into an e-mail column, then a web column, then a syndicated web column,” he said. “After collegehumor.com picked it up, I was suddenly writing for an audience of several thousand. The book developed out of what I was writing for them.”

Hofstetter begins by poking fun at the process of choosing a school and then goes right to the very first college experience for resident students – move-in day. He uses his humorous tone to talk of the importance of who gets to the room first and unpacking. He claims in his book that guys should wait to do because “the easiest way to meet girls is to go up and down the hall offering to put things on the top shelf.”

Just about every student should be able to identify with parts of Hofstetter’s book, especially those who live on campus.

Hofstetter manages to find humor in just about everything, including phone service.

In one chapter he writes: “Everyone knows that when they go home for the summer, they try dialing 9 to get an outside line. But the worst are the people who go to schools with seven-digit access codes. There’s got to be some old woman out there that has my access code as her phone number, wondering who the hell keeps calling her at 2:00 a.m. trying to get some pizza.” Admit it, some of you are guilty of this.

The response to his book has been generally positive, according to Hofstetter. Some critics, however, consider the book to be a negative influence and have apparently missed the humor behind it.

“There have been a few people here and there who have misunderstood its purpose. They think I’m trying to be a bad influence on people,” Hofstetter said. “If they actually read through the whole thing, they’d realize that the book is a funny look at what we are all guilty of.”

Student Body Shots is a quick and easy read that every college student can appreciate. If you read it and don’t laugh at any part of it, you might want to check your pulse. And, if you do enjoy this book, make sure to keep your eye open for Student Body Shots: Another Round, which is scheduled to be released in August.