"Cartoons of World War 2"

Cartoons of World War 2 (Tony Husband)

I don't have much to say about this book; this is one of the ones you can judge from the cover. I liked it well enough, and I got my fill for the $8 I paid, but the book could stand to be a little bit bigger; it's more of a sampler than a thorough exploration of the material. Fun to flip through if someone leaves it out in the bathroom, but that's about as glowing as my recommendation gets.

Grade: B

"History's Biggest Blunders"

History's Biggest Blunders (Ian Whitelaw)

I had a bad feeling about this book as soon as I started reading it; the first "blunder" is "Humankind domesticates plants and animals," which I think most people would agree has turned out pretty well, civilization wise. I chalked this up to the book not being titled "History's Most Nuanced Looks at Societal Development" and went on to the second "blunder", which is Pharoh not letting Moses and the Jews go free, even as the author mentions multiple times that God explains to Moses that he hardened Pharoah's heart. So is that really a blunder?
Eventually I got the sense that I know more than the author about most of these blunders (Did Alexander the Great really "push too far"? He won the Battle of Hydaspes and his army made him turn back; how is that one of "History's Biggest Blunders"?). This makes it a little tough to recommend, but it is fairly entertaining, and it's divided into two to three page chapters that are the perfect length for a bathroom break. Pick it up if you see it in the bargain bin, otherwise I can't recommend it too highly.

Grade: C-

"Boring Postcards USA"

Boring Postcards USA (Martin Parr)

Unsurprisingly, this is the American version of the one and only Boring Postcards. At first, I thought the author had lost it, as the first couple pages feature postcards that are, if not exactly thrill a minute, at least sport some mildly pleasent greenery; This does not last as the helicopter shots of planned expressways quickly give way to thrilling highway onramps, nondescript car washes, and pictures of Krispy Kreme donut boxes. Boring Postcards USA proceeds to deliver exactly what it promises, with no text except what I assume are captions from the postcards themselves - I certainly don't know of anyone who would describe the soulless recktangle that is Atlanta's new terminal building as "magnificent". The result is bizzarely fascinating; I had to stop myself from just reading the entire book in one sitting as I kept wanting to turn the page and see how Parr would top the images I was currently looking at. Highly recommended.
Grade: A

"Museum of the Weird"

Museum of the Weird (Amelia Gray)

This is a very bizarre short story collection. Gray has a masterful touch when it comes to making the fantastic seem realistic and perfectly normal, which makes for some very interesting (and some quite gross) stories. My three personal favorites are "Dinner" ("When the waiter brought a plate of hair to the table alongside Beth's soup, it was difficult to be polite about it"), a story entitled "A Javelina Story" in which "a clerical error of impressive proportions" results in five wild pigs being dispatched to negotiate with a criminal holding hostages, and "The Suitcase", where a man seals himself in his suitcase and won't come out. This is wonderfully dry, even when his girlfriend is stopped at the airport trying to take him through security and sent to the airport chapel where she starts conversing with the priest ("'The devil out of this luggage,' he said.") A runner up is "Snake Farm", a series of increasingly frantic directions for visiting the SNAKE FARM.
All in all, my only caveat is that some of these stories are really disgusting; just don't read it right before dinner and you're good.

Grade A-

"Dragon Keeper"

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

I tried with this book, I really did. This is another free Kindle e-book, a genre which I have not exactly enjoyed in the past. In this case, I tried to make it 50 pages (this is not easy to measure with the Kindle's "location" system), and after three and a half chapters I just couldn't stand it anymore. Reading this book is like wading through hip-deep mud: It's slow, heavy, turgid, and your mind constantly wanders to something more interesting. The book opens badly, starting with a bunch of dragons cocooning themselves, but they're all weak and dazed and half of them die, and it's so ham-handedly GUYS THIS IS SAD that it becomes silly; I couldn't help but imagine these dragons drunkenly bumbling around to comical music.
Then we switch to focus on a deformed harpy girl and her dad, and nothing happens, and while reading this part I was missing the dragons stumbling around. After a bunch of pages of nothing of interest happening we switch to focus on Alise, our mary sue who LOVES DRAGONS GUYS, and while reading this I was somehow missing the earlier parts about nothing happening to a deformed harpy girl. At this point (I was reading the book in the bathroom) I would have rather just listened to the various gross sounds coming from the next stall than continue reading this book, which I guess is very mean to say, but there you have it.

Grade: F

"STFU Parents"

STFU, Parents: The Jaw-Dropping, Self-Indulgent, and Occasionally Rage-Inducing World of Parent Overshare (Blair Koenig)

Time for me to engage in some hypocrisy! I've given more than one book a hard time for being nothing but the content of a website in book form, and here comes the content of a website in book form I quite enjoyed. In my own defense, there's a considerable bit of original writing in the introductions of each chapter, and the book has a further advantage over the website of not having any pictures (as much as I enjoy the website, it's a real appetite-destroyer). Even better, since the book is organized by theme, you can just skip the gross chapters (which I highly recommend as there's some real gut-churning nastiness contained within), which isn't always possible on the website. Plus, it was only ten bucks, and I'm going to tell myself that's a fair price for a book based on a website I've been enjoying for free for years. Oh, and, uh, the book's very entertaining, too.

Grade: A-

"Bizarre Books"

Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities (Russel Ash & Brian Lake)

At first flipping through this book, I was disappointed that it was mostly titles; that feeling wore off as I realized that 98% of the books in here sound pretty terrible (Proceedings of the Second International Potato Modeling Confrence, anybody?). Most of the book's humor comes from either incredibly boring sounding books (1587, a Year of No Significance), titles that were perfectly normal at the time but are now suggestive (Scouts in Bondage), and the just plain fucked up (Planet of the Knob Heads, of which the authors quote: "In about a week I had recovered from most of the effects of the knob operation"). The last part of the book is both the most juvenile and my favorite, being a list of weird authors names (including W. Anker, Twat Booth and of course Ludwig von Baldass). There's really something here for everything is what I'm saying, and this is a great little bathroom book that's very difficult to put down.

Grade: A

"A Bride's Story, Vol 1"

A Bride's Story, Vol 1 (Kaoru Mori)

A very well drawn, charming manga I couldn't really get into. The setting is interesting and unusual, but this seems to be a a slice-of-life book - in other words, nothing really happens; There's one chapter about making rabbit stew. I mean, it's not bad, and the art is nice to look at, but it's just not my personal taste. (Also, the titular Bride is kind of a mary sue.) There's worse ways to spend some time than reading this, but I wasn't gripped, which makes this hard to recommend.

Grade: B-

"Does A Bear Sh*t in the Woods?"

Does a Bear Sh*t in the Woods?: Answers to Rhetorical Questions (Caroline Taggart)

Perfectly inoffensive little bathroom book that - well, just read the title, really. This book's good for a larf, with Taggart's over-literal interpretation of the questions and informative if misguided answers keeping it moving along. The one thing I wished had been included as the author answering my  my favorite question - what is the sound of one hand clapping? (Ask me next time you see me in person and I'll generate the sound.) That's really it, so prepare yourself for the sound of a grade being assigned...

Grade: C

"You Must Be Skidding!"

You Must Be Skidding! (Tony Davis)

A fun little bathroom book about ridiculous cars, including some I've never seen before - no easy feat given my enjoyment of this particular weird little sub-genre. Davis' dry humor is quite good, but my favorite part is the goofy illustrations, with the absolute stand-out being a sad little kid bundled up in winter gear tooling down the road in a refrigerator with wheels, a windshield, and a trailing power cord. Great stuff.

Grade: A

"Grandpa Won't Wake Up"

Grandpa Won't Wake Up (Simon Hill & Shannon Wheeler)

I don't really have a lot to say about this book except that I really enjoyed it. The bare-bones premise is that Grandpa told his grandkids he'd take them to the zoo, and he'd take them soon, and it's already noon, and Grandpa won't wake up. The writing is very funny, the art is very apt, and the attention to detail is wonderful (I lingered over the list at the back of fake horrible children's books). That's all I have to say.

Grade: A

"Crap Cars"

Crap Cars (Richard Porter)

The Carthage to the Rome that is "The World's Worst Cars". This book differs from that one in that it has only 50 cars (to the 150 included in World's Worst), and the writing is much snottier. These aren't necessarily negative, but this is a really short book, basically 50 snarky paragraphs, and it does feel rather thin. Still, I enjoyed reading it, so I guess I can't be too hard on it.

Grade: C+

"Art of the Mass Effect Universe"

Art of the Mass Effect Universe ("Various")

A very nice, high-quality artbook about, well, you can guess which universe, I'm sure. A little more detail on 1 and 3 would be nice - about 50% of the book is ME2 - but I really liked how you get to see the different concepts for characters that were never used, and the commentary on discarded ideas is spare but illuminating. Maybe not worth $40, but for the $26 I got on Amazon I'm very pleased. That's all I have to say.

Grade: B+

"The World's Worst Aircraft"

The World's Worst Aircraft: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters (Jim Winchester)

At last, the stunning finale to the trilogy! You won't believe what happens to your favorite characters from "The World's Worst Cars" and "The World's Worst Weapons!"
No, I'm lying; It's just another book, which is about (checks title) bad airplanes. I don't know a lot about airplanes, so I was more interested in the parade of unbelievable disasters from the wild and wooly teens and twenties, where putting eight wings and sixteen motors on a houseboat looks comparatively sane. As for the rest of the book, well, it's an interesting bathroom book, and I wasn't expecting or asking for more than that.

Grade: B

"The World's Worst Weapons"

The World's Worst Weapons: From Exploding Guns to Malfuctioning Missles (Martin Dougherty)

Cousin of The World's Worst Cars, here's, well, you can guess from the title, right? I enjoyed this book a good bit - the sheer depth of weapons covered from throwing stars to nuclear howitzers kept it moving nicely. My one complaint is that there are some strange choices in here; Seeing the mighty Stuka included here is a bit strange, but what really takes the cake is the legendary AK-47 being inducted as one of the world's worst weapons. I know that this is just the author's opinion and that you can't subjectively say that it is wrong, but, it's wrong. Other than that, good book.

Grade: B

"The World's Worst Cars"

The World's Worst Cars (Craig Cheetham)

A pocket-sized little book about - well, you can probably guess from the title. 150 cars are inside, each one with a two-page writeup, consisting of a page of text and then a photo of the car with various wise-ass remarks. Since there's 150 cars, some of them aren't as bad as the others; You get weird curiosities like a car with a jet engine or the infamous "Amphicar" mixed in with some good cars that just had horrible build quality. (Luckily, probably the two ugliest vechiles in modern history - Europe's Fiat Multipla and America's Pontiac Aztek - don't escape the author's gaze.)
I found this book to be a enjoyable little larf. If you're a big car fan, you may want to excersize some caution; The author has a lot of English cars I'd never heard of (British Leyland keeps coming in for beatings), and some of the Amazon reviews are rather scathing. Niether one of these really matters to me, which ears this book a solid

Grade: B

"Holy Sh*t!"

Holy Sh*t! The World's Weirdest Comic Books (Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury)

Well, it's pretty much all there in the title - here's a interesting little book collecting some of the world's oddest comic books, running the gamut from Italian porno spider-woman knockoffs to the Archie-styled Hansi ("The girl who loved the swastika"). Each comic includes a full-page cover, a sample frame and a short discription. My only real complaint is that I'd like to see more of some of these; If you want to see more "Trucker Fags in Denial" or "Godzilla vs Barkley", who knows how easy those are to track down. (Also, it would be nice if the book was a little bigger, but then it wouldn't exactly be a bathroom book.) My personal favorite is Genus, specifically the "Special Extra Large Lesbian Unicorn Issue" featured here (the author dryly notes that the extra large "refers to the size of the issue, not the lesbian unicorns").

Grade: B

"Food Rules"

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual  (Michael "Bossy" Pollan)

The idea here is simple: Pollan takes his rules from his previous book (Eat food, mostly plants, not too much) and expands them here by giving you tips on how to follow them. I like his approach - he realizes that you're not going to remember every rule he gives you, so he re-states them various ways - to get you to avoid chemicals, he advises that you don't buy food with a chemical a third grader couldn't pronounce, but then also suggests staying away from the center of a grocery store and getting fresh produce on the one end and diary on the other.
This is actually pretty helpful, but I gave up about a third of the way through when I got to "mostly plants," where he suggests that you treat meat as a "special treat". Fuck off, Pollan - I want a burger! This is where the book goes from helpful advice mode to annoying nutritionist uncle lecturing you at thanksgiving mode. (This is also where you're forbidden to get anything drive-thru - which I know isn't healthy for you, but holy hell, live a little!) Eventually I put the book down because I wanted to just go out and start eating Big Macs for spite; Pollan, in annoying lecture mode, makes you want to do the opposite of what he's saying.

So I dunno - I did get something out of this book, and you may get even more. If you, apparently like the author, have time in between getting home from work and going to sleep to do nothing but cook up a nice big meal, by all means pick this up - unfortunately this doesn't apply to me and, I suspect, most people anymore.

Grade
First Third: B+
Last Part: D+

"[Citation Needed]"

[Citation Needed]: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing (Conor Lastowka & Josh Fruhlinger)

A fun little larf of a book, this is another case of a website being turned into a book done right. The authors pick out 200 examples of goofy Wikipedia writing and add their own mocking jokes at the end. There's not a whole lot to this, but it's always entertaining and makes a great bathroom book (altough I found myself lingering so I could read a few more pages more than once).

Grade: B