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-
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2013
Friday, March 1, 2013
"I Am Better Than Your Kids"
I Am Better Than Your Kids (Maddox)
This is probably the meanest book I've ever read - it's a treasury of children's art getting mercilessly critiqued, and really, if you read that sentence and thought it sounds funny, you can just stop reading here and go out and buy it. For those of you recoiling in horror, let me just say that the book is so mean that it circles around to being hilarious, with my absolute favorite parts being the author highlighting drawings (for example, by making a hideous crayon drawing of a superhero into a mocked-up comic cover for "I will catch you in my web man"). I could not stop laughing while reading this book. Highly recommended.
Grade: A+
This is probably the meanest book I've ever read - it's a treasury of children's art getting mercilessly critiqued, and really, if you read that sentence and thought it sounds funny, you can just stop reading here and go out and buy it. For those of you recoiling in horror, let me just say that the book is so mean that it circles around to being hilarious, with my absolute favorite parts being the author highlighting drawings (for example, by making a hideous crayon drawing of a superhero into a mocked-up comic cover for "I will catch you in my web man"). I could not stop laughing while reading this book. Highly recommended.
Grade: A+
Sunday, April 29, 2012
"Taking On the System"
Taking on the System: Rules for Change in a Digital Era (Kos)
I felt bad finding this in the dollar store. Even Amazon has this marked down to $6. I guess it's because it was published in 2009, and since it was written by one of those tricky Internet guys, the information in it is old news? Either way, I liked this book. It's a bit brief - it doesn't feel like its 290 pages, certainly - but I thought there was a lot of good information in here, and even if it's two years old, it still seems quite valid to me. Given the brevity of the book, I don't know that I'd pay too much for it, but it's a steal at a dollar, and I wouldn't complain for six, either.
$1 price: A-
$6 price: B
I felt bad finding this in the dollar store. Even Amazon has this marked down to $6. I guess it's because it was published in 2009, and since it was written by one of those tricky Internet guys, the information in it is old news? Either way, I liked this book. It's a bit brief - it doesn't feel like its 290 pages, certainly - but I thought there was a lot of good information in here, and even if it's two years old, it still seems quite valid to me. Given the brevity of the book, I don't know that I'd pay too much for it, but it's a steal at a dollar, and I wouldn't complain for six, either.
$1 price: A-
$6 price: B
Monday, January 23, 2012
Starfish
Starfish
Peter Watts
There's an inherent danger in over-recommendation. I think it's half the reason Final Fantasy 7 is so reviled at this point in history, it was over-recommended. The eventual backlash against the game was so overwhelming that it has significantly tainted the reputation of every RPG to come out of Japan, and it's possible that the coming (and don't lie, you know it will come) backlash against the backlash against Final Fantasy 7 may be so immense as to destroy our reality.
Such was I think the byproduct of my knowledge of Starfish before reading it. All I knew was it was AWESOME. And that it was about people surgically and technologically modified to be able to survive at the bottom of the ocean.
Starfish wasn't bad. To be honest, I thought it was pretty good. It just wasn't the most amazing, fantastic book I've ever read. Does that mean I'm now participating in the requisite backlash against all the hype I'd experienced because I'm a smartass on the internet? I hope not, the book was still good.
Sort-of-not-really spoiler below:
Good stuff: Interesting view of the future, still dystopian, but less so than your average Atwood sci-fi book. The sort-of but maybe not really lack of an "antagonist" was probably the most interesting aspect of the book to me, as the not-protagonists/but-not-antagonists-either were more compelling than the "main" characters. Some of the terminology was funny, I particularly liked suffering from Nitrogen Narcosis being referred to as getting "narked."
Stuff I didn't really need: All the psychodrama. I know Evangelion is influential, but I don't think every Sci-Fi genre piece published after that pivotal day in the history of Fiction in which Shinji yelled at his dad needs broken characters doing badass stuff brokenly (see: Xenogears.) To me, characterization needs to be more than "was abused and has brown eyes." It was a bit too distracting in the middle of the book, but I got over it after the story moved on.
Grade: B
Peter Watts
There's an inherent danger in over-recommendation. I think it's half the reason Final Fantasy 7 is so reviled at this point in history, it was over-recommended. The eventual backlash against the game was so overwhelming that it has significantly tainted the reputation of every RPG to come out of Japan, and it's possible that the coming (and don't lie, you know it will come) backlash against the backlash against Final Fantasy 7 may be so immense as to destroy our reality.
Such was I think the byproduct of my knowledge of Starfish before reading it. All I knew was it was AWESOME. And that it was about people surgically and technologically modified to be able to survive at the bottom of the ocean.
Starfish wasn't bad. To be honest, I thought it was pretty good. It just wasn't the most amazing, fantastic book I've ever read. Does that mean I'm now participating in the requisite backlash against all the hype I'd experienced because I'm a smartass on the internet? I hope not, the book was still good.
Sort-of-not-really spoiler below:
Good stuff: Interesting view of the future, still dystopian, but less so than your average Atwood sci-fi book. The sort-of but maybe not really lack of an "antagonist" was probably the most interesting aspect of the book to me, as the not-protagonists/but-not-antagonists-either were more compelling than the "main" characters. Some of the terminology was funny, I particularly liked suffering from Nitrogen Narcosis being referred to as getting "narked."
Stuff I didn't really need: All the psychodrama. I know Evangelion is influential, but I don't think every Sci-Fi genre piece published after that pivotal day in the history of Fiction in which Shinji yelled at his dad needs broken characters doing badass stuff brokenly (see: Xenogears.) To me, characterization needs to be more than "was abused and has brown eyes." It was a bit too distracting in the middle of the book, but I got over it after the story moved on.
Grade: B
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