Fuzzy Kitty - aNobii

Books (53)

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- The Screwtape Letters (61)
- By C.S. Lewis
- Reading since Nov 20, 2009
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- I Am America (35)
- (And So Can You!)
- By Stephen Colbert
- Reading since Nov 10, 2009
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- Practical Demonkeeping (34)
- A Comedy of Horrors
- By Moore
- Finished on Nov 19, 2009
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- Armageddon in Retrospect (3)
- By Kurt Vonnegut
- Finished on Nov 10, 2009
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- TEKKONKINKREET (4)
- Black & White
- By Taiyo Matsumoto
- Finished on Nov 2, 2009
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- Me Talk Pretty One Day (91)
- By David Brock, Sedaris, David Sedaris
- Finished on Oct 30, 2009
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- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (19)
- The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
- By Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen
- Finished on Oct 20, 2009
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- My Tank Is Fight! (2)
- By Zack Parsons
- Finished on Oct 1, 2009
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- Yotsuba&!, Volume 5 (2)
- By Kiyohiko Azuma
- Finished on Sep 15, 2009
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- Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon (1)
- By Zack Parsons
- Finished on Sep 6, 2009
  
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Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon

To fill my comparison quota of the day, Internet is akin to a fairy tale road leading through the haunted forest. A traveler can generally march through it along the path to arrive wherever with little more trouble than the occasional conversation with the Big Bad Wolf. Deviate from the path, howeve ... (continue)

To fill my comparison quota of the day, Internet is akin to a fairy tale road leading through the haunted forest. A traveler can generally march through it along the path to arrive wherever with little more trouble than the occasional conversation with the Big Bad Wolf. Deviate from the path, however, and the traveler risks encounters with witches, spider-people, and Youtube commenters.
Zack Parsons, one of my favorite writers from SomethingAwful.com, serves as the tour guide through some of the unusual subcultures found in Internet. He recounts interviews with members of various groups with preferences far different than the norm. From Ron Paul supporters to people possessing the strong desire to be devoured, the cast of characters are wacky, not in the way that your friend describes the events of the party last night after you left, but in the way that a doctor might say it, grim expression and all.
The book reads exactly like one of the better SomethingAwful articles, which was exactly what I had been hoping for. Apparently, I had not thought those hopes through. While scathing comedy is present (and sometimes inconsistant), the book should be taken with advice that high school teachers give concerning Internet research. Assuming the book is simply a series of truthful interviews is a mistake. While the underlying messages presented in many of the chapters are certainly believable, the work is ultimately ficticious. After finishing, I had the same feeling after watching most David Lynch films, trying to work back through to understand what REALLY happened.
So the book is about Internet in non-Internety adventures written an Internety way, a concept that I still can't think about without confusing myself.
In the end, I took off a star because Parsons ruined one of my favorite Groucho Marx quotes. I can never hear it again the same way, you jerk.

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— Nov 2, 2009 | Add your feedback
- The Queue (1)
- By Vladimir Sorokin
- Finished on Aug 30, 2009
  
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The Queue

Gimmicky, but cute.
The entire "story" is written in dialog without character recognition to simulate the experience of being in a Soviet Union queue during the 1980's. As I have no knowledge of the topic, I cannot judge its accuracy. The best I can do is a make a terrible comparison of the w ... (continue)

Gimmicky, but cute.
The entire "story" is written in dialog without character recognition to simulate the experience of being in a Soviet Union queue during the 1980's. As I have no knowledge of the topic, I cannot judge its accuracy. The best I can do is a make a terrible comparison of the worst lineup that Americans have to face: the DMV (narrowly beating out the roller coasters at Six Flags)
Despite being no character recognition, specific voices emerge from the masses, allowing for some shape in the amorphous blob of humanity. However, the dialog is still difficult to follow, but that's really the point. The book is more of a simulation than a story and it does an excellent job of capturing the reader in the setting.
I'm still foggy towards the use of the crowd dialog format out of the queue for the final scene, in which two characters are engaged in sex (I assume, although it could just be an intense game of Scrabble). Is the author drawing a comparison between the beauty of love-making to that of a massive 3-day-long queue? (The answer is an overwhelming maybe)
I recommend this as a rather unusual read that you can introduce to your friends as "This crazy book some random guy showed me." Or perhaps I can simply recommend it just to read the statement in the preface comparing The Queue to other of Sorokin's works, "no one is raped, mutilated, or eaten on the way; the sex is friendly, the violence confined."
Suddenly I'm interested to see how many characters get eaten in his other works.

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— Aug 31, 2009 | Add your feedback
- Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! (2)
- Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice
- By Scott Adams
- Finished on Aug 19, 2009
  
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Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!

Excessively practical. I don't know if such an adjective is possible, but Adams comes pretty darn close. The book is simply a collection of journal entries and blog posts of the Dilbert creator on topics varying from the creation of the universe to "Where to hide the body?" Not every entry is meant ... (continue)

Excessively practical. I don't know if such an adjective is possible, but Adams comes pretty darn close. The book is simply a collection of journal entries and blog posts of the Dilbert creator on topics varying from the creation of the universe to "Where to hide the body?" Not every entry is meant to be comedy gold, but I actually prefer his more serious entries.
For example, Adams writes that the way to appear a genius is to tell people what they already think, but express it better than they can. Going by that, the man's beyond Stephan Hawking to me then.
My only small complaint that several of the entries are almost identical to one another. I would have preferred additional topics or a simple omission of repeats.

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— Aug 19, 2009 | Add your feedback

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Fuzzy Kitty Male, 23. Parsippany, NJ, USA

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