God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales - Penn Jillette

Part manifesto, part autobiography and part joke, the uneven quality in this book can be attributed to it not knowing exactly what it wants to be. Zooming out of the gate, Jillette lays out what it means to be an atheist (All you have to be able to say is "I don't know") and recalls a story about eating bacon with Hasidic Jews. His attempt to match the Ten Commandments with his own has some wings (even if Hitchens did it better) but it sags in the middle, bogged down in personal anecdotes about having sex while scuba diving and stripping naked on the vomit comet. It picks up again at the end, with Jillette offering atheism as the only hope against terrorism, that faith is the enemy that rational people must overcome:

"Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence... Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith."



 

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

Yes, I'm a little late to this. I would have never read it all if I hadn't seen it in a used bookstore for $2.00 (my cut-off purchase point for any book). Of course I had read all the articles about the controversy, had seen the clip from Oprah. What never came up in all those discussions is that this isn't a very well written book. It's not poorly written, but there is a lot of repetition, a lot of being inside the author's head as he repeats the same thoughts again and again.  Intended to give a glimpse into the mind of an addict, it gets tiresome 100 pages in. All the characters talk the same, sound the same. Addicts offer words of wisdom in long, rambling bursts. The author finds redemption in a good girl living a bad life, guidance from a Mafioso with a good heart.

If this were a real memoir, you could defend all of this under the banner of  'it really happened'. Fiction doesn't get the same pass as memoir and non-fiction does - you can be sloppy and sentimental in a memoir, you can have clunky sentences and poorly constructed paragraphs and characters that act as pure plot devices, because it all happened. In fiction, you can't. Well, you can, but don't expect to be taken seriously.

There are some interesting parts about addiction and recovery, but if you want that you can watch Intervention or read the parts about AA meetings in Infinite Jest. The dental surgery scene is toe curling, and the main character does seem utterly irredeemable and unlikable, so the fact that people cheer on his recovery is a testament to the author's talent. But,you know at the end of the book he is going to make it, on his terms, his way. I almost expected a scene at the end where he walks across a football field and fist pumps the air.

I've never taken to memoirs. I prefer fiction, even thinly veiled fiction, but if I'm going to read about someone's life, I prefer autobiography and biography before memoir.  I didn't really see what the big fuss was about - of course he fudged some of this. It's a book.  Even realism isn't real - it's a version of real, an edited, crafted version that has a identifiable elements (plot, characters, motivations, etc) the real life often does not. All memoirs have some level of artifice involved - if a memoir recounts a conversation that the author had when he/she was eight years old - it's made up.   It doesn't bother me that he made up some central elements to this book, and it doesn't bother me that he tried to sell it as fiction first but then re-branded it as memoir when he saw where the  money was.  What bothers me is that is that he tried to hide some poor writing under the memoir tag.

That Is All - John Hodgman

How does the world end? Widespread economic collapse leading to a breakdown to society, forcing us to form post-industrial tribes that compete for dominance in  the Thunderdome? Environmental upheaval that melts the polar ice caps, causing the oceans to rise and forcing the remnants of humanity to live on floating cities? How about the Jock/Nerd convergence, combined with the awakening of the Unspeakable Ones and the awakening of the Century Toad that lives in the centre of the earth?

The third, and final, book in the series of world knowledge, That Is All details the end of the world, scheduled for Dec 21, 2012 (the Mayans were right, after all), which Hodgman, now a Deranged Millionaire from his work as a minor television personality, witnessed as visions one night under the influence of his albuterol asthma inhaler.  There's also some helpful tips on wine, cruise ships and how to become a Deranged Millionaire.

The most amusing part is the page-a-day calendar that runs across the top of the book, outlining how the world will end. (It includes Oprah's Space Ark, Stephen King's additional 700 pages of the Stand, The Dogstorm and the Singularity) It's a specific type of humour, one aimed at the kids who read McSweeney's for the pictures, who fast-forward the podcast of The Best Show to get the Philly Boy Roy call and laugh at the bits on The Daily Show that no one else does.