Let's Pretend This Never Happened

[beige_alert]

This morning the Amazon.com Elastic Tin Mechanical Cloud Whispering Turk "WhisperNet" "service" "wirelessly" delivered Let's Pretend This Never Happened to my reading device. According to the progress-bar-doohickey at the bottom of the Kindle screen I've read 27% of it, so I figure it's time to start writing some sort of book review.

I was never one of those people who highlighted passages in books with an obnoxious yellow marking pen, but I do sometimes like to highlight especially good bits in the Kindle because the computer then keeps track of them and they become searchable and shareable and get passed back to the Amazon mothership via the WhisperingTin Whispersync and then get cross-correlated with everyone else's highlights and somehow "monetized" so Jeff Bezos can ultimately buy an even bigger jet than the one he currently has (which according to something I found via the google is a rather-impressive three-engine Dassault Falcon). Anyway, the problem is, if I'm not careful I'll end up highlighting the whole darn thing, like one of those used textbooks I had in college that was previously owned by someone who bought an entire case of highlighters and decided that somehow it made more sense to highlight every single word in the book than to just scribble "good book, read it" on the cover. And then if I started tweeting everything I highlighted I'd end up just tweeting the whole book, which would be wrong, plus I've got the $79 Kindle that doesn't have a keyboard, so a hundred-odd character tweet feels like an eternity of writing selecting one letter at a time by clickclickclickclickclicking the little square button.

(If you think this post is weird and hard to read imagine what will happen to my writing style by the time I've read the whole book. This is just what 27% has done to me.)

Anyway, I recommend the book. The chicken will cut you, but the book won't give you anything worse than a papercut. The Kindle edition won't even do that. Although the Kindle does have a lithium battery in it, so it could catch on fire, and possible ignite your crotch. But this is very unlikely. Certainly I feel it's so unlikely that you shouldn't worry, and if you are a lawyer working for Amazon you shouldn't sue me for bringing up the highly-unlikely possibility. The paper version, of course, has no risk of a battery fire, but I understand that it is quite flammable and perfect for people who want to hold a book burning.  Really, read it or burn it, either way it counts as a sale, I'm pretty sure that's how the publisher sees it.

You might end up sitting in a coffee shop giggling uncontrollably while reading it, like I did this afternoon, but I'm pretty sure all the cool people do that.

Comments

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting! I've put it on my wish list and will look into it one day for sure. Meanwhile I still have about a cubic meter of unread books and about as much in ebooks. I wish I had more time.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I have that problem too...

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

This book was already on my reading list, but I just wanted to say that this is the most entertaining book review I've read in a long time.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I think there'se a dose-response curve with Jenny Lawson. You read a blog post, and it's a fine experience. You get a bigger dose, like 27% of an entire book, and you find you can't write a sentence without two other sentences sneeking in somehow. It changes your mental state. It's like drinking wine: You progress from being little-changed to the point at which you find television very funny to-eventually-finding yourself in someone's living room in a foreign country sitting on the floor, because you can't fall off the floor. Well, it's like that without the headache and vomity feeling the next day.