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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Distilled and concentrated Scalzi, now on cellulose., October 14, 2008
This review is from: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded (Hardcover)
"Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded" is a collection of blog posts from John Scalzi's long-running blog, "Whatever". Scalzi is a very good fiction writer, but he's also a terrific essayist, and his blog posts often turn out to be thoughtful, well-reasoned, humorous, and sensitive essays on subjects as varied as entertainment, current affairs, religion, politics, world history, and parenting.
(Scalzi is also a goofball of the first order, so all those gems are interspersed with application of pork products to household pets, and the inventive utilization of Photoshop skills. Sadly, the print version leaves out much of the Photoshop goodness.)
"Hate Mail" is sort of a "Best of..." collection from Whatever, the distilled essence of the blog. Scalzi routinely knocks the ball out of the park when it comes to "big" blog posts, the kind that gets linked on Instapundit and ends up getting emailed to everyone with an email account in the Northern Hemisphere. "Hate Mail" is a whole book full of such gems, and it also serves as an interesting evolutionary record of "Whatever", which Scalzi has maintained continuously for ten years.
Best of all, this blog content now comes on fantastically portable wireless technology that requires no batteries, and no Internet access.
For fans of Scalzi's writing, "Hate Mail" is a handy compilation of some of his best work...and for those who want to see how to write compelling blog entries on a wide variety of subjects, here's a great collection of examples.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Highlight Reel, March 20, 2011
This book caught my eye at the bookstore and ended up coming home with me. If you don't know, as I did not, Whatever is Scalzi's blog, where he has been blogging more or less since the dawn of blogs.
I am grateful for the many belly laughs I got out of this book, as well as the many new vocabulary words. No question Scalzi is a professional writer (if it slips your mind, he will remind you every few pages) and plies his craft well.
For an athiest, he certainly has a lot to say about religion, especially Christianity. For a heterosexual, he certainly has a lot to say about homosexuals. I appreciate very much his viewpoint that it is not imperative that we all agree on anything, that it's okay for all of us to have our views. Not everyone has this viewpoint. I was greatly amused that the things he did not like about George W. Bush are true in shiny spades of President Obama (p. 284).
My enthusiasm for the book waned as the pages dragged on. It became tiresome to me that Scalzi finds himself to be so darn smart about all things, all the time. In the course of the book, he tells you exactly how much dough he makes, exactly how big his rural compound is, exactly what he pays for it, and an awful lot about how his home finances are arranged. Additionally he seems to be campaigning for the Alan Alda "I'm More Sensitive Than You Are" award. Take my vote, please. Toward the end, however, there were a couple of entries about being poor, a condition he emerged from, that helped me tolerate the parts I did not like as well.
I did check out the Whatever blog, thinking it might be pleasant to add to my rotation. What I found is that 10 years of Whatever boiled down to 350 or so pages has about the right signal-to-noise ratio, so I look forward to the next volume in 10 years.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Second Helping of Scalzi Goodness, November 4, 2008
This review is from: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded (Hardcover)
This is the second volume of posts taken from Scalzi's Whatever site. This volume's subjects range far and wide, as opposed to the first volume You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, which was dedicated to posts about, well, Writing. This also means there's no overlap between the two books, and thus you have a second helping of what John delivers up on a daily basis at his site.
The posts here, which are really essays both long and short, are just as funny and sarcastic as those in the earlier book - the one here on cheese had me rolling on the floor laughing - and also just as thoughtful and insightful. Scalzi has some strong opinions about a lot of subjects, from politics to marriage and child raising, and these opinions come through loud and clear. John has an inimitable style that makes for very easy reading while being quite informative, and usually these essays are quite logical and well thought out. All this makes for a very enjoyable read while at the same time making you do a bit of thinking.
However, more so in this volume than the first, I found there was something lacking from this book, which is alluded to in the title of this volume, the thing that makes John's site required daily reading, namely all the comments he gets on his posts, many of which are just as interesting as the original post. Now obviously it would have been a major task to include some of these comments (just getting permission from all the various contributors would be a daunting endeavor), but still, I missed them. There are a couple of these comments printed here, specifically the winners in a small contest John ran on his site for the best examples of `hate' mail (alas, my own entry apparently didn't make the grade), and these are certainly interesting in their own right, but they give no indication of the broad range of the typical comments on his essays.
Still, books of essays are extremely rare today, and darned few of them can approach the level of both entertainment and thoughtfulness found here. If you haven't read Scalzi before, or know him only from his fiction books, give this one a try - and then head to his site for even more goodness.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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