Customer Reviews

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"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.

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.

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)

I've tried to read a few of his novels, and i can never get past the first few pages. Why i ever got this book remains a mystery to me, but i loved it. Scalzi is a clever fellow with enough opinions to wear out a keyboard.

Yes, it's true that all of the content of this book is available for free online. If you're the kind of person who gets all upset about paying for something you could have gotten, in some functional analog, without paying, then by all means, read the blog. As the author notes, though, it's a bit of a scavenger hunt to find all the old entries due to various hosting and format changes.

I've docked one star because there's no index. The entries are out of chronological order, often thematically linked, and that's fine until you're trying to find that one you read a few days ago that you just have to show to your friend/sibling/partner/guy sitting next to you on the subway. All i needed was a table of contents to save minutes upon minutes of my time, but apparently seconds of the publisher's time wasn't worth it.

If you are a fan of John Scalzi, then you want to get this book. John is also a blogger, and his whatever blog is one of the best blogs to read to dive into the mind and antics of a writer. Whatever features the crazy, the insane, and the mundane world view of John directly, unfiltered, unedited, and unexpurgated. From pumpkins to cats to kids to fans, "Your Hate Mail Will be Graded" is the best of the whatever blog, meaning nothing but hours of entertainment without having to wade through a Google search to find the good stuff.

Whatever has been around for about 10 years now, and it is difficult to wade through, as he has gone through various hosting companies, various blogging software, and various upgrades that just never seem to go right. Finding the best stuff in one location makes things tons easier for the Scalzi fan club, or anyone who is interested in a semi-random stream of consciousness style that permeates the blog. The book does the blog a great service, and really is a fun enjoyable read.

Rates 5 of 5, fun, entertaining, and generally wacko, just what you need to brighten your day.

I had read John Scalzi as a fiction author. I don't spend as much time noodling around on the internet as hunting and capturing the things I want in quick bursts. As a result, I am not much up on blog culture. I enjoyed reading the first and title article ("Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded") and picked up this book to check out the rest. I must admit that it amused me to pick up a (used) dead tree collection of electronic posts. Sort of an oxymoron meets cognitive dissonance.

While I am only halfway through or so, I have to recommend this book highly for the occasional essay on a diverse selection of topics. It's a lot like that opinionated friend who talks intelligently and convincingly about different things every time you spend time together. His content is organized, well thought-out and pithy without using straw man tactics. The nice thing about this book is that you can go from reading about why he disparages the various political groupings when taken to extremes to reading a meditation about fatherhood in the space of two pages. The bad thing about this book is that much like that friend who has a different topic each time, there's no effective way to navigate the book if you recall a clever bit and want to quote it to someone. I think it needs an coordinate index like the one James Burke put in The Knowledge Web to enable the reader to jump around to related topics when desired.

One quick note - Scalzi writes as if he shares many of my core values: the Golden Rule should hold true even if political parties and organized religion show weaknesses at times, there's a value to a working class background supplemented by education, sometimes saying outrageous things is the best way to make people think about what they really do believe, and gay marriage doesn't particularly undermine my own heterosexual marriage. If you are sensitive about a particular belief system you hold, then he will probably scandalize and irritate you.

I thought that this was a great collection of Scalzi's greatest hits of the decade. Although not all of the stories are zingers (Scalzi discusses things other than hate mail), it's still a great read.

My Dad and I are huge Scalzi fans, but my Dad's a total tech-phobe and so doesn't read The Whatever, Scalzi's blog, as I do. I bought this book to give to him, and figured I'd page through it quickly before sending it on as a gift.

Well, even as an avid Whatever reader for many years, the majority of these posts were new to me! Many were from further back and were about timeless topics, and the few repeats - posts which I had enjoyed already - I really liked reading again.

There were just a few clunkers for me in this book - just the couple entries that were about political things which I would have been more than happy to let live in the past, and one rant in particular that struck me as grumpy rather than witty - but for a book this size (it's about an inch and a half thick), I was able to just page past them and breeze onto something I found more enjoyable.

I really loved this retrospective of John Scalzi's blog. Even if you've been reading The Whatever for some time, I'd still recommend it. You'll find some good new stuff in here, and let's face it - the length of most posts make them ideal bathroom reading. Uncle John's Bathroom Reader takes on a whole new meaning...

Like a movie where all the good parts are included in the trailer, this book has anything worth reading on the cover. I bought it expecting some passable wit and gems of wisdom since the author adopts a vaguely Heinleinesque style in some of his better books. Sadly, I found little more than some personal notes, scattered in Democratic National Committee talking points. There isn't anything wrong with that in itself, I just wish the book had been marketed in the political section of local bookstores. Buyer beware, there is no price at which this book is a bargain...including free.

There are some real gems in this book but there is also a great deal of dirt to dig through to get to those gems.