Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

The Five Habits of Highly Successful Slackers by K. P. Springfield caught my attention at the library. I thought.. hey, I’d like to know how to slack more effectively! Unfortunately, this book really didn’t deliver.

A lot of the book was taken up with why you should slack, and some stories of people who did it badly. The rest of the book was ideas that would work well in a sales job, but not in most other jobs.

It was really disappointing, because he opened the book talking about how he was writing the book at work. I thought he’d give me some tips on how to do that myself. Does he sneak down to the copy room? Take long lunches? Have the book open in one window and an important-looking spreadsheet open in another? Well, no, none of that. And none of the things I hadn’t thought of, which would’ve been actually useful. He just pretends to be on the phone making sales calls while in his fully-fledged office with walls and everything.

Seems to me if you have the autonomy already granted to sales associates, you can already easily figure out ways to slack. I’d like to see him try it in other jobs.

The tone of the book also seemed to be making fun of other business books and not treating the subject with quite enough seriousness. And the term he coined ‘slackism’ never does roll off the mind’s tongue. I kept wanting it to be ‘slackerism’.

Finally, whoever edited the book (quite possibly him) definitely slacked. There were mixed up words and missing words enough to be annoying by themselves. The main issue, however, was the paragraphs were inconsistently indented.

And I never did learn how to write a book while at work.

I may have gotten around to reading this book eventually. I had seen Ha’Penny was on the list of novels being considered for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and borrowed it from the library, before realizing it was book two of a series. So I may or may not have been motivated to track down Farthing and read it, except that K had this idea of all of us reading and reviewing the same book, and M suggested this one.

Farthing is a British mystery set in the 1940′s, but it’s also an alternate history. Then there’s a dash of gay interest thrown in. Taken separately, I wouldn’t have been interested in this book, but all together, there’s enough there to make it worth a read.

How well does it work as a mystery? I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but it seemed to me to be rather dull and also rather obvious. We have two point of view characters, only one of which is the detective, so the other character has rather more access to information than the detectives usually get. Which means the reader knows more, and this reader is not an idiot.

In particular, there are a couple of chapters where the detective is just driving here and driving there and tracking down this bit of information that’s needed and the writing there is quite uninspired.

How does it work as an alternate history? Again, I don’t read a lot of alternate history — or real history for that matter — so I found it a little confusing. How much of the situation was true and accurate and how much was a what-if? The basic premise though, I believe, is that the UK signed a truce with Hitler to let him go on doing whatever he wanted elsewhere as long as he stayed out of Great Britain. Which, you may imagine, is not good news for the Jewish people in Europe. But on the face of it, it seems a good thing for the Brits. No more bombings, no more evacuations. The political climate is changing though. I don’t think you’ll be seeing socialized medicine in this UK.

How does it work as gay interest? Not interesting enough. One of the primary bi characters in the story is dead years before the story begins. The main character’s lover never makes it on screen. He barely even spares a thought for him. So the gay interest is all political. Which is fine and all, but it would’ve been nice to see some affection, no matter how non-public and discreet it would need to have been.

So all in all, rather disappointing on all fronts. The two positives I will say about it are, one, that it was very readable, even in the more uninteresting of the chapters. It didn’t feel like a slog. And, two, I found the two point of view characters interesting and likeable. I would read more with either of those characters, though I would be fervently hoping for some more interesting plots and scenes to come along.

If I were to give it stars out of five, I’d give it a very middle-of-the-road 3.