I just spent a car ride composing a post, but of course as usual by the time I get to a place where I could write it down, it’s all slipped away again. Perhaps if I start writing some of what I’d intended to include will come back.

Ah yes. My favorite radio station, 98.5, is changing its frequency. Why? A convoluted and only sort of logical shuffling of stations because apparently Boston was in desperate need of another radio station devoted to sports.

Speaking of sports, my mom won a contest and now my brothers are going to have breakfast with Jonathan Papelbon. I’m not jealous, exactly, because it’s not like I could go or it’s even the sort of event that I would enjoy if I could, but… maybe I am, a little. Because I can’t go.

I’ve been doing hardly anything worth reporting on, frankly. Barely any books read recently — or even tv of interest watched. I’m not sure where all the time has been going. Probably to random web surfing of the most incredibly useless sort. Some of it has been going to school, but fortunately that is pretty much done for the summer so I now have a month free of the nagging guilt that I have an assignment coming due.

Instead I just have the nagging guilt of other projects that I haven’t completed yet. Foremost of that are my Tripletake reviews, where I’m behind on June and July. As I have the past few weekends, I plan to make a push over the next few days and get finished. Because I really do want to start my Vorkosigan reread! Though in point of fact, now that LMB has announced that the next Miles book, currently to-be-titled Cryoburn, will be out in November-ish 2010, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t attempt to coordinate that better.

Earlier today, there was some lightning. J came downstairs and asked if I thought we ought to put a tarp over the tomato plants on the deck. I thought it might be an ok idea, so she went outside to do that — a few seconds later, I saw her hastily pulling the plants under the overhang. I was puzzled: hadn’t we just decided on the tarp?

Then I saw the giant chunks of ice smashing down all over the place. It seriously came out of nowhere — a flash of lightning, then a minute later, armageddon. The hail lasted for about 3-4 minutes before turning to very fat, violent rain. But that was enough!

Everythyng ys cooler wyth more ys.

The Plot
A loosely related collection of essays by blogger Wil Wheaton. The theme here seems to be memories.

My Thoughts
I’ve been a reader of Wheaton’s blog for years, and I read his first two books when they first came out. I anticipate that I’ll continue to read after this one, even though I found it a bit more disjointed than his previous efforts. Perhaps it suffered in comparison to Just a Geek, which I had reread most recently, and which was really a _book_ rather than a collection.

The essays in this entry into the Wil Wheaton oeuvre are of varying lengths. Some are just a handful of short paragraphs and others continue for pages — either greatly expanded from their origins as blog entries or a combination of many posts, because blog entries are rarely so epic.

The writing flows, at its best when he doesn’t try too hard to be literary and just lets the story have its own voice. It’s probably no coincidence, but I found that the writing was at its best in the entries where he’d clearly felt the most emotion while the event itself was happening. “The Butterfly Tree” and “Let Go – a requiem for Felix the Bear” really stood out for me. The former especially — I felt so badly for little Wil, and it was so easy to see myself at the same age feeling the same way in a similar situation. The deep embarrassment compounded by the unfairness of it all and his parents’ reaction: it’s the sort of thing that sticks forever in your mind.

Aside from the disjointedness of the content, which I’ve already mentioned, the only other thing that started to bother me was the continual injection of song lyrics and music into the text. However, this is not really a failure of the author — clearly song lyrics and bands are important to him. Unfortunately I just find them annoying. About the only thing that turns me off more than random quoted song lyrics in a blog entry is a long rambling discussion of the dream you had last night.

In Short
I wouldn’t call this Wheaton’s strongest book, but it holds up well enough next to his others. An expanded/revised/superspecial version of this is supposed to be out from Subterranean press some time soon (I believe he’s sent off the final copy to them now). I’d be interested to know what he felt like adding and/or changing now that the book has had a while to settle in his mind. Bear in mind that the title is sort of ironic, as quite a few of these memories have the potential to leave you in tears.