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.
I think it’s very interesting that we both seemed to be most affected by the same two stories, “The Butterfly Tree” and “Let Go – A Requiem for Felix the Bear.”