Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded | John Scalzi | A Second Helping of Scalzi Goodness

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded | John Scalzi | Distilled and concentrated Scalzi, now on cellulose.

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Your Hate Mail Wil...

	Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded John Scalzi Subterranean, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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On September 13, 1998, John Scalzi sat down in front of his computer to write the first entry in his blog "Whatever" -- and changed the history of the Internet as we know it today.

What, you're not swallowing that one? Okay, fine: He started writing the "Whatever" and amused about 15 people that first day. If that many. But he kept at it, for ten years and running. Now 40,000 people drop by on a daily basis to see what he's got to say.

About what? Well, about whatever: Politics, writing, family, war, popular culture and cats (especially with bacon on them). Sometimes he's funny. Sometimes he's serious (mostly he's sarcastic). Sometimes people agree with him. Sometimes they send him hate mail, which he grades on originality and sends back. Along the way, Scalzi's become a best-selling, award-winning author, a father, and a geek celebrity. But no matter what, there's always another Whatever to amuse and/or enrage his readers.

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded collects some of the best and most popular Whatever entries over the history of the blog, from some of the very first entries right up into 2008. It's a decade of Whatever, presented in delightfully random form -- just the way it should be.

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A Second Helping of Scalzi Goodness

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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Distilled and concentrated Scalzi, now on cellulose.

"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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The best of Whatever

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.

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