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Schrodinger's Ball
Aug. 28th, 2006 06:21 pmI picked up Adam Felber's new book based mostly on his being one of the panelists on NPR's 'wait wait, don't tell me' and plowed through it with high speed. This is not due to any great diligence on my part, but because the book is, as a friend put it, like eating your way through a can of Pringles. This is neither a complaint or a compliment, just a statement.
So what complaints and compliments can I offer? Back in college my friends and I produced a comic strip called Amalgam Hall that we billed as 'the strip for the discerning pseudo-intellectual'. Schrodinger's Ball is very much like that. Some parts are indeed downright funny, some are good for chuckles and few are really original. I was struck with several points of 'hey, this is about as funny as the last time I read it in x's book 5/10/20 years ago', but those books weren't mainstream novels. Which I suppose that more geek jokes are making it into the larger culture, which is good.
That might make it sound worse than it is. I enjoyed it, don't regret buying it and have started loaning it around. Which is the best praise I can give outside of buying more copies to give to other people. Alas, it's not that good.
So what complaints and compliments can I offer? Back in college my friends and I produced a comic strip called Amalgam Hall that we billed as 'the strip for the discerning pseudo-intellectual'. Schrodinger's Ball is very much like that. Some parts are indeed downright funny, some are good for chuckles and few are really original. I was struck with several points of 'hey, this is about as funny as the last time I read it in x's book 5/10/20 years ago', but those books weren't mainstream novels. Which I suppose that more geek jokes are making it into the larger culture, which is good.
That might make it sound worse than it is. I enjoyed it, don't regret buying it and have started loaning it around. Which is the best praise I can give outside of buying more copies to give to other people. Alas, it's not that good.
