God, No! by Penn Jillette

This was a total impulse buy. I just got paid and I was in the book store, saw a book by Penn Jillette about atheism, and thought, "Hey, sounds fun!" I was expecting an interesting, thoughtful, funny discussion of Penn's atheism and how it's affected his life.

Unfortunately, the book is a mess. I wouldn't mind that so much since a lot of the anecdotes are really funny and I don't mind rambling text if I'm being entertained. But there's almost no content. Occasionally he'll make a stab at explaining his views on atheism, but he's too easily distracted from the topic. Any points he brings up are lost in the bluster and noise of his writing style.

I started the book being open to his views; I'm certainly sympathetic to anyone who rails against lies and ignorance, whether I agree totally with them or not. And I've always thought Penn was a clever guy. But by the end of the book I was so turned off by his personality that he could have told me I needed to breathe air to live and I'd have thought, "You are so full of shit."

For someone who states repeatedly that people are mostly good, he sure hates a lot of people. He spends page after page trashing individuals who've slighted him in the past--sometimes decades before. Let it go, man. Geez. Women he's angry with he calls cunts, and women he's not angry with are pretty much 100% in the book so he can mention having had sex with them.

In short, it's a wankery of a memoir, not at all what I expected. I was disappointed, since it's not entertaining enough as a memoir and not intelligent enough as a discussion of atheism. I was particularly turned off by his increasingly ranty political essays, which were so weird that I wonder if the book fell through a wormhole from another dimension.

Although Penn's obviously dying to infuriate people who don't agree with him--he repeats himself when he gets sacrelicious, which makes me think he uses the same phrases a lot to shock people--there actually isn't much criticism of any religion except Islam, which he loathes with a white-hot passion. Christianity? Oh, well, his dad was a Christian and his dad was great. Judaism? Oh, well, isn't it weird that Jews can't eat bacon? That's pretty much it for religion. He doesn't even talk much about atheism beyond some generalities and a chapter on how Santa Claus is a stupid concept.

I can't imagine many atheists finding God, No! very interesting--there's just not enough substance. I suppose people who think they're fighting the good fight against atheism might pick up the book to see what their enemies are up to, but they'll be disappointed too. Unless they're really prudish about swear words, of course. Then they can get righteously angry.

B&N link

Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks

I picked this one up at a Borders going-out-of-business sale, and my goodness was it a good choice! I like amusing travel memoirs anyway. In this one, comedian Tony Hawks accepts a drunken bet to "hitchhike round the circumference of Ireland, with a fridge, within one calendar month."

It's a lighthearted, happy book. Tony spends a lot of nights getting drunk with friends he makes along the road. He meets some colorful characters and sees some beautiful scenery, but unlike a lot of travel writers, he doesn't feel compelled to hit the official sites to report bleakly on them and he doesn't make fun of every other person he sees (Bill Bryson, I'm looking at you). Tony obviously likes people and genuinely cares about them, and if he has to drag a fridge around with him to make people happy and win a bet, by God he'll drag a fridge around with him.

B&N link

Long Ago When I Was Young by E. Nesbit

Memoirs written by children's authors about their childhoods are much better than memoirs written by anyone else. They're more interesting, for one thing. For another, they're not usually depressing (unless they're written for an adult audience, in which case they're extra depressing).

E. Nesbit (Edith, but she was always called Daisy as a child) is one of my favorite authors anyway. I fell in love with her stories when my grandmother gave me a copy of Five Children and It. I had no idea that she'd written her memoirs until I found a copy at a library sale.

It's a short book but charming. Poor little Daisy was kind of a neurotic child, but it makes for very funny (and sometimes scary) reading to hear about what frightened her and why. She had an unsettled life, punctuated with awful boarding schools and sun-drenched months of perfection with her family at various homes in England and France.

She never bothers to explain "I had X number of brothers and sisters and these were their ages"; in fact, she doesn't include mundane details like that at all. The narrative wanders from event to event--exactly the way memory works, connecting one detail with another without necessarily staying in chronological order. The looseness of the narrative is both a positive and a negative. It made it a rambling, story-like read, but I'd have liked a little bit more about events outside the immediate scope of Daisy's life.

Since she was a child in the mid-19th century, it would have been particularly interesting to know more of the historical context of her life. Then again, the happiest parts of her childhood were spent in the countryside, where she and her brothers played pirates and explorers the same way my brother and I played when we were little. Maybe that's all the book needs.

B&N link (used book)