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kyatic's Reviews (974)
I've been wanting to read this book for years. It was the basis for one of my favourite TV shows of all time (Channel 4's Sirens), and also one of my guilty pleasures (the bawdy US version) and I'd been meaning to pick the book up ever since I got addicted to the adaptations. I never quite got around to it, though. What can I say? I'm stingy.
You can imagine, then, that when I was trawling Amazon for free e-books to make up the figures on my 2015 Reading Challenge and saw that this particular book was among them, I was somewhat excited.
In hindsight, I probably went into it with my expectations raised too high. Simply put, this book just doesn't match up to what I was hoping for.
Firstly, it's based on a blog, which is fine. I knew that. However, I hadn't expected that it would literally just be copied and pasted from the blog, spelling and grammatical errors included. If I'm reading a blog, then I can deal with people using 'it's' where they mean 'its'. If I'm reading a book, however, then I expect some discerning editor to make the reading experience a little more fluid. It's just damn jarring to try and work around obvious mistakes.
Secondly, the constant repetition of the phrase 'I'm not racist, but ...' and 'I'm not racist - I hate everyone equally!' made me particularly glad that the writers of the TV adaptations had clearly not based their protagonists on the author of this book. He sounds like the kind of guy you'd see at a party and would lead you to beg your friend to please, dear god, let you sit at the other end of the table.
It really isn't all bad. There are some genuinely hilarious bits, as well as some actual human emotion, and I don't regret reading it. I'm just very glad that it was free.
You can imagine, then, that when I was trawling Amazon for free e-books to make up the figures on my 2015 Reading Challenge and saw that this particular book was among them, I was somewhat excited.
In hindsight, I probably went into it with my expectations raised too high. Simply put, this book just doesn't match up to what I was hoping for.
Firstly, it's based on a blog, which is fine. I knew that. However, I hadn't expected that it would literally just be copied and pasted from the blog, spelling and grammatical errors included. If I'm reading a blog, then I can deal with people using 'it's' where they mean 'its'. If I'm reading a book, however, then I expect some discerning editor to make the reading experience a little more fluid. It's just damn jarring to try and work around obvious mistakes.
Secondly, the constant repetition of the phrase 'I'm not racist, but ...' and 'I'm not racist - I hate everyone equally!' made me particularly glad that the writers of the TV adaptations had clearly not based their protagonists on the author of this book. He sounds like the kind of guy you'd see at a party and would lead you to beg your friend to please, dear god, let you sit at the other end of the table.
It really isn't all bad. There are some genuinely hilarious bits, as well as some actual human emotion, and I don't regret reading it. I'm just very glad that it was free.
