Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives today at Gamers With Jobs:
Wheaton will forever get lumped into a bucket with "geek cred" painted on the side. Yes, he's "one of us." You need look no further than his blow-the-doors-off keynote speech he gave at PAX this year. Sure, it was funny. I mean hell, he opened with "My name is Wil Wheaton, and Jack Thompson can suck my balls." But it was also well written, well delivered, and something of an anthem for us over-30 geekdads. But we should pause for a moment and acknowledge the craft: the guy knows how to tell a compelling story.
That pause is difficult. It's hard to separate the work – the book – from the fact that he does seem so much like everyone I grew up with and to be blunt, so much like me. His stories of agonizing over Star Wars figures in K-Mart, of escaping into the safety of Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 12 – these are my stories. They are the stories of everyone I knew growing up who didn't think I was a spaz. They are our stories.
Here we sit in the crucible of the internet, invented, maintained, loved and obsessed over by geeks. Yet why is it we still look for our muse? I'm not sure I have the answer. I don't think Wheaton does either. But I do know that there is an intersection between the geek-as-consumer and the geek-as-creator that lies like a giant exposed central nerve, at least in organism in which I live. Sure, there are plenty of people writing about tech, and many of them write very well. There are scads of bloggers and pundits and comics and storytellers. And many of them (myself included, I hope) do a decent job of torturing words onto the page now and then.
Wheaton's different, not in an "oh my god he's so dreamy" way, but in the sense that blue and green are different. It would be easy to think that Wheaton has somehow parlayed a child-star gig into a kind of ambassadorship to planet Nerd. It would also be wrong. Wheaton's strength is not his provenance, it's that he is slowly mastering the craft of echoing the lives of a certain generation with simplicity, un-feigned humility and striking clarity.
It was really cool to read a review from someone who took the time to put Happiest Days into context with my other books and online writing. I think I've grown a lot as a writer since I sat down and started putting together Just A Geek (and then Dancing Barefoot) and it's pretty awesome to have that recognized by someone who isn't married to me.
This is the second review that's mentioned the length, though, so maybe I need to make it more clear in my marketing materials: this is supposed to be a short book that you can enjoy in little bursts, or read in one sitting. I could have padded it, but Andrew and I made a decision to eliminate stories that had different settings, but ultimately told the same thing (this resulted in cutting about 15000 additional words before we even got to the final rough draft of stories that made the cut.) I'd rather be accused of being short than stuffing the book with filler for the sake of making it longer. I know your time is valuable (hey, I'm writing this week's GiR about exactly that subject) and I didn't want to overstay my welcome.
Remember that you can submit your own reviews at Monolith Press, if you're so inclined.
