Isolation reading: I Hate The Internet

I Hate The Internet
By Jarett Kobek

The whole point of my one-person book club was to read things I normally wouldn't go near, but a wry, penetrating look at the absurdity of life in San Francisco, written in short, sharp bursts like a Kurt Vonnegut book, and featuring a mention of the host of a comic book podcast I listen to every week, and even has a brief explanation of what Wizard Magazine was, means this novel was about as securely in my comfort zone as I could ever get.

In the end, it wasn't as strong as any of Vonnegut's great books, just a little too cynical and ironic to match Kurt's efforts, and just trying too hard to seem that easy-going. The characters are also almost all a bunch of dickheads, hovering around the tech industry, and I'm not sure the world needs to really follow those people around too much.

But it does have a decent ongoing joke about the absurdity of racial prejudices and the societal bullshit that they cause that keeps coming up, and it pays all due and proper respect to Jack Kirby, so that kept me in true comfort