Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

As an avid blog reader and writer, I was quite surprised to have never heard of John Scalzi and his popular blog Whatever. But only minutely so, as the Internet is a big place, almost as vast as space itself and chock-full of everything from the inane (lol catz, need I say more?) to the supreme with writer's like Scalzi. //Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded// spans 10 years of blogging, from 1998 to 2008, yet flows seamlessly from one topic to another. Unlike most online writers, Scalzi's work translates well onto the written page with an almost gleeful disregard of topics often considered sacrosanct: religion, politics, and parenting. Very little escapes Scalzi's keyboard, from the silly (taping bacon) to his cat and posting the pictures online, to the serious (growing up in abject poverty). Each is so incredibly well-written one will want to return to the book time and time again. Most poignant is the chapter titled "The Child on the Train" in which he shares the grief over a miscarriage. Be careful when you share this book with family and friends (and you will, unable to help yourself) as you may not get it back. Reviewed by Lanine Bradley

My Dad and I are huge Scalzi fans, but my Dad's a total tech-phobe and so doesn't read The Whatever, Scalzi's blog, as I do. I bought this book to give to him, and figured I'd page through it quickly before sending it on as a gift. Well, even as an avid Whatever reader for many years, the majority of these posts were new to me! Many were from further back and were about timeless topics, and the few repeats - posts which I had enjoyed already - I really liked reading again. There were just a few clunkers for me in this book - just the couple entries that were about political things which I would have been more than happy to let live in the past, and one rant in particular that struck me as grumpy rather than witty - but for a book this size (it's about an inch and a half thick), I was able to just page past them and breeze onto something I found more enjoyable. I really loved this retrospective of John Scalzi's blog. Even if you've been reading The Whatever for some time, I'd still recommend it. You'll find some good new stuff in here, and let's face it - the length of most posts make them ideal bathroom reading. Uncle John's Bathroom Reader takes on a whole new meaning...

This is the second volume of posts taken from Scalzi's Whatever site. This volume's subjects range far and wide, as opposed to the first volume You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, which was dedicated to posts about, well, Writing. This also means there's no overlap between the two books, and thus you have a second helping of what John delivers up on a daily basis at his site. The posts here, which are really essays both long and short, are just as funny and sarcastic as those in the earlier book - the one here on cheese had me rolling on the floor laughing - and also just as thoughtful and insightful. Scalzi has some strong opinions about a lot of subjects, from politics to marriage and child raising, and these opinions come through loud and clear. John has an inimitable style that makes for very easy reading while being quite informative, and usually these essays are quite logical and well thought out. All this makes for a very enjoyable read while at the same time making you do a bit of thinking. However, more so in this volume than the first, I found there was something lacking from this book, which is alluded to in the title of this volume, the thing that makes John's site required daily reading, namely all the comments he gets on his posts, many of which are just as interesting as the original post. Now obviously it would have been a major task to include some of these comments (just getting permission from all the various contributors would be a daunting endeavor), but still, I missed them. There are a couple of these comments printed here, specifically the winners in a small contest John ran on his site for the best examples of `hate' mail (alas, my own entry apparently didn't make the grade), and these are certainly interesting in their own right, but they give no indication of the broad range of the typical comments on his essays. Still, books of essays are extremely rare today, and darned few of them can approach the level of both entertainment and thoughtfulness found here. If you haven't read Scalzi before, or know him only from his fiction books, give this one a try - and then head to his site for even more goodness. ---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

If you are a fan of John Scalzi, then you want to get this book. John is also a blogger, and his whatever blog is one of the best blogs to read to dive into the mind and antics of a writer. Whatever features the crazy, the insane, and the mundane world view of John directly, unfiltered, unedited, and unexpurgated. From pumpkins to cats to kids to fans, "Your Hate Mail Will be Graded" is the best of the whatever blog, meaning nothing but hours of entertainment without having to wade through a Google search to find the good stuff. Whatever has been around for about 10 years now, and it is difficult to wade through, as he has gone through various hosting companies, various blogging software, and various upgrades that just never seem to go right. Finding the best stuff in one location makes things tons easier for the Scalzi fan club, or anyone who is interested in a semi-random stream of consciousness style that permeates the blog. The book does the blog a great service, and really is a fun enjoyable read. Rates 5 of 5, fun, entertaining, and generally wacko, just what you need to brighten your day.

"Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded" is a collection of blog posts from John Scalzi's long-running blog, "Whatever". Scalzi is a very good fiction writer, but he's also a terrific essayist, and his blog posts often turn out to be thoughtful, well-reasoned, humorous, and sensitive essays on subjects as varied as entertainment, current affairs, religion, politics, world history, and parenting. (Scalzi is also a goofball of the first order, so all those gems are interspersed with application of pork products to household pets, and the inventive utilization of Photoshop skills. Sadly, the print version leaves out much of the Photoshop goodness.) "Hate Mail" is sort of a "Best of..." collection from Whatever, the distilled essence of the blog. Scalzi routinely knocks the ball out of the park when it comes to "big" blog posts, the kind that gets linked on Instapundit and ends up getting emailed to everyone with an email account in the Northern Hemisphere. "Hate Mail" is a whole book full of such gems, and it also serves as an interesting evolutionary record of "Whatever", which Scalzi has maintained continuously for ten years. Best of all, this blog content now comes on fantastically portable wireless technology that requires no batteries, and no Internet access. For fans of Scalzi's writing, "Hate Mail" is a handy compilation of some of his best work...and for those who want to see how to write compelling blog entries on a wide variety of subjects, here's a great collection of examples.