I had always compared the fiction section in the far corner of the school library to a set of gills, as the shelves, which at 5'7" plus a bit in my clunky shoes I can easily see just over, are crammed so tightly together that two people can only squeeze uncomfortably past one another, so my tiny, nagging seed of agoraphobia was urging me to get what I needed and get out before anyone wanted something from the same place I was. It was my little free time before school and I was hunched over like a vulture to peer at the names, specifically "Gaiman," when I happened to glance at a bit of fancy-looking gold letters crammed upright into the space the black spine allowed, reading "The Alchemist's Door."
I slid the book out of its place. A good portion of the blurb on the back cover was obscured by the library's bar code, but what little I could read, among which were demon, ancient, chaos, magic, and sixteenth century, said it was exactly what I was looking for, and I tucked it under my arm and was about to head off before I remembered what my Etymology teacher told us about our book choices for his class: anything outside our comfort zone. So I paused and once more hunched over, fingers twitching over the spines before they happened upon a purple-and-pink title in a staggered size: "Into the Wild Nerd..." Another library sticker covered the rest. I pulled the book out and examined the hot-pink cover decorated with repeated drawings of a 20-sided die scattered behind another drawing of a corseted dress. Into the Wild Nerd Yonder: My Life on the Dork Side, it said. I scanned the blurb and decided that my selection was sufficiently not what I was looking for, so I left the shelves and checked out my books, fully intent on reading the worse one first.
I was all so, totally excited to get to my new book. I mean, I'm the kind of person that loves to hate bad movies (not in the "oh, I'm going to make myself miserable" kind of way, but the fun, "I'm going to tear this thing to shreds when I review it" kind of way). So you know, you can tell I'm desperately trying to pass myself off for a member of some social group that the author wants me to fit into even though my personality doesn't adhere to it at all. I was also so ready to try out new things! I mean, the last chick lit book I read was Twilight, and I just loved it. I mean, I got to a whole 50 pages before swearing at it and giving up! (I'm being sarcastic. You know, in case you couldn't tell.) And the blurb said, like, right out that this book thinks nerds are totally grody. So I'm all for reading this (and also tearing it to shreds).
You know that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when they're all like, "Get on with it!" at that one chick? That's what I wanted to shout at this book right at the first page (But I couldn't because I was in History class at the time (Not that I was reading during a lecture or anything, my god! He was doing attendance. (Yeah, do you like these parenthetical asides? Get used to them. I'm probably going to use more parentheses than periods by the time I'm done. (I have yet to find Inception-style parentheses, but I'm not putting it past this book.)))).
When I got to the sixth page, I had to check the publish date because I swear, the way everyone was acting made me think this is set 30 years ago. It said it was published in 2010. Now I was thinking, "No way," because a character actually used the word "chillaxin" in a non-ironic context (don't even talk to me about the way this author uses the word "ironic") and had people in the halls literally point and laugh publicly at people dressed like punk rockers, but not at the "chillaxer". It's like they're in the *%&$ing 80s. (Oh yeah, there's swearing every other page, too. How did they let this book get into the school library? I mean, people are trying to ban To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn and they let this @%*# in? It reminds me of all those stupid $*^&ing sheeple that I feel self-righteous enough to talk about while I'm in the middle of something completely @&*$ing unrelated, a tangent which has no effect whatsoever on the rest of the *@!^ story and only serves to crush the reader's soul when she remembers that she can't cross out large sections of a *!#@ library book.) A reference to iPods and various (i.e. many) brand names confirmed this is set in the 2000s, but I still imagine everyone with mullets.
Now, I've only gotten to page 40, but boys are the most important thing in the whole &#*@ world. (Oh my god, boys. Boys boys boys. That one boy. I want to make out with everything he touches. (Not even joking. The character says this outright.)). Other people's boys can go be ugly and (gasp!) different somewhere else, though, even if their girlfriends are someone I just spent the entire previous paragraph complimenting wholeheartedly, yet who are apparently not good enough to warrant more than a compulsory non-insulting response when showing off pictures of the person they love.
Are you frustrated yet at the writing style? Did you just say TL;DR and skip down here to avoid that eye-searing word-spew? Now imagine an entire novel written like that, whose narrator is the most shallow, unforgiving, fake person in the history of literature who wants to share every single passing thought with you, be it hurtful, disgusting, or just plain unnecessary. Yeah, I died a little inside, too. And that's what you get for reading something that hates on nerds.
Overall rating: >:(
Pages read this week: 58
Pages read this semester: 58
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