I Can Make You Hate by Charlie Brooker
Feb. 10th, 2013 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Would you like to eat whatever you want and still lose weight?
Who wouldn’t? Keep dreaming, imbecile.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read something that alternates between laugh-out-loud-funny and apocalyptically angry, keep holding this book. Steal it if necessary.
In his latest collection of rants, raves, hastily spluttered articles and scarcely literate scrawl, Charlie Brooker proves that there is almost nothing in this universe, big or small, that can’t reduce a human being in a state of pure blind hatred.
It won’t help you lose weight, feel smarter, sleep more soundly, or feel happier about yourself. It WILL provide you with literally hours of distraction and merriment. It can also be used to stun an intruder, if you hit him with it correctly (hint: strike hard, using the spine, on the bridge of the nose).
This book is a collection of Charlie Booker’s newspaper columns for The Guardian between August 2009 and July 2012 and includes his Screen Burn columns (which he stopped writing in October 2010) together with a couple of the monologues that he performed on 10 O’CLOCK LIVE. If you’re a fan of Brooker than there’s nothing in here that you won’t already be familiar with although that doesn’t make the content any less funny. If you’re not familiar with Brooker’s work then I think that the collection serves as good an introduction as any of his other collections (maybe better because it shows how he’s moved on as a writer).
It’s interesting to see how marriage and fatherhood has impacted on his style, which to my mind has softened slightly from the acerbic cynicism of his earlier columns. I particularly like the way he reneges on a previous promise to never be one of those writers who use their column to talk about their children, which is almost as funny as his subsequent column reacting to the vitriol that this broken promise created.
In his introduction Brooker recommends dipping in and out of the collection rather than reading it cover to cover. I can see why he’d say that because the ranting can get a bit much at times but if you do read cover to cover then you see a lot of the phrase and subject repetition that characterise his writing style, which I found interesting. The most interesting column for me was the one where he explains why he’s stopped writing Screen Burn, which seems tied to his increasing participation in the media world. I understand his reasons but it’s a shame that he gave it up as he had interesting things to say about popular entertainment and the columns to serve as an interesting social history of English television – whereas his personal columns are more personal and provide less of a sense of the outside world.
Given that this is a collection of columns and monologues, there is a sense of this being just money for old rope but if you’re a fan that won’t matter because this old rope is funny as hell.
The Verdict:
This book is a collection of Charlie Booker’s newspaper columns for The Guardian between August 2009 and July 2012 and includes his Screen Burn columns (which he stopped writing in October 2010) together with a couple of the monologues that he performed on 10 O’CLOCK LIVE. If you’re a fan of Brooker than there’s nothing in here that you won’t already be familiar with although that doesn’t make the content any less funny. If you’re not familiar with Brooker’s work then I think that the collection serves as good an introduction as any of his other collections (maybe better because it shows how he’s moved on as a writer). Given that this is a collection of columns and monologues, there is a sense of this being just money for old rope but if you’re a fan that won’t matter because this old rope is funny as hell.
Would you like to eat whatever you want and still lose weight?
Who wouldn’t? Keep dreaming, imbecile.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read something that alternates between laugh-out-loud-funny and apocalyptically angry, keep holding this book. Steal it if necessary.
In his latest collection of rants, raves, hastily spluttered articles and scarcely literate scrawl, Charlie Brooker proves that there is almost nothing in this universe, big or small, that can’t reduce a human being in a state of pure blind hatred.
It won’t help you lose weight, feel smarter, sleep more soundly, or feel happier about yourself. It WILL provide you with literally hours of distraction and merriment. It can also be used to stun an intruder, if you hit him with it correctly (hint: strike hard, using the spine, on the bridge of the nose).
This book is a collection of Charlie Booker’s newspaper columns for The Guardian between August 2009 and July 2012 and includes his Screen Burn columns (which he stopped writing in October 2010) together with a couple of the monologues that he performed on 10 O’CLOCK LIVE. If you’re a fan of Brooker than there’s nothing in here that you won’t already be familiar with although that doesn’t make the content any less funny. If you’re not familiar with Brooker’s work then I think that the collection serves as good an introduction as any of his other collections (maybe better because it shows how he’s moved on as a writer).
It’s interesting to see how marriage and fatherhood has impacted on his style, which to my mind has softened slightly from the acerbic cynicism of his earlier columns. I particularly like the way he reneges on a previous promise to never be one of those writers who use their column to talk about their children, which is almost as funny as his subsequent column reacting to the vitriol that this broken promise created.
In his introduction Brooker recommends dipping in and out of the collection rather than reading it cover to cover. I can see why he’d say that because the ranting can get a bit much at times but if you do read cover to cover then you see a lot of the phrase and subject repetition that characterise his writing style, which I found interesting. The most interesting column for me was the one where he explains why he’s stopped writing Screen Burn, which seems tied to his increasing participation in the media world. I understand his reasons but it’s a shame that he gave it up as he had interesting things to say about popular entertainment and the columns to serve as an interesting social history of English television – whereas his personal columns are more personal and provide less of a sense of the outside world.
Given that this is a collection of columns and monologues, there is a sense of this being just money for old rope but if you’re a fan that won’t matter because this old rope is funny as hell.
The Verdict:
This book is a collection of Charlie Booker’s newspaper columns for The Guardian between August 2009 and July 2012 and includes his Screen Burn columns (which he stopped writing in October 2010) together with a couple of the monologues that he performed on 10 O’CLOCK LIVE. If you’re a fan of Brooker than there’s nothing in here that you won’t already be familiar with although that doesn’t make the content any less funny. If you’re not familiar with Brooker’s work then I think that the collection serves as good an introduction as any of his other collections (maybe better because it shows how he’s moved on as a writer). Given that this is a collection of columns and monologues, there is a sense of this being just money for old rope but if you’re a fan that won’t matter because this old rope is funny as hell.
