Tuesday, April 15, 2014

44:120 God, No! by Penn Jillette

Otherwise titled "Signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales".  I bought this for my husband who really enjoys Penn & Teller and happens to be an atheist.  He read it and enjoyed it and I figured I'd read it too.  After seeing Penn & Teller in Vegas a few weeks ago, this seemed an appropriate time.

There was nothing new and earth shattering in the book  There were some stories of people whom have come out of the atheist closet due to listening to Penn talk about it and some of his thoughts on atheism and God and such.  There were also a lot of stories just thrown in there of things that he has done and lived through that really don't have much to do with atheism at all but are just things he wanted to tell about.  That's fine and some of them were interesting and some were less so.

I wanted to like this book more than I did.  I felt like things didn't flow well into each other and had little connections to each other except that they all happened to one man and very few of them had much to do with atheism or religion.  Also, I have zero problems with cussing and I get that he wrote this as he would tell each of the stories but it's not being told, it's being read and that much cussing just gets boring when it's read.  It stops lending emphasis and starts reminding me of Dickens and makes me wonder if he was being paid by the word.  Maybe that's because I've been reading Dickens (and oh my dear lord is that man wordy!) but a lot of it felt almost forced in there for shock value and it ruined the flow for me more than anything else.  My husband has a mouth on him and his uncle is a stand-up comedian so there wasn't anything in the book I hadn't heard before and seriously, how many times must "mother f***er" be in one book???  It's not needed.  If you really want to include that much profanity, please be a little more creative at least.

Page count: 231p/10,685p ytd/191,677p lifetime

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