Review: Meh ... why bother?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2012
One of my supervisors sends out a daily "good morning e-mail" with a supposedly inspiring quote. I look forward to reading those quotes for their SQ (Sapiness Quotient). It's always a temptation to think of a snarky reply to the quote and hit the reply button.After reading The Book of "Quotations" for People Who Hate "Quotations," I wish I had not only replied to the insipid e-mails, but kept a copy of the replies and had them published. No doubt they would have made better reading than what co-authors Tom Tiding and Christiana Crabill came up with.I notice that Tiding is listed as a comedian and story-teller on his author's page. It makes me wonder if the responses to the inspirational quotes are funnier when they are spoken. They sure don't come across well in written form. In fact, most of the responses sound like they were written by a small group of frat boys passing around a bong and calling each other "dude!" Not that there's anything wrong with that type of humor, it just doesn't translate well to readers who haven't touched a bong since the Carter administation.I suspect The Book of "Quotations" for People Who Hate "Quotations" was written as what I call a bathroom book. That doesn't refer to scatological bathroom humor, but to the type of book you can pick up and read a few pages of while sitting on the toilet. No plot to follow ... no characters to keep track of ... just a bunch of short jokes that can be read for as long or as briefly as necessary. Besides, when you only read a few quotes at a time, you may not notice that many of the same quotes show up repeatedly at different places in the book. (Geez, folks! Pick your best joke to go with the quote. Don't throw all of them at us in the hope we'll find out or two of them funny.)Meh ... It's not the worst book I read ever nor is it the biggest waste of time. My response to the book can best be summed up in a quote by Truman Capote describing Jack Kerouac's literay output: "That's not writing, that's typing."