One of the Top Ten Books of Some Year

I been reading High Fidelity.

Its a lot of fun, even though there's bits of it that are word-for-word what you saw in the movie ('cause it couldn't be rewritten into a script without losing some of the personality).

The main difference between the book and the movie is that its actually s'posed to be a bunch of british dudes in London or something, and that actually helps to keep it interesting.

Yah, like, every once in a while, the dude will say something like "that's a corker!" and I'll be all like, wtfizzat.

Y'know, 'cause a lot of folks say stuff like "sabre" and "colour" is the "European Spelling" of the "Americanized" words "saber" and "color."

But what is really going on there is that that kinda shit is actually Ye Olde English and the Antiquated Poetic and Vestigial spellings of those words, maintained by the equivalent of Amish people who refuse to adapt to the modern times for whatever reason.

I can't use that kinda spelling without people thinking I'm going into character or Lovecraftian Mode or something heh.

Hey man, people give Lovecraft a lot of shit for being an Anglophile and all he ever did was spell a couple words funny ahaha.

Anyways the character telling the story thinks its funny that Americans actually use the word "horny."

And I think "corker" is pilgrim-talk.

So its a fair trade I guess ahaha.

Well, whatever, on the back of the paperback copy I got, there's this quote.

It says "One of the Top Ten Books of the Year - Entertainment Weekly" without some of the caps.

And the first thing that latched on to me about it was that being "One of the Top Ten Books of the Year" isn't all that great.

Its not like being One of the Top Ten Books of the Decade, or Top Ten Books of the Century, or One of the Top Ten Books of All Times.

Couldn't they find somebody that liked it better than that?

There's all sorts of weird-ass people on this planet, there's gotta be some freakasaur out there who put that book at number one of all times.

Its like you didn't even bother to look!

Its a pretty good book, imho, I mean, it definitely deserves better than being put somewhere in the Top Ten Books of the Year (which really means that it must be somewhere between 5 and 10, or else he woulda said it was in the Top Five, right?).

And that's especially true if you only read a couple books per year.

'Cause if you only read two or so books a year, then the fact that both of 'em are gonna be in your Top Ten of the Year sorta goes without saying.

That don't mean they were any good.

Maybe you don't read many books 'cause the Top Two of the Year were pieces of shit.

They should have found somebody that only reads one book a year, and then paid him to read High Fidelity, 'cause then he could honestly say that it was the best book he had read all year.

And its also the worst book he had read all year but whatever that's what quotation marks were invented for *snippety-snip* ahaha.

And just because a dude reads more than ten books a year, its not like he read all of the books that were written that year, y'know?

Its not like the opinion and ordination of a ten-book-a-year guy would be worth a shit.

And its not like you can just say shit like "its in the Top Ten of the Year" and think its official without realizing that this book probably did not earn that title competing amongst millions of hopeful contestants in some kinda international gladiator ring for books with impartial judges.

Even if being in the Top Ten of the Year is kinda wimpy, it probably didn't even really earn that, somebody probably just sorta said that in an off-handed way, and then it became gospel.

And thinking about all that shit gave me the time to realize that maybe the critic hadn't even read the fucking book.

'Cause the book is all about Top Five of All Time lists, not Top Ten of the Year lists.

And if the critic was trying to be funny and clever, he totally fucked that up.

Or maybe the critic was trying to be a dick, by fucking it up on purpose.

I do stuff like that sometimes.

Sometimes I do shit like that and it isn't even on purpose.

But then again, I prolly wouldn't have read the book either, if somebody told me I had to 'cause it was my job, I would've just scanned it a little and came up with a cheerful quip, without overdoing it, y'know, in case, when the real critics who actually read the books they review all the way through show up, it turned out that the book sucked fer some undeniable reason, like the literary version of a mathematical proof that proved both that the book sucked and that you were a total fraud as a reviewer or something.

No sense in muddying up your journalistic integrity on some stupid book that you ain't even gonna bother to read by giving it too much praise or whatever, better to play it loose and just dunk it in the lower five of the Top Ten of the Year.

You don't want people saying stuff like "oh man, that's the reviewer that said that that fucking High Fidelity book was like, the 8th best book of 19-whatever! That guy sucks! He didn't even read it!"

Yah, Top Ten of the Year is playing it safe, that's saying there's like a twenty percent chance of rain.

Plus ain't nobody gonna keep track and actually count how many times you put a book in your Top Ten of the Year as long as you never list 'em all out somewhere and never specify what year you are talking about, so that's good to use on all the ones you ain't gonna bother to read.

Still, maybe that Top Ten of the Year thing was a slam.

That be a pretty fucking good slam, coming from a dude who actually read the book, y'know?

That'd be kinda like a smashed-it-out-of-the-park-and-into-the-side-of-Jupiter slam, if it was on purpose.

And maybe the people who published the book didn't realize it 'cause they hadn't bothered to read the fucking book either.

'Cause they saw the movie, just like everybody else, and thought that the book seemed to be pretty much the same as the movie, same as everybody else.

Except the movie was only an hour and a half long and the book would take like, a month to read or something (which would leave two books out of your Top Ten every year, if you read non-stop all year round).

They prolly didn't even notice the parts where the guy says stuff like "thats a corker" and "arse."

Which is what makes it worth reading, really.

Its the tale of some tragically hip musical trivia dude that talks like a medieval sailor, what's not to love about that?

Its all weird and twisted and interesting like that dude on Boston Legal who played the original Daniel Jackson.

Its like writing a book about people who are too cool to read books for people who are too cool to read books.

That's the witty and ironic kinda shit that makes the British sense of humor world-famous, but at the same time, its sorta like its no wonder that nobody can finish the damn thing.

And the movie doesn't help, 'cause its like, "oh man, I seen all this before, dude, that Jack Black was hilarious, heeheehee, I'll just flip past this part" *flip-flip-flip*

"Yah, fuck this, I'm just gonna do a review of this weird little buzz-phrase on the back of the book."