Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

I'll keep my remarks shorter than normal about these except one because they were fine. The Amazon book is the first part of the one I read last year or year before. Founding of Amazon up through Kindle or so. I just read it to be complete. A short comment about the Apocalypse Never book is this is from pre-pandemic, Shellenberger lost his mind and interest in the environment to be a lunatic about homeless people and drugs. It makes the one chapter ironic because he doesn't see how he's slipped into the very thinking he was condemning in it.

The book I have to comment on is the Buffy one which is just terrible. Dude writes endlessly about himself in that obsessed media writer style like people should care. He gives an overly long yet full of gaps summary of every season of the show where you learn nothing except which episodes he likes even if he only names them not tell you which they were. The main chunk of the book is dedicated to either whining about how Buffy fails to meet 2020s Twitter social justice standards for anything or handwringing about whether or not you can like Buffy considering Joss Whedon exists.

All the actors/show writers/set designers/etc. interviewed say "yes, of course you can, TV shows are not a single person." While everyone else media writers/podcasters/PhDs/politicians/etc. struggle with the idea that Buffy and Joss Whedon are not the exact same thing in every way. If you want to read this book to find out what Joss Whedon did that's so awful you won't learn it either because every single person says "it's not my story to tell." Which, great, thanks. The closest you get is someone recounting that Joss once said a mean joke about somebody during season five. The most absurd is that James Marsters mentions that Joss once got in his face during a discussion about a character point. Marsters immediately frames this as passion for the material and that he respected it and it helped him understand the point. The author asserts that Marsters is sympathizing with his dangerous abuser and likely has Stockholm Syndrome from how terrible Joss was to him. Which ignores not only what Marsters directly said but also earlier when Marsters talked about how before doing Buffy (and Angel) he thought TV work was just a paycheck, that the only real place you could do the craft of acting and have passion was on stage, so he did TV and Spike just for the money. But it was in doing Buffy that he realized just how much there could be in acting on TV. So to me, not the author, it sounds like Joss and James were connecting over shared passion for the work even if Joss may have been a bit of a jerk about it. The author denigrates this into James being abused by Joss.

The book actually never makes any kind of resolution about whether or not you can like Buffy since Joss Whedon exists. After pages and pages of this the author just simply says it means too much to him so he's not going to stop loving Buffy (although it sounds more like a stalker obsession with Sarah Michelle Geller) but he can't answer for anyone else. Wonderful, it was all useless.