Book Review: The Mallet of Loving Correction by John Scalzi

Rating: 5 out of 5 mallets

I found myself deeply troubled by Scalzi’s lack of narrative structure. While the date of each chapter was clearly noted, the plot was nearly impossible to follow. Scalzi, genius that he is, apparently wrote all the chapters and then rearranged them them into, of all things, alphabetical order. I assume this was an editing error. So to give Scalzi a fair review, I re-read the entire book in chronological order. Ugh, even more of a mess. There was bright cheery optimism right at the beginning, and it just sunk into despair after two years from which it never really recovered. And most of the political characters he wrote about were so laughably incompetent and ideologically corrupt that they were completely unbelievable. The only moments I didn’t want to gouge my brain out were during his forays into real-world commentary, which I guess was his attempt to be “meta.” I mean, he even starts off with a chapter called “10 Things to Remember About Authors.” Self-involved much? Leaving aside my inability to find an overall theme for the novel, unless “Ha Ha, I’m Clever” is a theme, I found his insights to be deeply engaging. Bright spots for me were the chapters “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” “The Failure Mode of Clever” (language alert), and “And Now, An Incredibly Long and Detailed Assessment of My Own Last Decade, With Footnotes and Annotations Where Desirable, and Such Digressions As Will Elucidate the Subject in a Manner Amusing to All, Not Sparing Heart-Tugging Anecdotes When Appropriate, Phrased in the Vernacular of Our Times.” As a prequel to Old Man’s War, however, this leaves something to be desired.  Maybe Scalzi should abandon his novel writing and start a blog or whatever. Do people still blog? I give this one 5 stars because I could get it on Kindle and that makes me feel like I’m doing something about the environment without having to go outside or anything.

You can buy the book at http://www.amazon.com/Mallet-Loving-Correction-ebook/dp/B00F633XHI/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1382102358

Plus you can read Scalzi's blog at http://whatever.scalzi.com/

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