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Into the Hills, Young Master
Into The Hills, Young Master is a novel about a man who argues online constantly going out into the world on a quest to form the perfect opinion.
144 pages, Paperback
Published February 23, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
January 1, 2023
A young man on the quest to form the perfect opinion. Made me cringe with recognition. A great novel about the internet without really featuring the internet.
November 19, 2020
Nobody has ever written a more compelling story about a Reddit dipshit.
November 18, 2018
A hilarious satire of narcissistic teenaged philosophers. If you’ve been online you’ve read some of this guy’s posts.
Some passages are laugh out loud funny:
“As a member of the non-privileged sexless minority (which has remained consistent since I became a sexually viable object in my teenage years)”
Maybe the funniest thing, which took me a while to notice, is that he refuses to use contractions, both in writing and speech.
This guy is increasingly pathetic as he skates between shallow philosophies and elaborate adolescent fantasies. His job is beneath him, his family a useless weight. He idolizes robots from Isaac Asimov books as the purest form of existence. As fun as it is to laugh at his behavior, you can’t help but recognize some of the embarrassing impulses and struggles of your own teenage years.
“I was told this was adulthood. I called it slavery. And before any crying-wolf readers objects to me using the term ‘slavery’ remember that I am an ally.”
My favorite part was the excerpt from his novel about the orc Grundlak and the ensuing angry post about how he’s never jacked off to the female elf character.
Into the hills, young master is a funny satire but it thankfully never descends into full on cringe humor, which I can’t stand. Writing this book must’ve been painful. I enjoyed reading it.
Some passages are laugh out loud funny:
“As a member of the non-privileged sexless minority (which has remained consistent since I became a sexually viable object in my teenage years)”
Maybe the funniest thing, which took me a while to notice, is that he refuses to use contractions, both in writing and speech.
This guy is increasingly pathetic as he skates between shallow philosophies and elaborate adolescent fantasies. His job is beneath him, his family a useless weight. He idolizes robots from Isaac Asimov books as the purest form of existence. As fun as it is to laugh at his behavior, you can’t help but recognize some of the embarrassing impulses and struggles of your own teenage years.
“I was told this was adulthood. I called it slavery. And before any crying-wolf readers objects to me using the term ‘slavery’ remember that I am an ally.”
My favorite part was the excerpt from his novel about the orc Grundlak and the ensuing angry post about how he’s never jacked off to the female elf character.
Into the hills, young master is a funny satire but it thankfully never descends into full on cringe humor, which I can’t stand. Writing this book must’ve been painful. I enjoyed reading it.
February 15, 2018
This book reads like if Jack Handey was autistic. The main protagonist often lacks basic awareness that it cripples his life. He is so cold due to his obsession with seeking "the perfect opinion" that his snide perspective on the world unfolding around him reads like a red-pilled Drew Magary. However, this book can be really depressing, with a lot of sections that read a little to close to home. The entire book seems to be a send up of modern stereotypical "internet" male culture and the ending, the first time in the book you develop feelings for the protagonist (which are negative), is a flattening note to go out on. That said, I'm giving this book 5 stars because it is really funny sometimes, the graphs at the beginning of each chapter are worth buying the book alone for. What this book does better than any other is encapsulate and satirize internet culture in an unmistakably familiar way, even though the internet isnt heavily cited or mentioned in the book with exception to a full chapter that is simply a post and subsequent thread from the protagonist's favorite forum. Into The Hills is supremely weird, depressing, hilarious, and a jarring capsule of the poisonous mindset infecting modern culture.
January 10, 2022
Into the Hills, Young Master is a coming of age story of sorts. It details the intellectual predilections of a pretentious young white man attempting to navigate the modern world. It's the inverse of Hawthorne's Ethan Frome; instead of seeking the unpardonable sin, the eponymous Young Master seeks the "unassailable opinion." Hubris always ultimately drives such lofty goals.
The narrator's self-seriousness and ever-shifting political viewpoint is darkly comic: he begins as a conservative "voluntary celibate" and later converts to identifying as a member of the "dirtbag left." Regardless of his political affiliation, the tragedy of our narrator is that he remains a thorough-going solipsist: all relationships muddy his otherwise pristine intellectual waters. On his view, the only way to arrive at his own truth is to abandon the social ties that constitute him, and head for the hills.
The narrator's self-seriousness and ever-shifting political viewpoint is darkly comic: he begins as a conservative "voluntary celibate" and later converts to identifying as a member of the "dirtbag left." Regardless of his political affiliation, the tragedy of our narrator is that he remains a thorough-going solipsist: all relationships muddy his otherwise pristine intellectual waters. On his view, the only way to arrive at his own truth is to abandon the social ties that constitute him, and head for the hills.
March 22, 2023
I knew about Alex Branson from my first stint of podcast listening. This was during the boom in “weird twitter”/lefty podcasting that started circa 2015. He was part of a podcast called E1 that people on other podcasts I listened to would rave about and guest star on. The premise of E1 was that Branson and his colleagues ran a sort of archive of failed podcasts, and they would play the first episodes (hence E1) of these podcasts that generally didn’t make it past these first episodes (they’d bring back some popular numbers for an “E2” sometimes). These episodes would then be the hosts and guests pretending to be various kinds of pedants and oddballs going on at length about various fixations of theirs. Sometimes there’d be recurring themes, like a tiny man who caused chaos or the image of “an orc in bootcut jeans.” When I listened to it, it was clear I was listening to a unique comic talent, and sometimes it made me laugh a lot, but it was ultimately too abstract for me to keep up with in the long run. I probably wasn’t the right type of “online,” the type that day in, day out gazes into the asshole of the world that is twitter, youtube comments, and so on. Arguably, I am the sort of “bird brain” E1 claims to be simulating, blathering at length about nothing much to a tiny audience, persisting in the face of all logic… I find, on Al Gore’s internet, it’s a good idea to at least put the idea out there that you’re the fool in any given situation, as prophylaxis if nothing else.
A reader of my substack recommended Alex Branson’s first novel to me, I believe in the context of talking about the contemporary-online-awful space that takes up the literary attention of a lot of people who fancy themselves avant-garde, like Patricia Lockwood. So, I found a copy online and read it. This is the record of a few months or maybe a year in the life of an unnamed young man, painfully ordinary in most respects but convinced of his superior intelligence and attendant destiny for greatness. The narrator sets down his thoughts in pursuit of “the perfect opinion.” This, in particular, reminded me of Lockwood’s depiction of the internet, especially her proclamation that “perfect politics will manifest in the world as a raccoon with a scab for a face.” Signifiers detached from all significance save what can make the world that little bit uglier and more absurd, etc.
Like in “No One Is Talking About This,” the online reverie of our subject – in his case, playing video games, arguing on fora dedicated to “rationality,” on and on – gets interrupted by offline reality, the proverbial “touching grass.” But whereas reality crashes in on Lockwood’s unnamed narrator through a family crisis, Branson’s narrator decides to enter reality after graduating college, on the idea that a hermit-like existence in the country where he works out a lot will somehow result in greater philosophical insights. He’s a Missourian (I understand Branson himself might be from there, or from the Midwest elsewhere), and the young man leaves his suburban home with his sympathetic but largely absent parents (no siblings, it seems) to live with a ne’er do well uncle and go running in the woods, while still fitting in time for looking at the internet and gaming. He also decides, at various points, that he needs to sleep with women, and is forced to get a job.
The same archaeology-of-online-stupidity approach Branson brings to E1 is present in spades here, and is one of the things that distinguishes it and elevates it relative to “No One Is Talking About This” or “Fake Accounts” - his internet-bound anonymous person feels considerably realer than those presented in other “internet novels.” It probably helps that the narrator here is more of a loser- no speeches in London or off-the-cuff months-long trips to Berlin for him. His sense of meaninglessness comes with a wounded effort to wrap himself in various mantles of achievement culture, masculinity, contrarianism, and so on. He consoles himself with the fantasy that he’s a genius destined for greater things, and that the pettifogging objections he encounters to his ideas and behaviors are just proof of his superiority. In a way, for all their self-professed faults, Lockwood’s narrator, and Oyler’s, still have the superiority of self-consciousness, the last refuge for the contemporary subject: yeah, I’m an asshole in a world of shit, but at least I know that about myself. Not so for Branson’s boy.
For all that it came out of “weird Twitter” at the height of its political engagement around the Sanders presidential campaigns, neither E1 nor this novel gets particularly finely-grained about the ideology or formal thought processes at work in the mind of the internet pedant, the thing they’re supposed to know well. On the negative side, you can say this comes from the shallowness of the politics of that crowd, that beyond a vague social democracy and a disdain for neoliberalism (defined way overly broadly and too often as a cultural tone rather than as a political concept) they just didn’t have that much in the intellectual tank. I think at this late date we have to accept there’s some truth there.
That said, there’s a more charitable reading that could see what they were doing, when they delved into the mind of the internet, often through a sort of ventriloquism, as a sort of phenomenology. How much does the ideology really matter, they would argue, beyond how it inflected the emotional and experiential elements of living the life of the sort of person Branson depicts? Or, again less charitably- the internet pedant, whether from the altright or the tumblr left or somewhere in between, doesn’t actually know their shit, either. On top of that, critique on the internet so often turns into checking artifacts against a list of favored and/or suspect facets and tropes and classifying the artifact from there, you can see why one would want to resist taking part. Especially if your goal is artistic, like a comedy podcast or a novel!
So, I do think Branson is getting at something with his bird-brain-ventriloquism here. I’m not an expert on the culture(s) but it also seems he has a good ear, another thing all too rare in contemporary fiction reading. This asshole sounds right, sounds like the kind of person who, if I met him on the wrong day, might have talked himself onto the other side of a barricade. If nothing else, the repetitiveness, circularity, and glibness of the narrator’s writing and ideas feels real, too. Being who I am, what most struck me was how well Branson captured the ways in which online pedants make use of the dross, discarded stage dressing and props, of once vital (or still vital!) complexes of ideas that they haven’t got the beginnings of a meaningful context for to buttress homebrew ideological mixes that are closer to the characteristics of a playable race in a poorly-written role playing game than they are meaningful ways to make sense of and act in the world. That’s a long sentence! What I mean is, the internet has so flattened out previously-accepted hierarchies not just of the relevance of given ideas, but of their accessibility — at one point, it wasn’t easy to even learn what Radical Traditionalism, or Posadism, or accelerationism, even were, let alone swan around like these foolish ideas are your life guide — that if you’re used to how ideology functioned at any previous period, it can be hard to process how internet pedants and younger people use it now. The narrator writes with the pomp, maddening imprecision, poor word choice, galling attempts at style, that go along with a period where for a lot of people, the relationship between reality, idea, and expression has frayed to the point where they present little guidance to how to think, act, or communicate. This grates, but seeing it in a fictional depiction, this controlled space, is almost encouraging- someone gets it.
So, our guy swings across various ideological poles, going from right to left to just despair, but because he’s seeking something nonexistent — a “perfect opinion” and some sort of fulfillment from outside — it all winds up pretty meaningless, at best a strategy to alienate people with outre and inopportunely expressed opinions. I’ve talked about the suffocating feeling of other internet novels. This has some of that, though I’d say a little more earned because of the narrator’s real loser status. You do see some of the outside- his interactions with his uncle, various women, the people at his job. In particular, you see his interactions with “simple” rural folk, men like his uncle who live cheaply, not quite low lives but adjacent to low lives, who drink and aren’t entirely unused to the sort of minor disasters middle class people usually insulate themselves from. These, too, were a topic of E1 episodes, I remember- some of the episodes were just the podcast hosts taking on the roles of minor small town ne’er do wells, recounting the pointless happenings of their lives.
Beyond any specific political opinions or cultural “takes,” I suppose this perspective on contemporary life left me cold at the end of the day because it seems to take for granted not just the pointlessness of life — I actually agree with that — but the pointlessness of trying to make a point. At the end of the day, human expression is just so many diaries of young men philosophizing their trouble getting laid, or lonely pedants fixating on the minutiae of made-up lineups for mediocre pro basketball teams. Truth be told, I can actually sympathize with this stance, as well — the paths of glory lead naught but to the grave, etc etc — except that it gets boring. There is a big world out there, including a long history of people who have tried to develop sophisticated modes of thought and expression. Was it pointless? Maybe in the face of inevitable death and decline, it was. It all brought us here, didn’t it? But, say, trying out more than two mental operations — “ok, we’re either doing trope-checking ideology critique, or we’re rhapsodizing on existential pointlessness, if you can’t choose, flip a coin” — when confronted with a given set of questions seems like it might produce more interesting results with which to divert oneself on the road to the grave. If nothing else, the mental operation of “how was this different in other times and places, and how might it be different again?” I find that sometimes starts us down useful roads, if pursued rigorously.
If you think it’s all pointless, though, then likely, you won’t bother. Especially because the flip-side of the context collapse that frames this whole thing is that no one really teaches how to apply a wider range of techniques of thought than anyone has to use to get a job, and no one comes across them themselves unless it will help them “own” someone online. And… in this case, not asking why, not trying to point to a wider world and depicting most strategies of learning or growth as prima facie laughable, paid off in a reasonably good novel. It’s no good dismissing the pointlessness school because you don’t like it’s implications. That’s not one of the mental operations that might be helpful. The point is to gain perspective, and cutting parts off usually doesn’t help. I think the perspective here is worth keeping in mind. ****
A reader of my substack recommended Alex Branson’s first novel to me, I believe in the context of talking about the contemporary-online-awful space that takes up the literary attention of a lot of people who fancy themselves avant-garde, like Patricia Lockwood. So, I found a copy online and read it. This is the record of a few months or maybe a year in the life of an unnamed young man, painfully ordinary in most respects but convinced of his superior intelligence and attendant destiny for greatness. The narrator sets down his thoughts in pursuit of “the perfect opinion.” This, in particular, reminded me of Lockwood’s depiction of the internet, especially her proclamation that “perfect politics will manifest in the world as a raccoon with a scab for a face.” Signifiers detached from all significance save what can make the world that little bit uglier and more absurd, etc.
Like in “No One Is Talking About This,” the online reverie of our subject – in his case, playing video games, arguing on fora dedicated to “rationality,” on and on – gets interrupted by offline reality, the proverbial “touching grass.” But whereas reality crashes in on Lockwood’s unnamed narrator through a family crisis, Branson’s narrator decides to enter reality after graduating college, on the idea that a hermit-like existence in the country where he works out a lot will somehow result in greater philosophical insights. He’s a Missourian (I understand Branson himself might be from there, or from the Midwest elsewhere), and the young man leaves his suburban home with his sympathetic but largely absent parents (no siblings, it seems) to live with a ne’er do well uncle and go running in the woods, while still fitting in time for looking at the internet and gaming. He also decides, at various points, that he needs to sleep with women, and is forced to get a job.
The same archaeology-of-online-stupidity approach Branson brings to E1 is present in spades here, and is one of the things that distinguishes it and elevates it relative to “No One Is Talking About This” or “Fake Accounts” - his internet-bound anonymous person feels considerably realer than those presented in other “internet novels.” It probably helps that the narrator here is more of a loser- no speeches in London or off-the-cuff months-long trips to Berlin for him. His sense of meaninglessness comes with a wounded effort to wrap himself in various mantles of achievement culture, masculinity, contrarianism, and so on. He consoles himself with the fantasy that he’s a genius destined for greater things, and that the pettifogging objections he encounters to his ideas and behaviors are just proof of his superiority. In a way, for all their self-professed faults, Lockwood’s narrator, and Oyler’s, still have the superiority of self-consciousness, the last refuge for the contemporary subject: yeah, I’m an asshole in a world of shit, but at least I know that about myself. Not so for Branson’s boy.
For all that it came out of “weird Twitter” at the height of its political engagement around the Sanders presidential campaigns, neither E1 nor this novel gets particularly finely-grained about the ideology or formal thought processes at work in the mind of the internet pedant, the thing they’re supposed to know well. On the negative side, you can say this comes from the shallowness of the politics of that crowd, that beyond a vague social democracy and a disdain for neoliberalism (defined way overly broadly and too often as a cultural tone rather than as a political concept) they just didn’t have that much in the intellectual tank. I think at this late date we have to accept there’s some truth there.
That said, there’s a more charitable reading that could see what they were doing, when they delved into the mind of the internet, often through a sort of ventriloquism, as a sort of phenomenology. How much does the ideology really matter, they would argue, beyond how it inflected the emotional and experiential elements of living the life of the sort of person Branson depicts? Or, again less charitably- the internet pedant, whether from the altright or the tumblr left or somewhere in between, doesn’t actually know their shit, either. On top of that, critique on the internet so often turns into checking artifacts against a list of favored and/or suspect facets and tropes and classifying the artifact from there, you can see why one would want to resist taking part. Especially if your goal is artistic, like a comedy podcast or a novel!
So, I do think Branson is getting at something with his bird-brain-ventriloquism here. I’m not an expert on the culture(s) but it also seems he has a good ear, another thing all too rare in contemporary fiction reading. This asshole sounds right, sounds like the kind of person who, if I met him on the wrong day, might have talked himself onto the other side of a barricade. If nothing else, the repetitiveness, circularity, and glibness of the narrator’s writing and ideas feels real, too. Being who I am, what most struck me was how well Branson captured the ways in which online pedants make use of the dross, discarded stage dressing and props, of once vital (or still vital!) complexes of ideas that they haven’t got the beginnings of a meaningful context for to buttress homebrew ideological mixes that are closer to the characteristics of a playable race in a poorly-written role playing game than they are meaningful ways to make sense of and act in the world. That’s a long sentence! What I mean is, the internet has so flattened out previously-accepted hierarchies not just of the relevance of given ideas, but of their accessibility — at one point, it wasn’t easy to even learn what Radical Traditionalism, or Posadism, or accelerationism, even were, let alone swan around like these foolish ideas are your life guide — that if you’re used to how ideology functioned at any previous period, it can be hard to process how internet pedants and younger people use it now. The narrator writes with the pomp, maddening imprecision, poor word choice, galling attempts at style, that go along with a period where for a lot of people, the relationship between reality, idea, and expression has frayed to the point where they present little guidance to how to think, act, or communicate. This grates, but seeing it in a fictional depiction, this controlled space, is almost encouraging- someone gets it.
So, our guy swings across various ideological poles, going from right to left to just despair, but because he’s seeking something nonexistent — a “perfect opinion” and some sort of fulfillment from outside — it all winds up pretty meaningless, at best a strategy to alienate people with outre and inopportunely expressed opinions. I’ve talked about the suffocating feeling of other internet novels. This has some of that, though I’d say a little more earned because of the narrator’s real loser status. You do see some of the outside- his interactions with his uncle, various women, the people at his job. In particular, you see his interactions with “simple” rural folk, men like his uncle who live cheaply, not quite low lives but adjacent to low lives, who drink and aren’t entirely unused to the sort of minor disasters middle class people usually insulate themselves from. These, too, were a topic of E1 episodes, I remember- some of the episodes were just the podcast hosts taking on the roles of minor small town ne’er do wells, recounting the pointless happenings of their lives.
Beyond any specific political opinions or cultural “takes,” I suppose this perspective on contemporary life left me cold at the end of the day because it seems to take for granted not just the pointlessness of life — I actually agree with that — but the pointlessness of trying to make a point. At the end of the day, human expression is just so many diaries of young men philosophizing their trouble getting laid, or lonely pedants fixating on the minutiae of made-up lineups for mediocre pro basketball teams. Truth be told, I can actually sympathize with this stance, as well — the paths of glory lead naught but to the grave, etc etc — except that it gets boring. There is a big world out there, including a long history of people who have tried to develop sophisticated modes of thought and expression. Was it pointless? Maybe in the face of inevitable death and decline, it was. It all brought us here, didn’t it? But, say, trying out more than two mental operations — “ok, we’re either doing trope-checking ideology critique, or we’re rhapsodizing on existential pointlessness, if you can’t choose, flip a coin” — when confronted with a given set of questions seems like it might produce more interesting results with which to divert oneself on the road to the grave. If nothing else, the mental operation of “how was this different in other times and places, and how might it be different again?” I find that sometimes starts us down useful roads, if pursued rigorously.
If you think it’s all pointless, though, then likely, you won’t bother. Especially because the flip-side of the context collapse that frames this whole thing is that no one really teaches how to apply a wider range of techniques of thought than anyone has to use to get a job, and no one comes across them themselves unless it will help them “own” someone online. And… in this case, not asking why, not trying to point to a wider world and depicting most strategies of learning or growth as prima facie laughable, paid off in a reasonably good novel. It’s no good dismissing the pointlessness school because you don’t like it’s implications. That’s not one of the mental operations that might be helpful. The point is to gain perspective, and cutting parts off usually doesn’t help. I think the perspective here is worth keeping in mind. ****
June 2, 2022
A short, relatable, readable but not fun novel, with a protagonist who you don't really like and don't exactly root for but do, in the most basic sense of the word, sympathize with because you see better than he does how self-destructive his various hangups are. That's the hook. It either gets you or it doesn't.
And, if we're being honest, it got me. The character is an odd one, but his oddness, cringe and all, pulled me in. He's a little like Holden Caulfield and a little like Ignatius J. Reilly, and is definitely likely to be compared with both of them by people except that he's no longer as forgivably young and genuinely naive as the former nor as charmingly bombastic and atavistic as the latter: just one of millions of anonymous smart-but-not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is young adults leading a rootless, nameless, pointless existence in modern America, hanging out in the opium den of online forums, probably already too far-gone with their addiction to be salvageable.
And that's where we find the character to be lovable and forgivable after all: he's in a tragic man vs. self story, and we root for him to score the probably-unattainable victory because we know there are so many of him out there and their loss is our problem.
Literarily, this book is quite impressive: it's one of the most masterly uses of unreliable narrator I've ever encountered, and it has quite alot of depth for such a short and simply-written book. Someone who wastes less time reading than I do could easily knock the whole thing back in a single afternoon. And it would be an interesting afternoon.
And, if we're being honest, it got me. The character is an odd one, but his oddness, cringe and all, pulled me in. He's a little like Holden Caulfield and a little like Ignatius J. Reilly, and is definitely likely to be compared with both of them by people except that he's no longer as forgivably young and genuinely naive as the former nor as charmingly bombastic and atavistic as the latter: just one of millions of anonymous smart-but-not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is young adults leading a rootless, nameless, pointless existence in modern America, hanging out in the opium den of online forums, probably already too far-gone with their addiction to be salvageable.
And that's where we find the character to be lovable and forgivable after all: he's in a tragic man vs. self story, and we root for him to score the probably-unattainable victory because we know there are so many of him out there and their loss is our problem.
Literarily, this book is quite impressive: it's one of the most masterly uses of unreliable narrator I've ever encountered, and it has quite alot of depth for such a short and simply-written book. Someone who wastes less time reading than I do could easily knock the whole thing back in a single afternoon. And it would be an interesting afternoon.
June 24, 2023
Almost great, very good book. Reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye and A Confederacy of Dunces. Didn't love the very ending, but then again a lot of books lose steam at the end. That's the only thing that prevents it from being 5 stars.
If you encountered this book via Branson's Episode One podcast, know that it is a lot more polished and less detached than the podcast. It's a funny book, and shares a similar love/hate relationship with the Midwest as Episode One, but make no mistake - this book is legitimate literature, not a joke.
If you encountered this book via Branson's Episode One podcast, know that it is a lot more polished and less detached than the podcast. It's a funny book, and shares a similar love/hate relationship with the Midwest as Episode One, but make no mistake - this book is legitimate literature, not a joke.
September 24, 2017
I was expecting Orcs in bootcut jeans, Uncle Rick and the Matrix twins to make an appearance, but I was pleasantly surprised. Branson goes into the mind of deeply disturbed and thoroughly modern young man attempting to hone his philosophy. Anyone who has gone to Reddit has met this dipshit and hated him.
January 12, 2021
this was fantastic. read it on a recommendation from a friend before checking reviews. first thought was how it felt like a modern ignatius j reilly and it's neat to see others got that too. finished in like 2 days - quick read, totally worth it.
January 1, 2018
Alex Branson has written a chilling indictment of the young man
February 8, 2018
The modern day equivalent of Socrates if Socrates was INTJ, partly incel and a rabid Reddit-poster
March 23, 2018
Awesome book. It's really funny and kinda depressing. He creates a spot on portrait of internet culture and being isolated and shitty, some parts I felt personally attacked. Good stuff
March 23, 2018
It's like A Confederacy of Dunces but with a modern-day Reddit user.
April 8, 2018
Intensely humorous caricature of internet culture and the introverts that inhabit it.
November 27, 2018
Brave and Beautiful
January 19, 2021
The book is an eerily insightful look into the mind and lifestyle of a early 20's pseudo philosopher. The passages with the main character's lucid sometimes surreal thoughts are the key highlights. Some of these go off on tangents and are hard to follow. There is a story that brings this together with events reflections and characters that we meet. All in all, a sad funny read that gives food for thought.
January 3, 2024
A novel about a young male loner profoundly shaped by the internet, which barely features the internet. Sad and funny and an interesting brush with understandable subcultures and philosophies. A pretty good crack at what the Great American Novel should look like for the late 2010s.
Read
August 13, 2017A very moving novel about a man too dumb to realize that he is dumb, and belongs with us here on the dumb earth.
December 5, 2017
if shellac were still good and also a book
October 19, 2020
Good parody of these kinda guys but too high-fidelity to be funny.
February 21, 2021
About a permanently online guy and what happens when he interacts with the real world. It's like Confederacy of Dunces if I got the joke. Very, very good short novel for our age
Read
April 8, 2024finally got around to reading this and finished it in two sittings. more than lived up to my expectations. excited to read water wasted
November 21, 2025
Certified Branson Classic
March 26, 2024
Cuts close to the bone. Really funny.
November 9, 2019
Pretty good!
March 23, 2020
Confederacy of Dunces for the Very Online
March 25, 2018
Fun read exploring a loser introvert dumbass' quest to enlighten and improve himself for all the all wrong reasons through physical fitness, PUA shit, talking to himself, never having sex, and orcs.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews