This week I read Stuff White People Like, a book by Christian Lander.  Net-savvy readers will recognise the title from a website of the same name, well this is one of those books where a successful blog is turned into a paper product, and a lot of the content is very familiar to anybody who has browsed the site.   This was another of those freebies I get from Amazon Vine in exchange for a review, and here is what I wrote about it in the review:

Stuff White People Like is based on a cult website that has been running for a while and most of the contents of the book can be found on the website so this is not a great value purchase if you already follow the site.  It is amusing enough, although aimed very much at an American market.  Over this side of the Atlantic I think we can gt the jokes but not really feel them.

The title is a little misleading as this is not about white people but about a very specific subset of white people, namely those young professional, liberal, urban-dwelling white people.  By the definitions in here Barack Obama is probably more of a white person than, say, Ted Nugent.  In fact there is a quiz at the back where you determine how white you are and even allowing a few borderline yes answers I only rated 14% white.

The conceit of the book, and website, is that it is supposed to be written for people from either ethnic minorities in America or for foreigners so they can understand ‘white people’ and get on their good side and it is a good conceit.  In reality, of course, the book is aimed firmly at the sort of people the book is supposedly satirising – after all, number 103 on the list is ‘self deprecating humour’.

Bearing that in mind, the natural audience for it in the UK will be the sort of people who appreciate the Colbert Report and wish they could live in New York or San Francisco.  Hopefully there will be enough of them, because despite its lack of substance, American bias and familiarity to anybody who has found the website, it is quite witty and in places very sharp. Ironically (and ‘irony’ is No. 50 on the list) the bits I enjoyed most were those that appeared to have been written specifically for the book, like the flowcharts.

The other thing to appreciate is the attention to detail, with even the sub-title on the cover and the typesetting credit at the back containing sly digs at middle class mores.

Another book I finished this week was Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn, which I actually bought.  It shares one characterisic with SWPL – it is not a book to sit down and read in one go.   Both books are very readable, but the source material is episodic.  In the case of SWPL the material came from individual blogposts and in Brooker’s case the material was originally published as TV reviews in the Guardian.  Either book makes an ideal book for the smallest room in the house, or to whip out and read a chapter or two on the bus or in a waiting room.

It is one of those little facts of life that you don’t really want what you think you want.  I can remember reading Charlie Brooker’s reviews and always felt at the end of them that I wanted more and wouldn’t it be good to be able to just read one after the other, but when you get the chance you realise that they actually work better in small doses.

In the same way, I can remember seeing Madness and Cure videos on TOTP or other music shows in the 80s.  I thought that if I ever got a video recorder and got the chance to buy a video tape that only had Madness or Cure videos on it I would happily watch it all day.  Now that is possible I know that I wouldn’t do it.

As always, the anticipation is far better than the actuality.

Back to the topic though, Stuff White People Like is OK.  I might have enjoyed it more if I had not already visited the website a few times in the past and even more if I fell into the class of people the book categorises as white instead of being only 14% white at best.