Saturday, January 2, 2010

Sock, by Penn Jillette

This novel by Penn Jillette (from Penn & Teller) is more autobiography than fiction.  There is a thin plot around the hero catching a serial killer, but the book is mostly rants from Penn which I enjoyed.  The story is told from the point-of-view of a toy sock monkey which is a novel device.  It is made even better at the end when we are told the sock monkey is a metaphor for god, i.e. an imaginary friend that you feel closer to than real people.  I don't think I'm giving away anything because we had to be told the metaphor instead of it being demonstrated by the plot.  It's a great idea--it's just too bad Penn didn't show it as part of a nicely developed plot rather than telling us his thoughts disguised as a novel.

On a cool side note, I read this book on my new Kindle.  At first I thought my Kindle was broken because random ink splotches appeared on a few of the early pages.  Then I realized that Penn put fake printing press mistakes into the e-version to make it look more like a real book.  Very cool.

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