The Ravenous Bibliophage: Brian Briggs, The BBook of Geek
Think you know everything there is to know about being a geek? Think again, true believers: Much to learn you still have. But fear not! Brian Briggs has pulled together a truly delightful how-to guide to help veteran geeks, would-be geeks, and geek watchers expand their knowledge of this multifaceted and richly detailed culture.
Equal parts survival guide and good-natured spoof, Briggs's BBook of Geek has it all. Have trouble keeping up with the bloggers and their idiosyncratic language? This book can help. Still don't know what LARP stands for? You will. The BBook is broken up into helpful genre-specific sections such as literature, movies, and gaming, the better to help the well-rounded geek find what he or she needs quickly. Also, for your entertainment, there are countless lists on topics such as 'Top 11 Signs You Shouldn't Board That Spacecraft,' and many (surprisingly difficult!) quizzes designed to test your knowledge of your fandom of choice. Is 'Boss Nass' a Star Wars character or a Hip-Hop artist? Is 'Red Tornado' a superhero or a household cleaner? Believe me, it's harder than it looks.
There is a wealth of information here that will surprise and amuse you, but a word of warning: there are tongue-in-cheek 'facts' interspersed among the real truths of geekdom. (Example: "LOLcats can be traced back to ancient Egyptian drawings of cats with hieroglyphics that roughly translate to: 'I can haz pyramidz?'") And let's not forget the hilarious newspaper clippings with titles like "Blizzard Selling LifePacks for Scheduled Downtime in World of Warcraft," and "Thirty-Two Arrested in Poorly Conceptualized LARP."
The only complaint I have about this book is that it left me with an unavoidable sense of how little I truly know about geekdom in general. My own geekiness is confined to a spare few areas that I know way too much about--I'm not what you'd call 'fluent' in Elvish, but I can tell Sindarin from Quenya when I hear it--but my knowledge of gaming and comics is sorely lacking. And to that end, I'm glad that a guide exists to help fill in those gaps, at least a little.
It's a rare person indeed who can convey a genuine affection for and kinship with a given culture at the same time that he's shamelessly harpooning it, but Briggs pulls it off. Even if you have trouble separating the real facts from the clever jibes, chances are you will learn something new, and laugh your head off doing it.
