The Happiest Days of Our Lives

Meh, a disappointment. The Happiest Days of Our Lives is a collection of perfectly mundane Wil Wheaton stories about his family. I should say families to be more precise, since about half of them include Wil's childhood memories.

Picture this: you take your kids out to a fast food joint for an ice cream. One of them says something mildly amusing (I am being generous here) and you flirt with the cashier a little. The end.

The other half of the stories are mostly about his incredibly first-world childhood problems, like that one day when his mom took him to the toy store and he could not for the life of him decide which of the $1.99 Star Wars toys to get.

Although I realize this book is just a collection of blog posts, the stories are just show more too boring to be worth of anyone who is not a major Wheaton fanboy's time. This is nothing like Just a Geek which is an honest, pour-out-your-heart autobiography in which Wil critically examines his own life and the Hollywood industry. If you collected ten people off the street and told them to write a couple of stories about their family, I wager about eight of them would be more interesting than this.

Too bad, because Wil Wheaton is actually a good writer and he shows flashes of it in The Happiest Days, too. But even a very good writer can't make a completely boring story interesting. Fortunately, this is a pretty short collection. show less

A collection of short vignettes that previously appeared on the author's popular blog or elsewhere online, this is a warm-hearted, evocative, and very readable little book. Wil Wheaton is roughly my same age, so we share many of the same generational touchstones -- Star Wars action figures and '80s music, hair, and clothes, for example -- and this lends much of his subject matter an instant familiarity. But even when he's writing about things I have little or no personal experience with -- Dungeons and Dragons, poker, or running a marathon -- Wil is a natural-born storyteller who pulls you in and makes you his accomplice in all that he's feeling and experiencing. He also has an irreverent, occasionally vulgar, but very funny sense of show more humor that ensures things only get heavy when Wil wants to make a point. The former child actor may forever be remembered as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but he grew up to be something much more akin to Gordie LaChance, the narrator of Stand by Me.

My favorite segments were "I Am the Modren Man" (wherein he tortures his teenage son with the twenty-year-old Styx song "Mr. Roboto"), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek" (a recounting of his personal history with D&D, culminating in the night before he introduces his boys to the game), "Let Go -- A Requiem for Felix the Bear" (about the death of a beloved pet -- I'm a sap for these sorts of things), and "Lying in Odessa," a poker story that I frankly expected to bore me to death (I'm not much interested in poker) but which turned out to be a suspenseful and very satisfying story of the night Wil took a walk on the wild side and almost -- almost -- won big.

This is a keeper. show less

Wil's third book (I've only read this and his second) is awesome. Like his other books it consists of a series of short true stories, generally based on blog entries. Some stories had me close to tears - particularly the story of the loss of his cat. Another, one of which I'd recently read an excerpt of, tells of his introduction to D&D. There's only one story that really relates to Star Trek (another sad story), so if you aren't a fan of Star Trek you don't have to avoid it.Wil is one of those authors who makes me green with envy. If only I could write half as well as he does.

I've read Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek as well as this book. Well, rather, I listened to this book. I remember reading Just A Geek and thinking that it felt somewhat "forced" compared to Dancing Barefoot. I appreciated the raw simplicity and honesty of the stories in Dancing Barefoot and The Happiest Days of Our Lives harkens back to that book. I think it felt like a much more natural sequel to Dancing Barefoot than Just a Geek did. Wheaton and I have some things in common, which may have made his stories resonate more with me. We're about the same age and we're both fathers of boys. I especially liked the stories around remembering your childhood and trying to create good memories with your kids.

A series of wryly humorous, thematically-connected vignettes - about childhood in the 70s and 80s, and about growing up geeky - which really resonated with me.

I do generally like Wil Wheaton, but in this collection he just came across as really self-righteous. He kind of seems like he wants some sort of award just for raising his step-kids, and since their father is still in the picture I thought it was very unfair of Wheaton to make digs at him in this book. He isn't as good of a writer as he thinks he is, which meant that most of the stories (which are just about mundane, everyday things like getting ice cream or playing video games) were pretty dull.

In stories like the one where he throws a tantrum about accidentally not saving his video game/his stepson touching his D&D dice (for real, Wil? You're a grown man) or the one where he "calls out" his parents for not confronting his fourth show more grade teacher and causing a huge scene when she told him off unfairly (way to hold a grudge), he just comes across as very petty and kind of a douche. But whatever, if you want to read some not very interesting anecdotes about a guy you don't know, this is the book for you! show less

I've been keeping up with his blog for a few years now, it fascinates me to read about the life of someone about my age but who's life is almost totally different than mine. It's the almost that keeps me reading, a shared affinity for geekdom and an appretiation for the things in life that matter. This chapbook reprints and updates some of his blog posts about the things he enjoys and loves: family, pets, geekdom, poker, Star Trek. It was a bit odd reading a book and knowing most of the stories, I really got the sense of buying a book by someone I know to support them rather than to read all new material. That said, it's an enjoyable read, and collects the posts in one place, no searching required.