Short summary: don’t buy it. Hell, don’t even borrow it.
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve quite enjoyed the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon since pretty much when it started. Mocking Intelligent Design and the people who promote it is pretty much my bread and butter*. In any case, the venganza.org letter was hillarious, and the reaction it sparked was no less than amazing and wonderful. For me at least, the best part was the graph showing the correlation of pirates and global temperature.

When I heard there was going to be a FSM gospel published by the venganza author, I jumped on the idea and preordered the book. I mean why not… it was only like $10 or so. It arrived the other day and I gave it all a good lookie-poo.

I am sad to have to tell you all what an incredible disspointment the book has been for me. There was a grand total of one (1) original thing in the entire book that made me laugh, and that was on the damn cover. The problems with the book are many, but I’ll list a few:

  • the form factor for the book is all wrong. The cover actually has a picture of what a proper gospel looks like, but is actually a paperbook in an annoying wide format that wastes a lot of space. So instead of footnotes, the side notes appear off to the side and are very distracting.
  • the book has a severe lack of focus. It doesn’t seem to know what it’s function is supposed to be… is it a satire of ID, is it just mocking ID, is it faux-serious, or is it a random collection of things found on the internet?
  • the lack of focus would be alright if it were structured properly, but it is sadly not. It’s difficult for the reader to shift in the change of tone from satire to serious, from promoting it’s own “agenda” to making fun of another.
  • most importantly, it’s not funny. It’s repetitive, and kind of lame.

The only reason to buy this book is to donate some money to the guy who created the FSM. And if you want to do that, I’d suggest a better way would be direct donation instead of purchasing this ill focused and unfunny book.Notes:
* This is only true because I have no actual bread and butter**
** except in the literal sense, because I have bread and I have butter but not “bread and butter”. Fuck, I’m even confusing myself here.