I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions — nobody ever keeps them, and frankly I don’t need an extra dose of self-loathing because I failed to live up to some arbitrary and cliche’d promise to lose weight and improve my life — but there is one thing I’d like try to do in 2008, and that’s to get back in the habit of writing book and movie reviews here on Simple Tricks. Partly just because I used to enjoy doing them and I’ve missed it, but also because I think I need the mental exercise. My analytical skills have gotten pretty rusty the last few years, and I’m tired of feeling like a dunce when someone asks me for my opinion on something. And I think it’ll help with my retention, too; I was surprised and disheartened last night while writing my media wrap-up entries at how genuinely difficult it was to remember enough to comment on the stuff I’d read or seen only a couple of months earlier.

For my own sanity, I’m going to try and keep these reviews short. As I’ve repeatedly said, I just don’t have that much leisure time anymore, and I’m not sure people read all my really long entries anyway. Besides, there’s a real art to writing concisely, and that too is probably something I need to practice.

So, first up is a nifty work of memoir called The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by actor, writer, and all-round hoopy frood Wil Wheaton:

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 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. (****, four stars out of five)

[Note: This review also appears on my LibraryThing‘s review page.]