M. Lucero

Watership Down meets Ovid

Revisado: 07-31-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Absolutely. It's like very few other reads on the market today.

Who was your favorite character and why?

King Sparrow. He's humble yet authoritative, wise yet flawed.

Which character – as performed by James Romick – was your favorite?

He did a great job on every character, giving them each unique, recognizable, and fitting vocal features.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

In a world where bird betrays bird, anything can happen... Literally anything.

Any additional comments?

Take equal parts Watership Down and traditional fairy tales, and add a strong dash of Ovid, and what you get is pretty close to Bill Meeks' The Trials of King Sparrow. Another way to describe the story — or the first half, at any rate — is to imagine a BBC nature documentary, but told from the first person perspective of the animals themselves. The story begins with King Sparrow, the monarch of a small flock of birds flying south for the winter, is the victim of betrayal, almost losing his life to a conspiracy of wolves and one of his own people. Injured and almost certain to die, he begins a long journey toward vengeance, helped or hindered by other animals along the way. This first segment, to me, has a lot in common with Richard Adams' epic of rabbits plagued by a continuous series of dangers both without and within their own kind. Like Adams, Meeks gives his animal characters a definite ans pleasurable sense of their own animality. Though they have reason and speech, they're not merely human characters in animal clothing. This, to me, is the best part of the story.

About two-thirds into the book, the story takes an unexpected turn, as mysterious forces begin to intervene in King Sparrow's quest, and he is forced to turn aside, for a while, from the road to vengeance. This section is surprising and dreamlike, and for a while I felt unsure whether enjoyment or unease was the better response.

In a way this is appropriate, as this is often the feeling one gets when reading certain old myths, especially the kind one finds in The Metamorphoses. What is more surprising is that, as firmly rooted as the story begins in animality and a naturalist (in the more common sense of the word) aesthetic, it ends in sheer supernaturalism (also in the common sense). Again, this is approapriate to the fairy tail tradition, which in some ways King Sparrow falls firmly into.

The difference is that these characters, being written so well and so strongly as animals, do not belong as squarely in that setting of enchantment and happy endings. There is a brutality in King Sparrow that is both very appropriate given its setting in the animal world, and also very disturbing given the human territory the story wanders into later on. And that dissonance contributes very much to the overall sense of awe, mystery, and inscrutability the reader is left with at the end of the book.

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A glimpse of Internet history...

Revisado: 05-25-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

It's hard to imagine life without Internet memes, even for people who have lived in decades before they were around. For this and similar reasons, reading Bill Meek's single, Bert Is Evil, feels surreal. Exploring one of the first memes to spread around the Internet, the book recalls those far-off days when something amusing on the Internet to pass around to all our friends felt novel and unexpected.

Given the ubiquity of memes like Condescending Wonka, Philosoraptor, and Misunderstood Spider, this look back into the recent past feels more extreme of a retrospection than it should — as if we are talking not about something that happened in the late '90s, but rather something out of your grandfather's reminiscences of walking uphill to school both ways. The days before color television. The eight track. An odd effect, making me feel old as well as inspiring thoughts about the contracting and dilation of time.

In his book, Meeks carves out the story of a proto web developer by the name of Dino Ignacio, who created Bert is Evil in that early era of the bare-bones Internet which Meeks likes to call the Old Wide Web. Ignacio, we learn, derived the meme's humor from his linking of the well-known Muppet to dark and shadowy figures Lee Harvey Oswald, Osama Bin Laden, and even Hitler.

Reading this account, I realized that I had indeed browsed this site — or perhaps one of its many mirrors, the reasons for which Meeks chronicles at length — and that its 'shopped images indeed lingered somewhere in the ephemera of my memory. It made me think as well of other similar early memes, my favorite of which was Mr. T vs Everything, a site which 'shopped (with much less skill than Ignacio) images of the A-Team hero into poorly-executed webcomics, often ending with T throwing his foes into outer space.

These sites, as well as many others, provided troves of amusement at a certain point of my life; and yet all of them find their provenance in the work of Ignacio. A shadowy figure himself, Ignacio is brought to life by Meek's story, which takes the form of interviews with the man himself, and analysis and commentary by Meeks. Weaving together the history of its naissance, its popularity boom, and the fallout of its unfortunate involvement in a protest rally, the short feels like an episode of This American Life for the internet, especially if you listen to the audiobook edition.

Recommended for anyone interested in the history of the Internet, or even for those mildly curious about how these memes got their start, Bert Is Evil is a short, amusing, and informative look back into the incomprehensible labyrinth that is the Internet, clearing it up and lifting it out from obscurity for the reader to understand, maybe, one of the many roots that grew into the Internet we know today.

What other book might you compare Bert Is Evil: The True Story Behind the Web's First Viral Hit to and why?

It reminds me of This American Life for the Internet.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes!

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