I hate the internet, by Jarett Kobek, is a novel based on the life of Adeline who is a comic book artist. Her life is going well, and she has worked hard to get to the point she is at in her life. After many years of creating she has become quite successful with her comic book career. The whole story stems after a video is posted of Adeline discussing Beyoncé and Rihanna, revolutions in the Middle East to the YouTube. The video is controversial and causes the online community to freak out basically because they think that Adeline has “spit on their gods” and it ruins her reputation. The rest of the story is her trying to right her wrong in a way and redeem herself.
Just three pages into his book Kobek proclaims that “This is a bad novel.” It is a reoccurring theme that affirms my belief that this was by far the worst book, I read this semester. The book is all over the place and the plot and characters are not very important to the novel if I’m being honest. It’s very random and painful to read as the different ideas are all over the place and pop up randomly. The opinions and ideas presented are sloppily done and its very opinionated. The book is hypocritical because the people hating on Adeline are doing just as bad as her because they are sending her death threats “bitch I’m coming to kill you in San Francisco”, so the people online are the ones who are actually in the wrong in my opinion.
The novel is very hard to follow, I recall several times where I would be reading and have to reread as I had become lost and confused as to what was actually going on. Many times, Kobek goes on rants over explaining things which lead to confusion for the reader. “It didn’t suggest that most educated White people, by virtue of their interaction with consumer electronics built by slaves, demonstrated that they didn’t believe in inclusion or fairness or justice. Fifty years ago, they had been ignorant in their unexamined racism and now they were ignorant in their unexamined anti-racism.” (212 Kobek) In this paragraph we see how confusing the writing actually is. The way he introduces ideas is flawed and confusing and causes me not to enjoy the writing.
I would not recommend this book to anyone as it goes in circles and is very confusing. My whole class was in agreement that this was the worst reading the whole semester and we are glad to be done with it. I would read anything we already read over this novel, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr.Squires removes this from his required coursework as it is too confusing and pointless in my opinion. In fact, I hope that’s what happens for the sake of future students taking this class.
Literature & the Internet 