Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd Book

I seriously thought I wasn't going to be able to finish this book. I had gotten to around page 60 and I felt like I wasn't going to be able to connect with these stories. In a way I'm glad I pushed through it but I wasn't as happy with it like I thought I would be.

Clearly what interested me was the whole culture of being a geek and there were a good collection of young adult authors who contributed to this book, so I totally expected to be thrilled with it. I figured out fairly quickly that my concept of being a geek is not the same as everyone else's. Honestly I thought I was pretty geeky, boy was I wrong (at least according to this book). I totally felt out of my realm at first. A lot of terms and things that were mentioned would just whoosh over my head. It had sci-fi, LOTR, role-play (real and not real), gamers, nerds, drama people, and so many other hobbies and people I couldn't really keep track of. I did have a general knowledge of most of these things, but I did notice how much I actually didn't know.

Since this is a collection of short stories, it was kind hard for me to really connect with any of the characters. A lot of the time I thought any of the good stories would be great full length novels. Really understanding the characters is important to me, and it's hard to establish that kind of kinship toward the characters without a lot of pages to do it in. Short stories remind me of when you're in school and assigned to read a story and answer a list of questions. Not fun times. A lot of the stories had teen drinking, which is realistic. I'm not naive or oblivious and I know teenagers drink, but there were only a handful of stories that did not have drinking, and it kind of felt like it was stuck in there to make geeks look cool. Isn't that a bit I don't know... trying too hard? It just didn't sit right with me.

I did enjoy a few of the stories, my favorites being the second to last one that dealt with astronomy and the one that Garth Nix wrote. Some of the stories concentrated a lot on the geeky hobby (more like obsessions) and others had that as a sidenote and dealt with deeper issues. I'm glad I picked it up, but not as funny as I had hoped.