Fridgularity

Fridgularity
by Mark Rayner
(4/5 stars)

I think I would have enjoyed this a little more if I hadn't been so busy the last few weeks I hardly had time to read it at all, which made it seem to take forever.  My main criticism is that the book is on the long side, something I similarly felt recently when I read "John Dies At the End."  It's my opinion that humorous books should stay under 300 pages or it starts to run too long, like one of those annoying SNL skits that keeps pounding the joke into the ground for 10 minutes until there's nothing funny left and you just get up to use the bathroom or something.

Anyway, the book is about a fridge that takes over the world.  Well not really a fridge.  It's an artificial intelligence that manifests itself through a web-enabled fridge in the kitchen of Blake Given, an Irish-Canadian web programmer who apparently is pretty well off to be able to afford a web-equipped fridge.  One day the fridge starts talking to him and calling itself "Zathir".  Zathir turns off the Internet while it works to increase its strength.  Naturally there's a bit of a panic.  Blake ends up pretty well off as Zathir's primarily link to humanity.

There's a lot of other stuff that happens but for a major cataclysm things stay pretty well-mannered.  The ending felt a little abrupt especially after as long as it took to get there.  I'd have liked a little more of an idea what exactly happens to Blake and the others at the end. 

Still, if you've got the time for it, this is a fun read.  It'll make you reconsider just how much time you should spend on the Internet--reading book reviews for instance.

That is all.