The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton

The Happiest Days of Our Lives

Author – Wil Wheaton

Hardcover
Pages: 160 pages
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Release Date: December, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59606-244-3

I first became aware of Wil Wheaton (outside of his acting, of course) a couple of years ago (or maybe around the time I joined Twitter. I can’t remember) and could never really figure out what the big deal was, or why nerds (Trekkie or not) were ready to kiss the damn ground he walked on. Sure, I was damn jealous of the traffic his blog gets, and that he was going to be on Season Three of The Guild, but Wesley Crusher? Come on, nobody liked Wesley Crusher back in 1989, so why would that change now, 20 years later?

Well, for one, it turns out not even Wesley Crusher liked Wesley Crusher all that much (Wheaton appreciates the success of the show, but was never too fond of the material given to him by writers), and it also turns out that Wes– er… Wil Wheaton has a whole lot more to offer outside of Wesley Crusher and Gordy from Stand by Me.

The Happiest Days of our Lives showed up unannounced on my doorstep the other day, an advance copy from the good people at Subterranean Press that wasn’t ever really on my radar. It couldn’t have come at a better time. After coming over a marathon read of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, I picked up Junot Diaz’s The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that promised to be a geek’s dream, but left me feeling confused, alienated and a little depressed. Inevitably, it became hard not to compare Diaz’s novel to the one I read next. To follow that uneven experience, I picked up the quiet little novelette by Wheaton, a collection of non-fiction pulled together from writing for his blog, WWdn and found everything little misinformed me wanted The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to be.
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