White Whine by Streeter Seidell

I’ve been having a pretty bad week and am in totally no mood to tackle anything remotely heavy. So I borrowed this, because I remember laughing when I found the site a couple of years ago (although it doesn’t seem to load for me now).

White Whine is basically a collection of ‘whines’ that exemplify the idea of first world problems. They can be tumblr posts, Facebook posts, and even newspaper articles (apparently some kids sued their mom for lousy birthday cards?!). The book is organised into topics, with the majority of each short chapter being taken up with a commentary and then a couple of whines.

To be honest, I’m not a fan of the commentary. I understand the author was trying to be funny, and maybe it’s because of my current mood, but I didn’t really laugh. It felt more like the commentary was building up to a lot of funny whines and then I’d see one post, which was anticlimactic. I actually started skipping them after a while.

I don’t know what it says about me, but some of the whines actually sounded pretty reasonable. If I saw someone scrubbing themselves with a pumice stone in the hot tub I was in, I’d definitely be grossed out. So sometimes, the author just felt like a cranky old man.

If this was a collection of the best of the posts submitted to the site, I’d like this a lot better. The book works when it pokes fun at the ridiculous entitlement some people have, but it falls flat at other times. If you are/were a fan of the site, you might want to read it, but if you’re not, you can just skip it.