David Rees (6) (1972–)

This is a completely pointless and very stupid book. I loved it.

I was worried that this was just a funny idea for a book. With an artful photo shoot, a well-designed cover, and enough padding and celebrity endorsements, I thought, you could make a book out of this, but it might not be worth reading.

The line that convinced me otherwise was in a rundown of the equipment required for sharpening pencils, when he says, "It's not hard to come by a good pair of tweezers; I use the ones my wife left behind when she moved out".

The weird emotional truths revealed in these asides colour everything else in the book; it's less about how to sharpen pencils and more about the type of man who sharpens pencils as a calling.… (more)

David Rees' sadly retired Get Your War On remains to this day one of my favorite political comic strips, but after that ended he hasn't done much on that level. In fact, he's apparently been running an artisanal pencil-sharpening side business from his house in suburban New York, which he decided to leverage into this very treatise. I read an interview with him where he described it as "basically an emotional memoir disguised as a how-to manual hidden inside a 'humor' book", and that's actually somewhat accurate, since he has also gotten a divorce, an event that's occasionally, and somewhat jarringly, referred to in the book, which for the most part is exactly what the title promises.

The conceit holds up fairly well for the first two thirds. Rees strikes just the right kind of mostly-deadpan tone while he discusses, in stupefying detail, the materials, techniques, and best practices you would need to sharpen pencils to even the most exacting standards of craftsmanship. He mentions that he's a big fan of serious industrial manuals, and the parts where he discusses minutiae like how to get perfect scalloping patterns on collar bottoms are marvels of comedic voice. Only someone who had dedicated a truly non-trivial amount of time to something like obsessing over pencil points could write sentences like these:

"Remember: A pencil point enjoyed by the writer may not be suited for the draftsman; the ideal point for the standardized-test taker laboring in an over-lit classroom may not please the louche poet idling on a windswept peak. No point can serve all needs. The unsharpened pencil is, in contrast, an idealized form. Putting a point on a pencil - making it functional - is to lead it out of Plato's cave and into the noonday sun of utility. Of course, life outside a cave runs the risk of imperfection and frustration. But we must learn to live with these risks if we want enough oxygen to survive.

Let us now walk together into the sunlight."

The last third of the book, by contrast, feels like space-filling. There are too many items of "wacky" material like sidebars of "Common Names of American Schoolchildren", and even though it's difficult to argue that the final chapters are any less meaningless than the beginning ones, Rees loses the voice he had earlier. Fans of Jimi Hendrix will also object to a portion of the section on unconventional sharpening techniques. Still, as a guide to sharpening pencils, this is basically as comprehensive a book as you could ask for. Of course, you could skip reading the book and just send Rees $15 and a pencil to have the master do it for you himself, but seeing as how a brand new paperback copy currently costs less than $13, and a Kindle version costs only $9.99, that old adage about giving a man a sharpened pencil versus teaching him to sharpen his own has never been more apt. Luckily I picked this up at the library and didn't pay anything.… (more)

There's probably a reason why everyone loves this, but I don't personally get it.

It's clearly about the cultures at some kind of shitty environments, but I guess I'm lucky in that I never had to experience it. I don't enjoy any of the people, whether it be the crackpot managers with silly office metrics based on nonreality or the staff who stay at a place they don't enjoy but also sabotage themselves and others at any chance they get.

It reminds me of retail culture, a mixture of management arrogance/incompetence and employee apathy.I don't find it funny, just depressing.

I may also be too much of a software developer for the random barfage of terminology to anything but weird and nonsensical.

All in all, I'm very happy to not enjoy this book because my life sounds like it would suck if I did. I hope all the best for the people that enjoy this book, I wish I could change the world so that nobody had to be in environments like these.… (more)