There was some drugging and some drinking but there wasn't much of a romanticism put on it. One thing that separated Scattershot from most of these other books is it didn't end up glorifying the chemical abuse aspect. The book falls into the same category that I'd place Bukowski, John Fante (and quite possibly Dan Fante, who I haven't read but I think would fit here), or The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin or Joseph Mattson's Empty the Sun, which I don't know exactly how to sum up nicely but as pretty straight forward, 'muscular' / masculine, anti-hero / loser stories.

I think if twenty-two year old Greg had read this he would have wet himself over it, but nearing middle-age Greg enjoyed it too, just not as much as my younger self would have.

For now I will just comment that this is all slightly relevant because this is only available as an e-book. I will admit I enjoyed reading on a device more than I enjoy reading for an extended period of time in front of my temperamental laptop. I could have read it on my computer but after reading the first twenty pages or so I realized that I wasn't enjoying the experience very much. This is the very first book I read on a device. I felt it was a disservice to this book, the author and the publisher to use the review as yet another platform for me to rant about 'e-readers' (I seriously hate that term, anytime you see the word device you can think Nook, Kindle or whatever other brand of thingey's one would use to read a book without paper). Those glorious and not so profound points though will die in my notebook, or maybe pop up somewhere else but for now they aren't important. I will say that I had some awesome points in the rough draft that had to do with the misuse of our language in the marketing of these devices to the public. I was borrowing one of these for a couple of days, and I borrowed it expressly so I could read Scattershot, which the kind people at Seedpod emailed to me so I could review it.ĭoes anyone really care to hear my semi-luddite ramblings about electronic devices you read on? I didn't think so. What I wrote in the hour I was on break was mostly about my experiences reading this book on the Nook touch, the third generation device put out by the company that gives me my paycheck each week. I started writing this review on paper, with a pen about a week ago when I was having a lot of trouble with my laptop.

Scattershot by Richard Goodwin