Noah Lugeons

My first completed book this year was Diatribes V. 1, the first collection of the Diatribes of the podcast The Scathing Atheist. (https://scathingatheist.com/) Noah Lugeons is the voice of my anger. He's far better at it than I am -- I wish I had his access to the sharp, vulgar, accurate insult.

These Diatribes are from the first year of an over 4 year old podcast that drops an episode every week. Noah is sometimes topical, but often his wit and fury are directed at more universal wrongs, so they don't age.

I'm not much of a reviewer. I write about my experience with a particular book, and not in a very professional way, so I'm at something of a loss here. I'm attached to the voices of this podcast, and especially to Noah's voice, so it's hard to be objective about this book. Noah expands upon the Diatribes here, giving his thoughts upon rereading, filling in background and context, which makes this more than just a collection of angry and often funny essays. I read through them pretty quickly, in part because I'd heard them all before at least once (yes, I've plundered the archives of the podcast) and in part because they were written to be spoken, and so flow nicely. The act of reading them is pleasant even if the subjects (and, occasionally, the language) is rough and pointy.

Negatives? If you aren't a person friendly to the ideas of secularism, humanism, and especially atheism, this book will piss you off. In fact, it's intended to do so. It's not for a general audience. Also, I had to restrain my inner pedant because there are typos and the occasional grammar error, the casual kind that happen when someone is trying to compile a large collection of writings created over a long period (mostly problems with "it's" and "its". I would happily go into the original file, remove the unnecessary apostrophes, add in the missing commas and periods, and fix that one subjective pronoun into an objective pronoun.

If you aren't familiar with the podcast, I enthusiastically recommend it, especially if you are curious or enjoy dick jokes with an underlying layer of smarts. If you aren't into podcasts, or just want to sample before you tune in, this book will give you a taste.… (lisätietoja)