The Happiest Days of Our Lives is Wil Wheaton's third book, and is an autobiographical look at some of the happiest and/or important points in his life.  His first, Dancing Barefoot, is similar in style and published under his own Monolith Press, as well as his latest.  His second, Just a Geek, is an autobiography which was published by O'Reilly, publisher of many tech books you may have read.

Reading the well-written Happiest Days was a fun experience, and you can't help but feel like Wheaton is telling you these stories himself.  If you have read his blog often enough, you may have read some of these stories, but it's great to see them in print.  And these really are some happy and fun stories, including one about his love of Star Wars action figures, or his family run for the Susan G. Komen foundation, or his great poker game (which he actually builds some suspense), or even his return to the stages that once housed Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he played Wesley Crusher.

I have to hand it to Wil, he brought back my own memories.  I think he's around three years older than I am, and I fell in love with Star Wars figures at the same time; I was stuck wearing corduroys in the late 70s/early 80s (thank God they went out of style by the time my family moved to South Florida in 1984), and more.  Except I wasn't an actor on TNG (dang). 

Anyway, I highly recommend getting this and his other books, they'll bring a smile to your face.  Find them at monolithpress.com or amazon.com.  Now Wil, can we get some fiction?

If you read the back page of the book, Wheaton gets tech geeky on us, telling us how he wrote the book (on a MacBook Pro with OpenOffice.org, along with a first draft done on a computer running Linux).  If you read enough Wheaton, you know he's a big ol' tech geek!  Also, instead of a Copyright, Wheaton licensed the book under the "Creative Commons Attributions-Noncommercial-Share-Alike license 3.0" (which is a mouthful), which I believe makes it possible for others to freely use the book, noncommercially.

A little about Wil Wheaton: He was one of the first bloggers on the internet with his wilwheaton.net; he has since taken it over to WWdN in Exile at wilwheaton.typepad.com.  He also writes great, geeky articles for websites like the Onion A/V.  You may also remember him as Gordie in the most excellent Stand By Me, or as Wesley Crusher in the even cooler Star Trek: The Next Generation (my friend Sarah was a big Wesley fan).

Posted at 09:17PM Nov 26, 2007 by Heath McKnight in Entertain  |  Comments[0]