It's not as good as Vowell's later works, which are collections of essays. This is her diary, the product of a project she did in 1995 of listening to the radio (almost) every single day and documenting what she hears, how she likes it, and how it affects her and others' worldview. I do think it's really funny that while she totally disses NPR all the time, she listens to it a lot. And her obsession with how unadventerous NPR makes talk radio (she obsesses about NPR like 20 days out of every month) made me listen to NPR much more regularly (I used to just listen to certain shows that I liked, like Car Talk or This American Life, where Vowell is now a regular contributor, hehe). And she also turned me onto the extremely weird Hour of Slack by one of the reverands of the Church of the Subgenius (you can get the show off the web) -- I'm not really sure if I like the show or not, but I know I keep downloading and listening to it. I would never have had heard about HoS if it wasn't for Vowell. And she made me re-remember how great those grunge bands are (Hole, Nirvana, etc), especially when compared to those bands now that try to pass as alternative. And that previous sentence just made me feel really really old -- "kids these days and their music!".

Anywho, from good ole Amazon.com --
From Kirkus Reviews
Be ready to hit the scan button repeatedly with this wildly uneven, day-by-day-by-day diary of a year--1995--spent listening to the radio. Like strip malls and superhighways, radio has become such an integral part of the American landscape that we rarely notice its sheer ubiquity. Between our houses, our cars, our offices, even our elevators, there are more than 500,000,000 radios in this country, all spewing a 24-hour-a-day hodgepodge of everything from rock to religion to right-wing ranting. Any account of this vast cacophony is necessarily subjective, but Vowell, a music columnist for San Francisco Weekly, spices her impressionistic stew with unhealthy dollops of narcissism and jejune banality: ``I only conceived this diary as a means to say that I'm just as confused and overwhelmed as my elders, just as ill-informed and worried and perplexed and lacking in answers (but willing to look) as people twice my age.'' In these limited terms, the book is a roaring success. As Vowell spins her way around the country, tuning in to the local radio stations, she reacts like the perfect poster girl for Generation X: I mean, don't you just hate Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and all those mean Republicans? And how about National Public Radio, isn't it, totally nonadventurous and establishment? And doesn't Top-Forty completely bite? What little wisdom there is to be found in this landscape apparently comes mainly from grungy Seattle rockers like Nirvana and Pearl Jam (those who believe that truth resides in rock lyrics will be particularly taken with this book). By the end, Vowell is justly sick and tired of radio, of the noise and chatter, the hate and spew and ``all the stupidity.'' Unfortunately, one of those rare books in which subject and author are in near-perfect harmony. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Released on Saturday, October 18, 2003 at tag sale at my house in Chicopee, Massachusetts USA.

Tag-saled at some ridiculously cheap price -- all just an excuse to try to get more people in my area into BC...hopefully it worked. We will see. :-)