It was a very interesting, meta experience to do this as an audiobook instead of in print. Mostly I feel really vindicated that I'm not the only person who gets VERY passionate about people who use crappy grammar and punctuation, and I'm especially annoyed with things like "with Jessica and I," a mistake that, interestingly, is pretty much exclusively employed by the educated class to sound fancy (read: pompous) and is actually just plain incorrect.

I got a little bored towards the end, and occasionally Norris' own classist attitudes came through a bit too strong. I'm not impressed with technophobes or snobs who disparage any part of internet culture because they want to legitimize themselves as old school and fancy, and she throws that stuff in a lot. Pronouns these days are an especially fraught and fascinating subject, and she shows an utter lack of awareness or care for the social justice elements of them (or anything else. She says awfully insensitive things about her trans sister, for example) and instead calls ze/hir pronouns something out of "internet groups dedicated to bondage" (slight paraphrase since you can't just look things up in an audiobook). I doubt that, but even if it's true, that's a hugely reductive and rude thing to say when genderless pronouns, while in flux, are not something petty or oversensitive.

So yeah. The straight-up grammar talk and anecdotes about working at (pretentious, pompous, but nonetheless relevant to American culture) The new Yorker? Yes. Elitism? Present, but would be nicer if it weren't.