3 out of 5

It’s sort of unfair to rate this as a book because it was, initially, just Ryan’s tumblr chronicling his reading of… the novelization of the feature film Back to The Future, which he promised was all sorts of crazy in its divergences from the movie (yes), so despite that it includes, I think, all of the mentioned book in excerpts or paraphrasing plus Ryan’s comments on what he’s reading, page by page, it probably functioned best as a daily or weekly read and not as a ‘book’ proper, as the humor gets pretty repetitive.  Still, it’s a cheap Kindle purchase and there were absolutely moments I laughed out loud and even though I’m not a diehard Back-t-t-Future fan, like a certain webcomic author, the study drawn between the novel’s writing style and what made it to the film is pretty hilarious.

The thing to latch on to here, and what North latched on to, is that this was written off of an early draft of the film’s script, plus it seems to have been adapted by a man a tad out of touch with modern day, making constant references – from Marty’s point of view – to figures or concepts that wouldn’t have made sense to a teenage, but made sense to an older adult writing in the 1980s.  So there’s a fair amount of humor mined from our original author being repeatedly called out as an old man, but still, many kudos to North for spotting how weird some elements are when pondered upon just as narrative techniques.  I mean, we expect novels of books to be bad, but it took someone with Ryan’s bent and intelligent sense of humor to call attention to just how odd some aspects of this are.

Still, as mentioned, while Ryan’s webcomic Dinosaur Comics can get away with shuttling through various styles of humor, this blog stuck mostly to Ryan’s “that’s totes weird, bro” conversational style of humor.  Read at blog pace, page by page, it is frequently hilarious.  But read like a book, you can start to call the jokes coming around the corner.  What serves to break this up is when North inserts some of his thoughts on how and why something happened in the film, shaded anew by some information from this, apparently, early draft, or by the years his had since his many viewings to sit and think about it… and a blog / tumblr is a great place for exactly this, to just pose these very specific Back to the Future questions he’s always had and toss some of his half-informed half-hilarious takes on potential answers out there.

Worth the cheap price, for sure.  But totally popcorn entertainment, something to pick up and put down.