3.0

I enjoyed this book, but had to give it three stars because I ended the book less excited about it than I was when I started. The three stars are as much my fault as Chuck's. I was hoping this would be a discussion of the character structure of villains in general rather than an examination of what makes one person a villain over another in popular culture. There's nothing wrong with his examination--it's thoughtful and often funny--it just didn't quite offer me what I was hoping for when I started. It's also still a valuable explanation that helped me realize why a character could be considered a villain in a story; it just didn't speak to that specifically. I'm also not much of a football person, so many of his football-based stories were only tangentially interesting.

But his honesty and his examination of those American culture tends to consider "villainous" is still definitely worth a read. This book is probably much more widely appealing than the book I thought this was would be, to be honest. Only WRITERS would read about CHARACTERS, right?