5% of Five (#1) – 5 Free “Humor” Kindle Books

Damn you HundredZeros!

Thanks to you and sites like ManyBooks and the Baen Free Library, I now have more books than I know what to do with on my Kindle. I was already at the point where I didn’t have time to read all my print books, and you’ve gone and made it worse. There’s only one thing to do…

Make more snap decisions.

Introducing 5% of Five!!!!

5% of Five is the new irregular feature here at BenTrubeWriter, featuring reviews of the first 5% of five free books. Hopefully these posts will be helpful in telling you what’s worth your time (and lack of money), and what you’d be better off avoiding.

Our Rating Scale!!!!

5 – I really enjoyed this. I would (and may have already) spent money to buy other books by this author.

4 – I’m intrigued, I will have to finish this at some point.

3 – Some good parts, overall so-so.

2 – I’m glad this was free. It was pretty bad.

1 – DELETED!

Today’s Books (Humor)

Kids Say The Cutest Things When They’re Drunk – The best part of this is the title. I was kind of expecting some bizarre narratives of weird things kids had done, but the book starts with a test on whether you’re ready to be a parent. Obvious warning signs that you’re not ready, you don’t want to clean diapers, lose all your free time (and money), and are a pedophile. If you want to read a funny book on parenting, try Mother On Fire, by Sandra Tsing Loh (Not free, but far more worth your time). Rating 1.

Silly Signs – I read 100% of this, in about 5 minutes. Mostly pun based humor. One or two laughs, but generally pretty lowbrow. The book is presented in cartoon format without a lot of variation. It might be worth your zero dollars, but I guarantee an instant archival after one reading. Also there seemed to be some formatting glitches (blank pages) on my Kindle. Rating 2.

Funny Jokes For Adults – By Adult they mean clean but “intelligent” humor. Probably at the level of “Humor in Uniform” or other such columns in Reader’s Digest. Nothing that made me laugh out loud, but maybe a few jokes that I’d retell with a little tweaking. Formatting is the biggest problem with this. The original document must have used very small fonts, since I had to turn my text most of the way up to make it readable. Rating 3.

Obama Sutra – Another book where the best part is the title. I knew this would probably be pretty silly, but I was actually looking for some decent Obama based humor here. By the third page or so they were already making a Clinton joke, and most of the Obama jokes definitely came from one side of the political aisle. I bet in the right hands a more “fair and balanced” and far funnier book could be crafted with this title, but not this one. Rating 1.

The Book Of Biff #1 Target Practice – This book filled a need I didn’t even know I had, single panel comics for the Kindle. Biff is a bald man with some serious eyebrows and mustache who gets himself into all sorts of weird situations. Is he human, an alien, or a toaster? The Book Of Biff is an online comic by Chris Hallbeck that’s been going on and off for more than a decade. To date there are 10 collections of 100+ comics a piece, most $2.99 but this one is free! I’m not sure if I’ll buy the rest at $2.99, but I did pick up Volume 5 which is discounted at $0.99. Rating 5.

That’s it, our 5% of Five. What did you think?