Things I’d Rather Read Instead of Sean Penn’s Novella
Sean Penn, who has plead no contest to assault more than once, and was sentenced to both jail time for assault as well as psychiatric counseling for a violent temper, as well as being an Academy Award–winning actor, has quit acting and written a novella. It is, by all accounts, bad. Real bad. Real real real bad. So bad I would read Franzen before I’d read it.
Here, in collaboration with several other Book Rioters, is a non-exhaustive list of things I would read before I would pick up Bob Whatever.
The Twilight series
The Fifty Shades of Grey series
The full text of every Terms & Conditions I’ve ever agreed to without reading them (Deepali Agarwal)
The bottle of Doctor Bronner’s Peppermint Castile Soap
The screenplay for Dunkirk (Deepali)
Garbage Pail Kids fanfiction (Jamie Canaves)
Dunkirk fan fiction (Deepali)
Every iteration of the AHCA (Susie Dumond)
Right-wing bumper stickers (S.W. Sondheimer)
James Franco (Jaime Herndon)
Paul Ryan on The Fountainhead (Elizabeth Allen)
A majority opinion written by Clarence Thomas
Walden (again)
Photo by J—S on Unsplash
The Bible (again)
A dissenting opinion written by Clarence Thomas
The Federalist Papers (again)
My college transcripts
Editor’s note: a previous version of this post referenced Penn being an “alleged wife-beater.” As Madonna retracted her statements, we’ve retracted that phrase.