If it weren't for the close-to-but-not-really sci-fi story called "Escape From Spiderhead" and the story about the war vet called "Home" I would have said every story in this book is atrocious, but even those stories weren't that great. The choppy sentence structure, the plague of oddly placed punctuation, and the overuse of informal language was extremely distracting from the overall story telling; I did not find it "edgy" or whatever it may have been that Saunders was going for. This book was considered by several sources as "hilarious" but the only funny thing about this book is that some people actually enjoyed it. One of the most annoying aspects about the book was that the characters kept getting lost in their own heads to the point where I almost forgot that the scene being written was not actually happening--and sometimes that happened so much that when actual events were taking place I thought they were in the characters' heads; this happened too often in "Puppy," "Victory Lap," and "Al Roosten." The story that made the least amount of sense to me though was "Sticks." It is a two-page long story about a scarecrow-like figure that the protagonist's father enjoyed dressing in various outfits. From reading other reviews, I gathered that the purpose of this act was to cope with the death of his wife; however that did not come across to me as I read it. The story focused too much on the sticks rather than on the suffering the father harbored--that is if Saunders was really trying to write about a man with depression and not about his scarecrow. "Exhortation" was so overwhelmingly dry that it took me many tries to get through the entire story, despite it being one of the shortest stories in the books. I completely gave up with "The Semplica Girl Diaries" after only a couple of pages; the plot of the story, if there was one, was not evident and I felt that I was wasting my time trying to continue on especially since it was the longest story in the book. I could not bear to read every story nor do I plan to ever try (the events in the final two stories will forever remain a mystery I do not care to solve). I almost thought these stories were rough drafts that could have potentially been good if Saunders wrote them in normal prose instead of this contemporary writing style. I got this book for free and I was not aware that it was so widely popular and highly rated. I honestly do not understand why--this book was terrible; I would not recommend it to anyone.