the voice of this novel is a sock monkey named Dickie. he is owned by the Little Fool, a police diver who scubas a reserve of water in new york for bodies. the story starts to pick up steam when the Little Fool drags a familiar body out of the water. an old lover of his that he has now determined was his true love. i enjoyed the book as a whole. it is full of pop culture references, all of which the author has said help give the paragraphs a theme. i felt that there was a chapter towards the end...

Kinda weird and choppy writing, with a story told by a largely omniscient sock puppet narrator. I believe this work would be patently offensive to many about things like religion, and to a lesser degree, human sexuality. A few enjoyable moments and by the end the story was pretty damned captivating. Was more curious to see what the hyperactive comedian/magician was able to pull off in the literary department, but definitely not blown away.

I'll be up front here. Lately, I've had a non-sexual crush on Penn Jillette. This, of course, was spurred by his appearance on that awful time-suck of a show called Celebrity Apprentice; however, I've always thought he was articulate, creative and uber-intelligent. He's tall. He's mysterious. He's mothereffing magic. Not to mention, he named his daughter Moxie CrimeFighter. For real. What a RAD DAD. Anyways, a few years back, I picked up "Sock" and found one more reason to appreciate Penn Jillet...

This book has the most interesting narrator I have ever read: a sock monkey called Dickie. All throughout the book, readers will see things from Dickie's point of view. You see, Dickie belongs to a grown-up NYPD diver, whom Dickie calls Little Fool. One day Little Fool discovered a body belonging to his former lover Nell, obviously dead, in a river. Together with his friend Tommy and Dickie, Little Fool tries to find the killer. Which is a bit challenging, since Little Fool is a diver, not detec...

I am a big fan of Penn Jillette, whether it be from TV or his Vegas show, where he graciously signed this book. So of course I was curious to read a work of fiction from him. I was a little nervous because the story was told from the point of view of a sock monkey and I had read an awful book called Winkie, which was told from the point of view of a teddy bear. Luckily the odd narrators are the only similarities. This is really two books in one. The main storyline is a classic noir story; a poli...

What begins as a potentially interesting, Gothic romp through the mind of a terrible sock monkey in the midst of a murder mystery devolves into an all-out attack on religion. It's depressing to watch a novel with a lot of dark, intriguing ideas become a simple delivery vessel for Jillette's pure hatred of religion. I can't go below 2 stars here, because the writing's solid, and this book had me thinking and flipping pages pretty fast, but it's final on-the-nose "message" undercuts what makes the...

The words slam from the page like Penn Jillette shouting in your ear. Smart. Raunchy. Loud. Funny.

First off, I must admit that I had no idea Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame had written a book. I was very happy and excited to find this - it meant a book for my hubby to read and I really wanted to read it myself. And, as is usual of strange writing, we had very different opinions about said book when we were done. Namely that hubby really liked it, and I was really disappointed by it.The story is a basic murder-mystery on the surface. A police diver (the guys that fish corpses out of the w...

Penn Jilette puts his words into his protagonist puppet's mouth in his oddball novel Sock. Purportedly told by a stuffed sock monkey, the main focus is on a New York City police diver. Upon finding the bludgeoned body of his ex during a crime spree, the diver and his salon-running gay best friend team up to bring down the murderer. While starting off with a neat premise, the book swiftly falls into a running commentary of Jilette's societal views. Plot is sacrificed in order to expound upon reli...

I want to give an extra star for the wild and unconventional execution, but it’s tempered by the fact that a lot of its kooky devices fall flat. Every paragraph ends in a pop culture reference, usually a line from a song, I guess because the Little Fool listened to music a lot when he was younger, so Dickie picked up these phrases? But they are only rarely actually relevant to the content of the paragraph they are tacked onto, and often that relevance doesn’t go much deeper than simple word asso...

This book was a grind. It's about 50 pages of story and 220 pages of Penn's meandering thoughts (filler). Usually I enjoy Penn's meandering thoughts, but not when I think I'm going to read a crime/mystery novel. The 'sock' as a storytelling device was unnecessary at best and stupid at worst. I love Penn's other books, but not this one.

The end of every paragraph ends in a line to a pop song. This is meant to reinforce the idea of the paragraph. It seems like a nice, quirky idea, but for me it was extremely distracting. It took away from the flow of the story. I quickly started skipping the last line of every paragraph. It still bothered me because sometimes he threw in two lines of a song. I felt myself getting super frustrated because of how much I liked some passages of the book.Then I found a website that listed all the lyr...

2.5 stars. I was a big fan of Penn Jillette's two collections of rants, anecdotes, and essays - God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales and Every Day is an Atheist Holiday - so I was curious to see what a work of fiction from him would be like. Well, it turned out that the book was still full of rants and opinions - and they pretty much overwhelmed the narrative. The plot of Sock is fairly straightforward; a police diver discovers the brutally murdered body of his...

Penn Jillette.. The louder half of Penn and Teller.Penn wrote a book back in 2004. When i saw it in the book store, i said to myself, that looks awesome! The story is narrated by the sock monkey of a NYC Police Diver. Said diver runs across the body of an ex-girlfriend and spends the rest of the book determined to locate the killer and take him down. Did i mention it was narrated by a sock monkey?The book (aptly named “Sock”) was one of the lousiest reads i have ever mucked through. The story wa...

If this book was a person I would punch it in the face.This isn't a story. It's just a string of atheist essays with a small bit of plot holding them together. I hated it so much, and I'm not even a religious person. If I had known this book was going to preach to me I never would have started reading it in the first place.The worst part of all is that a dear, sweet sock monkey had to be included in this drek. I love sock monkeys. I hate this book.

I fully knew what I was getting into when I started this book, thanks to so many reviews on sites like this. But I am having a hard time putting my thoughts into words for this book, or even picking a rating. I liked that it was so different from other books. It was dark, but at times I wondered if the author was doing so for shock value. I didn't understand the point of the pop culture reference at the end of almost every paragraph. Few of them contributed much to the story.The ending seemed a

Sock. What a surprise. Granted it has been out a few years, but I had not heard anything about its existence, let alone how well or poorly it was written. Not quite what you would expect from the co-author of "Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends". But, then again, in some ways it is.I see that the goodreaders don't rate it (on average) quite as highly as I did. I can understand that. It is "choppy" in some ways, but not because of lack of interest. I think that elements of the book take more effort to...

A well-written spree-killer police procedural narrated by the imaginary friend/sock monkey of a NYPD diver. The narration is punctuated by pop-culture references from the time and anecdotes from the author’s own life that will be recognized by any listeners of his long-running podcast. I thought it was an entertaining, and rather odd, read.

If you like Penn Jillette the person, you’ll find him all over this book. This is not a book about magic. This is not a book about entertainment. This is a weird third-person mystery narrative told by a sock puppet.There’s a LOT of Penn Jillette’s philosophy and beliefs in here. I feel like maybe the main character is Penn Jillette in an alternate universe? One that’s fairly close to ours?It’s a mystery novel. So there’s murder, and trying to figure out whodunnit. But, it’s like 50% Penn Jillett...

This is a difficult novel to review, especially if you are a fan of Jillette not only in his roll as bullshit bashing magician, but as a social commentator. Penn tells it like it is-constantly. And that is the problem with Sock.As a debut novel it is brave, clever, insightful and raw. Unfortunately,if you've read any of his other works as I had with God,No! http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/84..., read any of his work online, or seen Penn & Teller:Bullshit, it's all old and just comes across as...