Funny and nostalgic. All too real and relatable to anyone who was a teenager in the 90s.

A lovely look at the Internet from someone who spent their formative years in it, like me! I enjoyed a lot of the stories, although it veers away from the Internet by the end.

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

For those of us who are part of the generation that remembers the internet suddenly being a thing in their pre-teen/teen years and embracing it wholeheartedly, I'm sure we can all relate to what Jess Kimball Leslie's thoughts and feelings about growing up in a sudden digital age. When I saw this title, I had to read it, because I am definitely a computer geek and very proud of it. This is a collection of essays that details Leslie's personal experiences around how her social life has been shaped by the internet while also giving some brief historical details about how the internet was back in its early days.

Let's start with the good stuff. Leslie gives a humorous and witty outlook on various internet related things: AOL, very specific chatrooms, Myspace vs. Facebook, Blackberries, etc. I especially related to her stories about how she found friendship online in a way that just wasn't available "IRL." For example, she was a huge Bette Midler fan, and she found "her people" in a Bette Midler themed chatroom and made friendships with them. As a kid, I loved Nancy Drew and joined forums where I could talk about those books to my heart's content for HOURS and HOURS and there was always someone listening. Now, as a book blogger, I can relate. I don't have many friends who go out of their way to read as much as possible and review books, but here we are, all gathered together on the interweb, pointing out to each other where the good books are. I love it! So, this in particular was very relatable.

What I didn't like was the organization/setup of the essays. They were each their own little pieces, with very little reference to what came before or after it, so the personal stories were a little hard to follow for me, because I couldn't follow the progression of the timeline. It didn't feel cohesive, and I think having the essays relate to each other just a little bit could have brought it together to improve the overall flow and feel of it. Aside from that, I genuinely enjoyed reading this book. I think that for people who are in the same boat as Leslie and remember a time pre- and post- internet, and were there when all the social media was developing (Myspace! Facebook! Twitter!), this will be a nice nostalgia trip. I'm not sure if younger people will enjoy it as much, but it could be interesting to read how the this stuff was developed and used before it was what it is today.

This book was just ok for me, usually I would enjoy books of this nature but I found it hard going and at times had to stop and find something else to read. The writing was ok but perhaps not for me.

I wanted to like this book. It started out sort of funny and highlighted some of the easily forgotten parts of the days of the early internet. Then it started to skip around and devolve. Some of the "facts" about the popularity and origins of things like Twitter and blogging were more opinions than actual fact. Her side stories into her friendship with wealthy, famous people were interesting but not fleshed out.

I wish she had written a straight up memoir without trying to shoehorn the history of the internet into it. It came across very choppy. It would have been easy to blend the internet stuff into a regular memoir; there was no reason for chapters and sections to be based around what website was popular at the time. It came across as forced and artificial. It also kept her from delving into anything personal too deeply. The author should have either written a memoir or written a social history of the internet not try to cover both in one book. As a result, she failed at both.

Interesting insight about the introduction of the internet from someone who started using it from a young age to find friends and feel included.

OMG!!! This book! As a 90s girl, I found so many situations totally HILARIOUS and relatable. It was a nostalgic reading.

I have no idea who Jess Kimball Leslie is. I got this book on the strength of the title and the cover typography. But after reading it I can safely say, I don’t really want to know who is Jess Kimball Leslie. Maybe it’s the classic tale of expectations vs. reality, but I thought I’m going to get a bunch of interesting essays about the intersection of technology and personal life. Instead, I got a bunch of not very interesting personal essays about. . . something, I guess? Her voice is mediocre and indistinguishable from any random blogger on any random blog.

Most of the time the focus is way off, there’s just too much tangential rambling going on. I lost my interest completely in the middle of the Gawker piece, but I’m stupid so I read on. Good news? It did not get any worse than that. I know, because I kept reading. Don’t ask.

A humourous memoir that gripped me from its opening pages. Showcasing how it was to grow up as a true part of the origin of the internet we know and love today. Full of wit and sharp social commentary, this book with had me chuckling from start to finish.
Although it dips at times, going off on a tangent that sometimes loses sight of its original topic, this book is a refreshing and relatable outlook on growing up in the internet age. I found it an insightful, and entertaining frolic into the life of someone seemingly on the brink on the edge of the life I equally want and dread. An enjoyable and enthralling read.

Can Jess be my new best friend? She'd totally be in my 'top 8.'

A short, hilarious collection of essays, documenting a life with the internet. From the early days of AOL chat rooms, to her first blackberry and the nightmare that follows, to Twitter to Facebook groups, Jess Kimball Leslie is a child of the internet age. There is something very familiar to her stories, maybe you too met your best friends on the internet, or you suffer at a startup. This is the world we live in, growing with with giant Compaq monitors and weird educational games, now carrying our entire lives in pocket sized devices.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for this review.

This quippy book will undoubtedly be relatable to the millennial population who came of age just as computers and social media started to take hold.

I was pretty pumped to read "I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live In It" because I could totally relate to the title. Unfortunately I was expecting more about the friends in the computer than I got, although I could totally relate to almost everything the author was writing about since she is only a few years older than me. Replace her Bette Midler online chat rooms with Hanson and you've got me. She even went to Oklahoma to meet up with someone she had met online - I do that yearly. The book became more about her life and how technology played a big part in it than what I was expecting with more about the relationships and friendships she had made through the internet. Jess is funny though, so I really enjoyed her dissection of twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. We are both from Connecticut and both have engineers for Dads so when my friend thought that perhaps I wrote this book, she really wasn't too far off. The only difference is she is married and met her wife on match.com, and while I'm not looking for a wife I have tended to shy away from dating sites. The rest of our lives do seem to parallel though so maybe I should give it a try....

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It is the rare book that actually lives up to the title. From the first page, Jess Kimball Leslie does a wonderful job of making you laugh out loud with every story she tells. Anyone who is old enough to remember AOL chat rooms will appreciate this book's nostalgia, and those too young to remember those days should be required to read this book to learn how far it has all come! My only complaint is that it was too short-I could have read Leslie's stories forever!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.

The description of this book drew me in. Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy it. Trying to figure out the target audience was confusing. The collection of different topics seemed disjointed at times.

I thought this would be an interesting read and was disappointed. If you aren't from the Northeast area and have a very active online life you won't find most of the book very good and while there were parts that were funny, I unfortunately didn't find the book very readable as a whole.

This book, so far, what can I cay....
Yeah, I can relate is so many ways.
First when I got the internet. I didn't know how to use it.. I felt like a dummy. We had dial up, What's that you wonder. You literally had to plug a phone cord coming out of a wall, plug that cord into your modem, and the best one at the time was a 56 K modem. Then plug another line into the back of your computer, (behind the tower, usually on the bottom. It had two ports one for "in' the other for "out') and then plug the out to other side of the modem. This is so that when you wanted to connect, you had to click a button that connected you to the modem, dialed an assortment of numbers, if one number was busy, the modem went to the next number and so on. Following this, you were able to hear the lovely machines talk to one another, those screams and squelches of yester year. Finally as most of us did have AOL America Online, because it was the easiest platform to use. Once you connected, you did hear those lovely three worlds "You've got mail"


A comparison title is "You've Got Mail" which is where the motion picture came from.
I would literally stay online for hours and hours. Most household had at minimum had 2 phone lines. One for talking to friends and family, the other for you... yeah, you guessed it. For the internet. I'm not sure for the rest of you, but I, pronounce it "innernet".

Nowadays we spend countless hours on it. Did it catch on? You be the judge of that.
I know one thing if you have a business and your not it with your website. You don't exist!
Find my Blog with everything I'm reading at http://redrosesinpinkshoes.blogspot.com/

The first half of this book was a five star read. The nostalgia of remembering early Internet paired with the author's personal memoirs of growing up Bette-Midler-obsessed in a family of geniuses is sharp, witty, and extremely relatable.

Such as life, I suppose, the storytelling begins to behind cynical when the author moves to New York to work in publishing and social media. The nostalgia and early memoir are delightful. The closer the book comes to modern day, the more it feels like mockery of selfies and Facebook and Twitter. While I agree wholeheartedly that the way social media is employed is head-shaking at best, this delightful memoir begins to turn into more of a social commentary as the timeline of the text transitions from the 90s into the more recent 2000s.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. However, I would have liked to read more of the reminiscing about discovering chat rooms and the fascination of new technology that was so slow and inefficient that it wouldn't even be tolerated today, but was like magic at the time.

[Edit: This review will appear on GoodReads prior the publish date]

This book is so highly intoxicatingly relatable and hilarious I could not put it down! Jess Kimball Leslie is funnier than "a monkey in a business suit falling down an entire flight of stairs," and I loved everything about her book - growing up in Connecticut in the 90's and her early forays into the wilds of AOL, her nascent career in celebrity assistanthood and subsequent sendup of the world of tech journalism. Whether it was her thorough debunking of the stereotypical VC-backed startup fantasy, or a seemingly impromptu rant about IKEA or a morning at the dogpark, Jess Kimball Leslie entertains with self-effacing and intelligent wit, and tremendous insight.

Leslie is at the tail end of Gen Y, so she's an age where the rapid changes in technology and the Internet happened as she was growing up. As the daughter of two scientists, one a software engineer, she certainly was in a good place to observe these changes and they somewhat come into the book. But it is not in any way what I hoped it would be.

Lelie doesn't give me, as someone much older, an idea, really, of what these changes met and how they affected her generation. Nor is she an astute enough observer to tell you what was happening. Instead we get the view of technology that is very self-involved. And that's a shame.

Sandwiched between her parents generation who built the infrastructure and technology of today, and the Millenial generation who deals with technology in a very natural way, Leslie could have lots to say about the emerging world of cell phones and the Internet. She also could go beyond surface observations (that Facebook is the social medium for the non-cool kids) to take on bigger questions of privacy and freedom, or of celebrity, or even questions of why some things succeed and others don't.

But don't look for for that here. If you want a memoir with technology, the book is fine, but if you want something you can apply to the wider world, this isn't the book for you.