15: The Game, Neil Strauss

Bugger: another one I read three or four books ago. Amusing, fast read. Neil paints himself as a very humble, rational, sane guy—the only such human around for most of the book. A little reading on the web reveals he considers himself The Jedi Master of the Seduction Game or some such nonsense. He doesn't seem very humble after all.

The book makes some "good" points, for some value of "good". "Valid"? "Reasonable"? It's more a "this is my story, look how normal and sane I remained among all these crazies, look how I can look back and judge my past actions fairly, lalala, look how many things I learned so quickly because I'm just so dedicated and smart, smart, smart" than a how-to guide. Hmm. I take back that bit about his painting himself as humble in the book. Neil tries to show he's humble, but you end up thinking of him as demanding and relishing your adulation.

14: Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

Oops, this one is actually a few books ago, just before Death by Theory. From an eletter to my friend Tracy, September 7th 2006:


other news: j.d. salinger's "nine stories".

my mom had been recommending it for years, and my aunt in stockholm recently recommended it, too. (actually, she meta-recommended it, saying that she kept recommending it to her daughter, who had yet to read it. this revelation was accompanied by the report that she, the mother-aunt, had read "hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy" on her, the daughter-cousin's, recommendation, and had found it only "mildly amusing and somewhat silly" (which is of course a fairly accurate characterisation of the work, if we replace "mildly" with "uproariously" and "somewhat" by "exceedingly and delightfully"). i believe i tried to get my mom to read the guide, but i don't think i succeeded. she, on the other hand, did succeed (this requires a major context jump back to that whole "recommending" business in the first sentence of the paragraph, i'm afraid), and i just finished "nine stories".

writers of short stories are big on death and other misery. being the protagonist of such a work nearly guarantees a miserable ending. that said: it's very good.

i hasten to add that salinger's prose is not as pompous nor as labyrinthine as mine above.

13: jPod, Douglas Coupland

Ah, c'mon, Coupland. What gives? Yes, it was entertaining and I read it in two sittings, but dammit, this is just a weaker Microserfs. The small inaccuracies bug me to no end—far more so than the stretches into un-realism: Belgian keyboards aren't that odd, the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" button does not return a different list of results than the "Google Search" button, the Atari 2600 did not have 3D graphics, the Goldbach conjecture is not proven and thus not a fact, and you would not use 'find' but 'grep' to find a capital letter 'O' in a string of digits. Yes, I'm an anal fuck and marked all these in the margins.

Questions for DC:
Who's Ethan?
Who's K girl?
Who's in a coma?
What's with the Lego obsession?

Questions for the editor:
Why'd you capitalise "jPod" in the title? Apple does not capitalise iPod, iTunes, etc. in their title headings.

Anyway: don't bother with jPod. Just read Microserfs twice.

12: When Do Fish Sleep?, David Feldman

One of the Imponderables books. They're all interesting reading. Answers the questions you used to ask as a kid.

11: Death by Theory, Adrian Praetzellis

A tale of mystery and archaeological theory. The mystery is thin, but I learned some bits of anthro & archeo theory. I have a slightly better idea of where Michael Shanks is coming from, now.