books 'o' the month

Non-fiction
"A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey is brutal, blunt, and refreshing (I'm reading Rushdi's "Shalimar the Clown" right now and the comparison in writing styles is jarring... Rushdi is flowery and poetic, Frey doesn't even bother with sentences sometimes... much more stream of consciousness). James wakes up on a plane with a hole in his cheek and missing his four front teeth. His true story climb out of a lifetime of addiction (to just about everything--he's only 23 at the time that he's checked into rehab but he's been drinking, smoking, doing crack, heroin, meth, or some sort of drug since he was a preteen) is tragic. I'm pretty sure I've got the right kind of personality/genetics/whatever to fall into the life he had and only didn't by the grace of god and more than a bit of luck. Scary stuff that is so immersive that I finished the book feeling like I had just awoken from a fever dream of addiction and rehab myself. Reminded me of "Requiem for a Dream," in some ways (a cautionary film I can't say I enjoyed but I can say should be required viewing in high school). Read it.

Fiction
"The Atrocity Archives" by Charles Stross is a totally fun spy-nazi-mathematical holes in the universe-geek-meets-girl-saves-universe-while-maintaining-company-servers-secret-british intelligence-arm-demons-beware-fantasy. This one would be a great movie.

On the subject of Charles Stross I finally got around to reading one of Joe Hughe's suggested readings, "Accelerando," it was serious brain-upload singularity stuff. Enjoyable read and totally different than the atrocity stuff.

A good example of the writing in "Accelerando?"

"Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa."

It starts with a guy who has an idea a second and gives them away to help other people become rich (post-dot-com-style), includes the requisite uploaded lobster brains in space and ends with his great great grandkids fleeing the solar system in the hopes of surviving economy 2.0 (somewhere in there people become currency, people upload so they are immortal, and the solar system is converted from raw matter into a matrioshski layered--think russian nesting dolls/dyson spheres--brain of computronium, the better to dream bigger dreams I suppose).

Its downloadable for free here if you like that whole digital thing. Worth the read (I think I read much of it before in short story form so I wasn't totally blown away by it, but if you're interested in the social aspects of this sorta future society you'll eat it up).