This was a fantastic book recommended to me by one of the owners of this blog, Jen.  Jen interviewed me in November for her podcast and mentioned this book. I watched the trailer and immediately bought the ebook on my iPhone.  This book could easily be broken down into two halves.  The first half involves a five year old boy named Jack and his mom kept in an 11 foot by 11 foot room by their kidnapper Old Nick.  The second half occurs after an amazing escape from the room and how Jack adapts to the outside world he has never known.  I have to say that the book became immensely fascinating and one that could not be put down at the point of the escape throughout the entire second half.

Besides the interesting concept  and what-if scenario of a 5 year old boy experiencing the world for the first time after being locked in a room since birth, the uniqueness of the book is that Donoghue managed to write the whole thing from Jack’s perspective and in exactly the way a 5 year old would think and talk.  When in Room everything has its place. There is Rug and Wardrobe where he sleeps at night and Bed where Ma sleeps and Meltedy Spoon and even when Old Nick brings him a remote control jeep he calls it Remote and Jeep.  Ma was kidnapped at age 19 and the escape happens when she is 27 so she spent 8 years locked in what amounts to a backyard shed.  I’m not going to reveal any more about the escape because it one of the most exciting scenes in the book.

I do want to talk some about the second half though because I think it was probably my favorite section of the book.  They wind up at a psychiatric clinic to help them make the adjustment to the outside world.  The doctor gives Jack counseling sessions and Jack also gets to meet his grandparents and aunt and uncle for the first time.  There is also a media storm of paparazzi surrounding the amazing story.  What was so interesting to me is that Jack was taught so much in Room about math and counting and reading, but he got into the outside world and he didn’t know how to slide down a slide or that it was wrong to take a book from the bookstore.  He had to slowly acclimate to even going outside for the first time.  I guess what I liked so much about it is that Donoghue wrote in a such a way that I could believe everything Jack was going through.

The other really interesting dynamic in the book was the relationship between Jack and Ma.  Because Jack lived the first 5 years of his life in the same tiny space as his Ma he couldn’t bear to be without her when they got into the outside world.  Jack could force himself to be brave or independent when he had to be such as when Ma was “Gone” on painkillers and during the Great Escape.  But most of the time he stuck to Ma like glue and would not leave her for anything.

The last thing I would like to bring up when talking about this book are all of the references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  There are many passages sprinkled in throughout.  I guess you could interpret that as being parallel to how Outside was so topsy turvy to Jack and how everything was strange and unusual to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole.  It’s also interesting that the Great Escape was inspired by another piece of classic literature The Count of Monte Cristo. Over all I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

This was a very hard book to listen to. As a matter of fact I had attempted to listen to it once before and stopped about an hour in.  Last night I finished listening it. It is not a very long book, only 136 pages or 5 hours in the audio version, but the language and situations depicted in it are highly vulgar, but very real.  The novel Push was made into the movie Precious, which in itself was a very hard movie to watch.

This whole story takes place in Harlem, New York in the 1980s. The book is told from the perspective of Clarice “Precious” Jones.  She had her first baby from her father at age 12 and her second baby also from her father at age 16.  Her father had been having sex with her since she was 7 (that she can remember) but there is a line toward the end that the abuse may have started much earlier when she was in diapers.  Not only was she raped by her father but her mother beat her while she was having her first baby on the kitchen floor.  Remember she’s only 12 years old when this happens. It is beyond horrible that this poor girl did not get a normal childhood.  Living with her mother has been an absolute hellish existence.  The first baby is severely mentally retarded and has Down Syndrome.  Her grandmother takes care of little Mongo (short for Mongoloid).  Her second baby Abdul is a healthy baby and Precious is determined to take care of him herself.

The book has redeeming qualities also which started to make it more compelling for me.  Precious never was very good at school. When the book opens she is 16 years old and in the 9th grade and has no idea how to read and write.  She sits in the back of math class.  She is sent to principal’s office and is suspended for being pregnant which she is angry about because it is not her fault.  The principal comes to her house and talks through the intercom at her about an alternative school Reach One Teach One on the 19th floor of the Hotel Theresa.  Precious wants to learn so she enrolls in the program that teaches remedial reading and writing.  There are about 7 girls in this class all, we find out later, with similar horror stories as Precious.  It is taught by a teacher named Blue Rain.  She becomes a mentor to Precious and teaches her the alphabet and how to read and write in a journal every day.  Precious even gets an award from the city for her progress and moves out of her horrible home into a half way house.  There is hope for her until she hears from her mother that her father has died of AIDS and you know where that is headed.

It was a very hard book to listen to, but after awhile it became so compelling that I wanted to finish it. Sapphire (AKA Ramona Lofton) is a very poetic writer, at times making the book sound like Slam Poetry, and the book is so steeped in realism that you are sure stories like this really happen to people, even as horrible as it may seem.  There is also some commentary about welfare, unemployment, and other issues related to poverty that make this an interesting book as well.  Overall I ended up liking it for the issues it brought up and that little bit of hope that Precious got at the end.

The cover of this book is the now-familiar chalkboard writing from the opening credits of The Simpsons except this one says “I will not write an uncensored, unauthorized history of The Simpsons” over and over again. Ortved set out to write what he calls in the introduction to this book, “an oral history” of his favorite TV show. The book primarily consists of anecdotes from various people involved in the production of The Simpsons including writers Conan O’Brien and Brad Bird, Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, Matt Groening’s ex-wife, and many others.  Quotes from Matt Groening himself come from interviews or DVD commentary.

Ortved chronicles the history of The Simpsons from Matt Groening’s alternative weekly comic strip Life in Hell to getting the Simpsons on The Tracy Ullman Show all the way through the mid-2000s.  The book was published in 2009 so it was mentioned that O’Brien would be taking over Leno’s Tonight Show, but the ensuing fracas happened after the book was published.  Some of the more interesting tidbits I learned from this book included the in-fighting and jealousy that went on between Sam Simon and Matt Groening at the beginning of the show’s run.  Matt Groening was the face of the Simpsons since he created the main characters and he got all of the credit in the press for writing, producing and the directing where in reality he did none of those things.  Sam Simon was one of the head writers and was upset that Groening was getting all of the credit for work that he and the other writers were creating.  Also interesting is that Groening was more than willing to sell out and spearheaded a lot of the merchandising boom of Simpsons T-Shirts, dolls, etc in the early 90′s.  He even reportedly bought a second house to store Simpsons memorabilia.

Other big names discussed in the book include James L Brooks, the executive producer as well as director or producer of many big comedy movies of the 80′s.  The Simpsons made Fox, a fledgling network then, what it is today and the book talks about what free reign the show was given on the network.  A lot of the book is about the writers on the show and the eras of the different show runners from Al Jean and Mike Reiss to Mike Scully to Al Jean again in the 2000s.  Ortved talks to owners of two of the biggest Simpsons fan sites on the Internet The Simpsons Archive and NoHomers.net.  The latter half of the book is interesting in that it tries to pinpoint why the show didn’t stop when it was ahead and how mediocre the shows have gotten under Al Jean’s leadership in the 2000′s.  It also touches on its successors South Park and Family Guy and where they are taking the medium of prime time animated comedy.

If you are a fan of The Simpsons and are interested in this type of anecdotal history of a TV show then you will probably find this book to your liking.  There was a lot I didn’t know about the behind-the-scenes workings of the show and so on that level I enjoyed the book. I listened to it on Audible and didn’t know if I liked the narrator at first, but it grew on me.

This was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long time.  Those are some big words, but it is true. I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read the sequel FreedomTM.  A daemon is a computer term for something that runs in the background like a printer queue.  In the case of this book the daemon pretty much takes over the world. It is one of those thrillers almost like a Stephen King novel that once it gets going is very hard to put down.

Everything starts with a couple of murders on the grounds of a computer game company Cyberstorm Entertainment.  Around this time one of the founders of Cyberstorm and a very wealthy game developer by the name of Matthew Sobol dies of cancer.  Sobol played a large part in developing two of Cyberstorm’s popular first person shooter Over the Rhine where players shoot Nazis and its Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) called The Gate.  Detective Pete Sebeck and a technology consultant Jon Ross discover that Sobol may be behind these real life murders even though Sobol  just died himself.  Sobol was able to use the Internet to pull off these killings by setting certain parts in motion.  The fun comes when the FBI, CIA, DARPA, and every other government agency starts getting involved and they try to infiltrate Sobol’s mansion.  A driverless, fully automated Hummer starts mowing people down.  A couple of bomb squad men who make it into house get attacked by ultra low frequency waves which turns their insides inside-out and they start vomiting. This is when the authorities know that what they are fighting is nothing like any enemy they’ve ever fought before.

Soon Sobol’s Daemon starts recruiting beginning with a low-life identity theft hacker from Houston named Gragg.  Gragg is an avid player of Over the Rhine and finds a special game map that suddenly appears on his server one day.  After much difficulty he meets the ultimate Nazi enemy of the game (the one that graces all of the promotional posters for it) who gives him a string a characters that he has to decode.  I don’t want to give away too many spoilers except to say Gragg becomes recruited to work for the Daemon.  Other people (highly intelligent technologically or in other ways but not necessarily model citizens) get recruited in different ways until it’s an all out good vs evil fight.

The over arching theme of the book is very interesting in that technology controls every little aspect of our modern life.  The world economy depends on it, the stability of the country and it infrastructure depend on it and so many other people depend on it, but really it is a house of cards, and if it gets compromised things can get really bad really fast.  Now none of the fantastical events that happen in the book or technological tools that Sobol engages in could happen in real life but we are very close.  Google and other companies are working on fully autonomous vehicles. At CES last week they showed augmented reality glasses similar to ones used in this book for the Daemon’s operatives to connect with objects in the virtual world in order to wreak havoc in the real world.  Overall though this book was just fun and if you like technology, computers or computer games I think you will absolutely love this book.