Posted on October 28, 2005 - by deCadmus

From the Reading Chair

I have to remind myself that, since I now have a spiffy, categorized site I can write about whatever I want, and you can simply tune into to what you want to read… and tune out what you don’t. (It’s Blog 2.0, don’t ya know.) So without further ado…

From the Reading Chair

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow.

It didn’t take me long to suspect that Cory wrote this book on a bet. You know the drill… say you’re at a writer’s workshop and somebody challenges you with plot-lines that are so absurd as to be incomprehensible (quite a lot like our gang would do with improv… and most often on a stage before a less-than-sober crowd, where the chances that something foolish and epic-scaled would happen were freakishly high.) Things like, “Let’s say your Dad is a mountain and your Mamma is a washing machine. Oh, and you’ve got brothers who are like a set of Russian nesting dolls… No, really.”

And then I began to suspect that Cory was actually somewhere in the process of writing an Electronic Frontier Foundation manifesto, when it occurred to him to take the result of that writing workshop and mash it up with the techno-gee-wizardry of wifi freedom for all.

Someone Comes to Town is weird — altogether absurd and strange — and at the same time compelling and tightly written. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets the Goonies; David Copperfield and a car wreck; and like that wreck it’s hard to look away… the detritus is bewildering, but you know — you just know — there’s got to be some demystifying, essential truth in there somewhere.

Curious… and curiously satisfying. Recommended.