Tao Lin

A dark lament reflecting the macabre aspects of today's world follows the experiences of a man who navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes before touring Taipei, where he confronts family origins, suffers a breakup and pursues an internet affair that culminates in a gaudy Vegas wedding. Original.

Taipei

Stuart Romanek

-- and sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center, Disney’s future-themed ‘amusement park’ that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one robot maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008. At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life—and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death—technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

jack

Whoa. shocked at how much i loved this. the drug stuff is pretty boring but the style is just overpoweringly profound. got a lot out of this.

Katie Chua

a book about drugs without actually moralizing or criticizing them. i hated the narrator, hated reading this, but i think it actualyl does have something to say about addiction, technology, drugs, and living in the 21st century. i feel like it made me more depressed though, or "depleted" from ...existing? november in seattle is hard

Thank god it's over

I am intrigued enough to maybe pursue another work of Lin's. Maybe Bed or one of his poetry collections. But I wasn't intrigued enough not to skim most of this book.

That was boring.

If this is what I am missing out on by not regularly taking psychedelic drugs, then I'll pass, thanks

Taipei

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