I haven’t updated my Goodreads at all…

LifeLife by Keith Richards

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t know if you have to be a fan of the Stones to enjoy this, or not. I am, so there you go. That said, I like the Beatles more than the Stones but have never enjoyed a Beatles biography as much as I liked this. Richards is an undeniably great character, and that comes through in this— it’s a story, not a meticulously footnoted academic piece. His biases are there, too— sometimes he attempts to villainize people in his life, yet you find yourself sympathetic towards them, not him. All in all, an entertaining read.

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Finished reading this week. It was OK. 3.5 out of 5, maybe. Kind of like a ‘Brave New World’ updated for modern technology. The two most difficult things I found about it was the relative lack of sympathy I had for the main protagonist, and the lack of setting it in a clearly defined time. The time thing was worse, actually. I’ve heard the author talk about how basically you can’t set anything in the future anymore, because the future is already here, so presumably this book is in the not-so-distant future. And while I won’t say it’s out there that some of the technologies might exist, I don’t really buy the complete and utter upheaval of society— especially the idea that everyone had given up reading and that even owning books was borderline disgusting. Really? Vinyl was outdated twenty years ago, and no one regards it with disgust. And I don’t think we’re as post-literate as the author suggests— certainly not to the point that in the ‘not-so-distant future’ even English majors won’t know how to do anything more than scan books. The most prescient thing about it was the dependence everyone had on their apparati (basically cellphones), and the fact that when the connectivity disappears, suicides follow. Yeah, I can see that happening.
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Finished reading this week. It was OK. 3.5 out of 5, maybe. Kind of like a ‘Brave New World’ updated for modern technology. The two most difficult things I found about it was the relative lack of sympathy I had for the main protagonist, and the lack of setting it in a clearly defined time. The time thing was worse, actually.

I’ve heard the author talk about how basically you can’t set anything in the future anymore, because the future is already here, so presumably this book is in the not-so-distant future. And while I won’t say it’s out there that some of the technologies might exist, I don’t really buy the complete and utter upheaval of society— especially the idea that everyone had given up reading and that even owning books was borderline disgusting. Really? Vinyl was outdated twenty years ago, and no one regards it with disgust. And I don’t think we’re as post-literate as the author suggests— certainly not to the point that in the ‘not-so-distant future’ even English majors won’t know how to do anything more than scan books.

The most prescient thing about it was the dependence everyone had on their apparati (basically cellphones), and the fact that when the connectivity disappears, suicides follow. Yeah, I can see that happening.

Every morning, before work, using the oilcloth as my model, I drew the map of Newfoundland. My goal was to be able to draw it as well from memory as I could draw the map England. For the longest while, after I began drawing Newfoundland, it was the map of England I saw when I closed my eyes at night, as though my mind were sending forth this primary shape by way of protest - which it needn’t have bothered doing, since England had been so early imprinted on my brain that no amount of drawing other maps could supplant it.

- Wayne Johnston: The Colony of Unrequited Dreams