Stealing MySpace

[ivyfic]

I finished Stealing MySpace last night. I have a friend who used to work in advertising there, so I have heard Stories. Unfortunately, the author, apparently, has not.

This author, like so many nonfiction writers, has mistaken depth of research for narrative. She goes so far as to quote one of the founder's teenage Usenet posts to build a history of his youth. But the bulk of the book is just talking about corporate deal-making and stock options and blah, blah, blah. The book was also published when MySpace was the king of social networking and Facebook was still an upstart, so it feels like it lacks the most important part of the narrative.

Overall disappointing.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think this was part of my problem with The Making of a Chef. At random intervals, he'd give us some random background information on his fellow students. But there was no actual narrative involved. He didn't make friends with them, or gain meaningful insight into their lives. I feel like either he should have had one chapter on "My Fellow Students" with a series of anecdotes about different students with the idea of showing the range of backgrounds they had, or he should have actually gotten close to one or a handful of them, followed them, and constructed a narrative out of their experiences. We know that Adam is brilliant, surly, and taciturn, but he never changes. We know that Erica starts out incompetent, hates instructors everyone else adores, and matures into a competent chef, but only because each stage is told to us. No clue what changed in her head over the time or how she feels about that.

Random facts is not a rich narrative. There's a limit to how many random facts you can absorb and still care. There's very little limit to how much narrative you can absorb--it makes you care more.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

And there's very little of "then Yahoo offered $750 million and then so-and-so talked to so-and-so at Google and they had drinks and Google offerd $1.2 billion" that I can absorb. The book just made me think all thes internet-investing venture capitalists are crazy fuckwits.

Now that I've read The Lost City of Z and know how compelling nonfiction can be, that's kind of my yardstick, much to the shame of almost everything else.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

The fact is, writing well is hard.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Inorite?