PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
Watch me post three days in a row (though it's easy when I don't have to work yet)!
I recently finished "PopCo" and I simply can't go on without spreading the news about the greatness of this book. Scarlett Thomas doesn't seem to be nearly as well known as she deserves to be.
It's always a bit difficult to describe the plots of her books and they tend not to be the real point either, but each of her books leaves you feeling like you just had a cozy coffee conversation with an incredibly sophisticated, lovely andout funny person. And on top of that, I always learn something when I read her books and I probably learned more about math from PopCo than I did in a year in high school.
PopCo tells the story of Alice Butler from two persepectives. One perspective is about her adult live, where she designs toys for a huge and somewhat shady toy company named PopCo. They collect all their creatives in a retreat to develop the perfect toy for teenage girls.
The second perspective follows Alice as a child, who loses her mother early and then soon her father because he dissapears on some wild treasure hunt. She goes on to live with her grandparents who are mathematicians and kryptographers. She learns how to make and solve code very early and clearly has a gift for math.
And she knows that there is a code in the necklace her grandfather gave her, that contains the key to the treassure her father was trying to find.
This is how it starts out and the book turns out to be brilliant on so many levels. An incredibly smart sense of humor runs through the whole thing. It gives you the basic ideas of cryptography in a way that you can really work with it. It has a massively interesting take on female development as Alice thinks back to her teenage years for the project and reconstructs all the social pressure she experienced in school and how it changed her and again how she is changing kids today with the products PopCo produces. I also learned a lot about modern marketing strategies from the book, about things like mirror branding and so on. And finally it is a book that really makes you question the compromises we make every day to fit into the world somehow.
Anyone here who knows it? I would love to discuss it, but I don't want to spoiler anyone who has not read it yet with the interesting turns.
I recently finished "PopCo" and I simply can't go on without spreading the news about the greatness of this book. Scarlett Thomas doesn't seem to be nearly as well known as she deserves to be.
It's always a bit difficult to describe the plots of her books and they tend not to be the real point either, but each of her books leaves you feeling like you just had a cozy coffee conversation with an incredibly sophisticated, lovely andout funny person. And on top of that, I always learn something when I read her books and I probably learned more about math from PopCo than I did in a year in high school.
PopCo tells the story of Alice Butler from two persepectives. One perspective is about her adult live, where she designs toys for a huge and somewhat shady toy company named PopCo. They collect all their creatives in a retreat to develop the perfect toy for teenage girls.
The second perspective follows Alice as a child, who loses her mother early and then soon her father because he dissapears on some wild treasure hunt. She goes on to live with her grandparents who are mathematicians and kryptographers. She learns how to make and solve code very early and clearly has a gift for math.
And she knows that there is a code in the necklace her grandfather gave her, that contains the key to the treassure her father was trying to find.
This is how it starts out and the book turns out to be brilliant on so many levels. An incredibly smart sense of humor runs through the whole thing. It gives you the basic ideas of cryptography in a way that you can really work with it. It has a massively interesting take on female development as Alice thinks back to her teenage years for the project and reconstructs all the social pressure she experienced in school and how it changed her and again how she is changing kids today with the products PopCo produces. I also learned a lot about modern marketing strategies from the book, about things like mirror branding and so on. And finally it is a book that really makes you question the compromises we make every day to fit into the world somehow.
Anyone here who knows it? I would love to discuss it, but I don't want to spoiler anyone who has not read it yet with the interesting turns.