Darice de Cuba

Four months ago I bought “The End of Mr. Y” by Scarlett Thomas. I was intrigued that it is a book about a book and the cover and colored pages also played a role in me buying the book.

This book has good reviews, and although I didn’t find it bad it I wasn’t lost in the story. The book cover topics such as time travel, science, religion, physics and quantum mechanics. So even though the book is fiction you do learn some thing. But the story development of the main character wasn’t real deep, it stayed at the surface and focusing more on the tie travel issue.

Even so I decided to read this author other book “PopCo”. This one is about cryptography and math. I liked this book much more as it has a deep story about the main character, going between the past and the present time. I also liked the fact that being focused in a big company how the marketing section of the company is portrayed. I found it funny because I also don’t get marketing people when working on websites. Their view and ideas sometimes are just so not logic and a lot of marketeer don’t understand the product to be able to market it well.

A extensive topic in this book also is multinationals, having their factories in third world countries where people and children work in sweatshops for almost nothing, while CEO’s make millions of dollars on a product. And how the only thing they want to do is sell, sell and sell..they will do anything to get people to buy their products.

“PopCo” while having an entertaining story also teaches you a few things about cryptography, math and the current capitalist world situation. All wrapped in a fictional story. All in all no ta bad read if your are into these topics. It’s not a light read, especially “The End of Mr. Y” had some mind boggling theories I had to re-read to really get.