Book Review - Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

Its been a while between books for me. I generally don't make time to read. But have recently moved out of the city and am back in the public transport system. This means I again get about an hour each day to read. So given that i hadn't read a book in ages and i had a borders voucher to use i was really pumped for a great, interesting, funny read.

i find it really hard to pick a book. I'm really not sure what type of book is my style. For me its probably more about how the book is written. I definitely prefer if the author is witty. I like insightful. I like it to not be overdone with explaining - eg the rock was slightly oblong with a small crack to the left of..... I'm not a skimmer, i like to read every word. And therefore i get a little lost when books over use words.

Looking at a cover and reading a blurb make it a little hard to determine these things. And like most people I'm like a magpie - I see a shiny cover with a nice title and think "yeah, that looks like a bit of me."

That's what happened with "Dice Man". Had a good cover. Had some nice comments on it to say the guy was some sort of literary genius, and that it was one of the best books of the decade. It was about randomness, and this concept intrigued me a little. It had dice, i love games. So i thought, this has gotta be for me. Wrong!

The book had its moments, the dice made some funny situations for him to be in, but in the most part it was about sex. This guy was overly obsessed with sex. I'm pretty sure he should have been writing for Mills and Boons.

Now i don't think I'm a stick in the mud by any means (i managed to read American Psycho all the way through) but a sex scene every 20 or 30 pgs was just unnecessary. I got the picture that he liked sex and liked experimenting by about page 50, but to keep going on about it in depth was too much. It got very boring and monotonous.

The book never really went anywhere, which i suppose was partly what the writer was probably trying to show - he had given his life over to randomness. Which is fine, but when I'm reading a 300-400pg book I'd rather it go somewhere.

So yeah, i wanted to like it, i tried to like it. Unfortunately, I didn't like it. I just rolled a dice to decide what to give it as a rating - it came up a 2.