Chaos Monkeys

This started out so promising - a sarcastic, informative, and realistic insider's take on the world within a world that is Silicon Valley. It turns out that about half of the book delivers on that promise, and then the rest unravels into a mostly uninteresting memoir full of bad blood and axes to grind. The author is genuinely talented with a great sense of humor - I just wish that an editor would have reigned in the narrative and kept the book on course. I don't regret reading it, but it drags on for at least 100 pages too long.

Couldn't put it down for the first 40%. Then interest dipped sharply at 60% and failed to recover. It's written in a speculative thriller sort of way albeit without much to reveal. Also the constant analogy-making thesaurus powered writing style gets tedious fairly quickly. If you haven't read it, the only thing you're missing on is some valley goss you can get in a summary. To be fair, I would have liked it more if it ended at the 50% mark, the second half draaaags.

An interesting and easy to read story about the inside world of IT-startups. It often resembles Silicon Valley TV show. I was pleasantly surprised by the size of author's vocabulary. Last time I had to look up so many words was maybe when reading Henry Miller's books. I liked the author's writing manner. Each time the reading becomes boring, there is a hilarious story from the past or a philosophical musing or an introducing of some fun character.

While parts of this are interesting from a historical perspective, this book was just super hard for me to get into. I found myself loathing pretty much every person in the book. The tone felt like a narcissistic tech geek power fantasy, but with mostly bumbling and little true interest.

I do not recommend this unless you were personally involved in a social media startup in the mid 2000's.