On Sunday, I did not clean my house. I did not join my friend who invited me to see Superbad. In fact, I barely moved from the couch, and it's all because of New York Times reporter and author Matt Richtel.
His book, Hooked, is aptly named. I know it's a cliché but I literally could not put it down. I hated myself, laying there, an unshowered lump. Occasionally I would look out the window at people frolicking on probably one of the last warm days of the year. But this story of biotech startup insanity had taken hold of my brain. The story literally starts with a bang: an explosion that the main character narrowly escapes, which turns out to be no mistake. The mystery starts when a note in his dead girlfriend's handwriting tells him to get the hell out of there.
Richtel manages to maintain that kind of intensity until the end.
He had me officially hooked by the end of chapter 3 with his main characters reasoning on why he decided to become a journalist rather than a physician after medical school:
Writing about public health issues, and trading pragmatism and respectability for the idea of helping to change things, and gaining relative control over my time -- at least compared to playing doctor. The fact that I faced $100,000 in debt and was still considering journalism suggested to me I had just the kind of idealism necessary to make such a career blunder.
Maybe that's the kind of paragraph that can only make a nerdy journalist laugh, but I knew then I liked this writers' sense of humor.
Also, a thoroughly satisfying thread peppered through the narrative was the character's interaction with his editor.
The phone call was from Kevin. He said, "Got a sec to chat?"
Somebody should study how editors and writers communicate. A remarkably high tnubmer of conversations begin with an editor saying, "Got a sec to chat?" But this doesn’t refer to a short exchange of ideas. It means: Do you have a hald hour? I need to tell you precisely how to write your story.
Writers respond, "Absolutely." By which they mean: You talk. I'll ignore you. I'll write the story the way I want to.
Ouch. Yeah I've been on both sides of that conversation. But those passages are just the icing on the cake. The story is a seriously wild mental ride. It's one of those stories where you're not sure who's good or bad, or what these crazy people are really up to until that moment when you find out. And then you're like: Whoa.
Read it on your next cross-country flight. I bet you'll finish it by the time you land.
