The Game

In my attempt to regain some of my reading prowess, I've been hitting Amazon a lot lately, checking out their best-sellers and looking for material that I can get at the University City Library. Upon looking at the top 100, I came across The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

I know, most people's intial reactions to this book have been, "what are you reading it for?" As I am currently involved, they wonder what reason I would need to learn to pick up women. My answer was simply that it was intriguing. And it got even more inriguing as time went on.

From my intial encounter with the book, it seemed it was going to be an interesting ride. The book is leatherbound, designed, it seems, to look similar to a bible. Clever, it seems, to create this "bible for men" more than just figuratively.

Once I started, I was pretty much wowed from jump. Not that the ideas in the book were so novel, just the way these pickup artists seemed to study, craft schemes, and create this community, was crazy to me. While I have yet to decide how much of the book is fact and how much is fiction, the fact is, regardless, it was an enjoyable read (not necessarily for females, however). The first half of the book reads more as an advice book (how I did this, how I did that, ways you can imitate me, etc.). The second half, however, was more of a story, and a love story at that. It turned out to be a really wonderfully written, well thought-out, caring book about relationships with people. The author, Neil Strauss, is a talented writer who clearly understands the emotions behind everything he went through. It was a wonderful study of human interaction, if nothing else.

I think what I most enjoyed about the book, however, was that from the beginning I could see in the author what, throughout the whole book, he was struggling to see in himself. It's somewhat of an affirmation that the person we all want to be is inside of us, we just have to go about finding that person, and letting them out. It doesn't mean who we are now is bad or wrong. In fact, the person we all want to be will have more of the qualities of who we are now than we ever expected. It will just be able to bring all those qualities to the front and help them shine.

So, do I recommend this book? I actually really do. While I hesistate to recommend it to women simply because I feel as though they will lose some faith in their interaction with men, if you read it all the way through, you begin to understand somewhat of what the author is trying to convey, which is that the true human interaction, and the true success with the opposite sex, as well as within any other interaction, comes from within, and not from well crafted schemes and lines.