When I heard about Lexicon it immediately caught my attention. It sounded really interesting.
Here's what the info says on the inside cover:
"At an exclusive school somewhere outside Arlington, Virginia, students aren't taught history, geography, or mathematics - at least not in the usual sense. They are taught to persuade, to use language to manipulate minds, to wield words as weapons. The very best graduate as 'poets' and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.
"Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card monte on the streets of San Fransisco when she attracts the attention of the organizations recruiters. Drawn into their strange world, which is populated by people with names like Bronte and Eliot, she learns their key rule: that every person can be classified by an extremely specific personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately controlled by the skillful application of words. For this reason she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.
"Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the secret key to a war he knows nothing about, that he is an 'outlier,' immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.
"A brilliant thriller that connects very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data collection to centuries old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry's most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet."
It sounds really intriguing, right?
I couldn't even finish it.
Once I got it, I couldn't wait to start it. I got all comfy in my bed and opened the book. Then, out of nowhere, there's a freaking F-bomb only 7 sentences in. I was thinking, "Well, that was unnecessary." But I decided I'd keep reading. Maybe that was the only one. Wrong. There are probably around a dozen just in the first chapter. Now the first chapter follows the assault on Wil Parke in the airport bathroom, and then towards the end of that chapter, one of the main cuss-ers gets killed. So I thought maybe, with that guy no longer in the story, perhaps the language would die down a bit. Wrong again. I didn't even finish the second chapter. Chapter two introduces Emily Ruff, and, unfortunately, she is just as fond of the F-bomb as the other cuss-ers.
Now, I can handle a book with one or two "effin' this" or "what the eff was that for" if it's a really great book otherwise. But come on! It seemed like the author was putting it in there for no reason other than because he can. And when an author can't think of words that are a bit more creative, when he just throws words around like that, it gets annoying fast. Branch out a bit. Make up your own exclamations.
I'm sad to say that Lexicon was a disappointment. I had hoped that it would be a great read, but, unfortunately it was not. In the future I may try to look into some book reviews before purchasing a book that I think looks interesting.
Books should come with ratings like movies.
Overall, from what I read of it, I'd give this book 0 stars. Sorry, Max. Clean out your mind and try again.
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