Rating:
(233 reviews)
Author:
ISBN : B00D4BBPB0
New from $23.95
Format: PDF, EPUB
Download file now Epub Lexicon [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren't taught history, geography, or mathematics - at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science. Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as "poets": adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.
Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school's strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Bront?, Eliot, and Lowell - who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. 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 Jamieson is brutally ambushed by two strange men in an airport bathroom. Although he has no recollection of anything they claim he's done, it turns out Wil is the key to a secret war between rival factions of poets and is quickly caught in their increasingly deadly crossfire. As the two narratives converge, the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Epub Lexicon
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 36 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: June 18, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00D4BBPB0
Epub Lexicon
Around a year-and-a-half ago, I was introduced to the writing of Max Barry with his witty satire Machine Man. While it didn't make me go out and seek his other books, it was definitely good enough to make me willing to give him another shot. That shot wound up being Lexicon, a book that has some of the same magic that worked in Machine Man, but wrapped up in a plot that just doesn't work.
Lexicon is centered on two characters who initially don't seem to be related to each other. Wil is coming home after an airplane trip when he's kidnapped by mysterious figures. They want information from him, but he has no idea what to tell them. Meanwhile, Emily, a homeless teenager with a gift for con artistry is recruited to go to a school that, not unlike Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, teaches magic.
It's not truly supernatural magic, but rather the magic of the power of words. The graduates of this school are known as poets and are able to use language to manipulate people and affect all sorts of events. Some words are just a bunch of nonsense syllables, but have the power to control people's minds. Then there are the powerful barewords, words so powerful that they can raise or bring down civilizations. Essentially, it is all fantasy with a science fiction foundation.
It reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about a joke that was so lethally funny that even looking at could kill; where that sketch was played for laughs, Lexicon tries to be more serious. It is a reasonably entertaining book, but the plot is too muddled to make it a good book. The non-linearity of the story is a little bit wearing, but the bigger problem is in the premise itself. Not only did I have a hard time buying into it, I had a hard time even understanding how it fully worked.
Max Barry isn't the first writer of recent vintage who has opted to create a work of speculative fiction devoted to the destructive power of words; Ben Marcus' "The Flame Alphabet" is a notable, and perhaps, better, example. With "Lexicon", Barry offers readers a spellbinding alternate history work that will remind readers of a cross between a young Neal Stephenson ("Zodiac", "Snow Crash") and Elmore Leonard ("Get Shorty"), that, is truly, to quote Time magazine media critic and author Lev Grossman, a work that is almost the "perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell". Indeed, "Lexicon" is especially noteworthy for its intricate, rather suspenseful, plotting, though exhibiting far less sophistication than anything I have read from the likes of Graham Greene, John Le Carre or China Mieville, but still displaying more than enough to keep readers in suspense until the very end. To his credit, Barry offers readers a novel that is almost as compelling a novel of ideas, as it is of fast-paced action; however, his level of sophistication, especially with regards to his world building of the "poets" and their secret history, pales in comparison with the best I have seen from the likes of Neal Stephenson ("The Diamond Age", "Anathem"), China Mieville ("The City and the City", "Kraken", "Embassytown"), Paolo Bacigalupi ("The Wind-up Girl"), Matt Ruff ("Bad Monkeys", "The Mirage") and William Gibson ("Neuromancer", "Count Zero", "Idoru"), to name but a few.