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Title: Wake Up

Author: Jack Kerouac

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 146

Rating: 7/10

Jack Kerouac – Wake Up

Wake Up is Jack Kerouac’s biography of Siddhartha Guatama, the founder of Buddhism. Written in his inimitable style, it’s certainly an interesting read if only as part of Kerouac’s legacy, and it’s a short enough book that you can whizz through it pretty quickly. I can’t say that I’m particularly interested in Buddhism and so this was a struggle at times, but it’s one of those books that you read so that you can say that you’ve read it, and hopefully to learn a little along the way.

Buddhist ideals had an undeniable influence on Kerouac, and this is hardly the first time that the author wrote about the subject. This, then, is a book that needed to be written – Kerouac’s take on Buddhism for the West.

Jack Kerouac

Click here to buy Wake Up.

Aaron Peckham – Urban Dictionary | Review

Title: Urban Dictionary

Author: Aaron Peckham

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 343

Rating: 7/10

Aaron Peckham – Mo’ Urban Dictionary

Aaron Peckham is the founder of UrbanDictionary.com, and this book is his first compilation of the best of the best user-submitted words to join the site’s database. As such, it’s basically a physical dictionary for street slang, although it’s already kind of out of date.

It’s fun, just like the website is – I wouldn’t say that the words included here are actually the best of the best, but the author has at least weeded out most of the rubbish ones, even if he’s not really the author because all of the submissions were crowdsourced from the community.

Imagine, if you will, somebody hitting a big ‘random‘ button a couple of thousand times, logging all of the results that came up, and then alphabetising them and putting them into book form. That’s basically what we have here, and I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. After all, isn’t a regular dictionary pretty much the same thing?

Aaron Peckham

So yeah, buy this if you fancy a bit of a laugh and you’ve used the site before, or if you grew up using it like I did. Who knows? If you’re a regular user, you might even see your own definition in there. But the chances of that are pretty slim, seeing as there are so many words on the site and this book was published in 2005, so you’d need a historical entry to make the roster.

Still, it’s worth owning, if only to show to your (geeky) friends. For a bit of extra fun, claim that the book came out before the website and see if they buy it. And if you enjoy reading and flicking through it, then who knows? Perhaps you’ll even buy the sequel – I know I did! No idea if there was a third book though, I kind of lost interest after that. The gimmick only works for so long, and for different lengths of time for different people. Good luck, folks.