#paulcarr

[thebluebird]

Book club #theupgrade #paulcarr

[kickassessment-blog-blog]

Book #34: The Upgrade

The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of Live Without Reservations by Paul Carr (Kindle)

High-concept pitch: Carr, tech journalist, gets fed up with spending a buttload on rent for a tiny London flat, and calculates it's cheaper to live in hotels. What follows are tips on how to achieve this swanky lifestyle, lots and lots of debauchery and girls in togas.

(More after the break…)

  Review:  I might be slightly partial to the author, since I found his month-long blog series about staying in a different hotel in Las Vegas every day to be quite fascinating and brutally funny. I was expecting a lot of the same out of this book, to be honest, just...longer, and that's indeed what I got, though with much more depth and a surprisingly moving turn in the last quarter or so of the book. The whole idea of living exclusively in hotels and relinquishing nearly all material possessions seems impossible to me, and Carr admits that it's not possible for everybody to do--or even sustain, in many cases--this lifestyle, due to differences in work demands (being a writer, he can work pretty much from anywhere), personal needs, etc. Carr does include a lot of tips in how it's possible to live this way for awhile, though most of the book is about his life while he is living in hotels, not about actually the experience of living in hotels. If anything, it's a device to have him discuss some wry observations of tourists, differences between Brits and Americans, hotel etiquette, etc., etc., not to mention his increasing troubles with alcohol. Overall, this was a very entertaining, and surprisingly heartwarming book, and provided a lot richer satisfaction as a reader than what I was expecting to get out of it. It doesn't knock your socks off, but it's a solid look into the life of a writer who undertakes a crazy experiment.

Overall: Three blaggings out of five.