Book – Who Moved My Blackberry
Author – Lucy Kellaway
Year – 2005
Genre – Humour
One of my very favourite books of all time is a novel called E by Matt Beaumont. When I read it about nine years ago it was different to anything else that I had ever read in that the entire thing was written in e-mails. It was the funniest thing I had ever read, and might remain so to this day. The second review of this blog was the follow up E2, and I massively enjoyed that too, so when I saw Who Moved My Blackberry available in a Christmas sale I was excited, and have been looking forward to reading it ever since.
Which makes the final product all the more disappointing. The book follows through email the life of Martin Lukes, a Director in a big business (which is named as a-b global, yet it is never defined what they do) who spends all of his time speaking in management speak (typical sentence being “I have been doing some 360-blue sky thinking and have decided that our synergy with the consumers is a creovative masterclass”) and doing pretty much no work. He is unfortunately a character with pretty much no redeeming qualities, and therefore you are at no point interested in rooting for him. Added to that, the single joke of the whole book is the aforementioned management speak, which gets tiring after about a dozen pages, and you are left with a poor poor book.
Having looked into the book a little after reading it, it would seem that the novel is an extention of a column from the Financial Times. I suppose that this means that it could at least be a piece of fan service, but does nothing to improve the book. Definitely one to avoid.
2/10