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Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

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Looking for the perfect gift for the Apple fan in your life? If so, your search is over. Get them a copy of Options by Fake Steve Jobs, AKA Daniel Lyons. If you're not already aware, Lyons has been writing a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for quite awhile and it features some of the best sarcasm and wit on the planet. He leveraged that fame and fortune to write Options, which takes a fictitious and hilarious look at the Apple stock option backdating scandal.

The Fake Steve blog is a treat to read but I couldn't help wonder whether the style and approach would get old in a book length work. Boy, was I wrong. Daniel Lyons is a genius. He describes events in such fascinating detail that you not only feel you're there but you assume they actually occurred!

My personal favorite is the point towards the end of the book when Jobs meets with Yoko Ono to discuss reselling The Beatles library on iTunes. I won't spoil it by divulging too much here but I laughed out loud more than once while picturing this meeting in my head. There's also a funny twist to the ending, which again, I won't spill the beans on here.

Still not sold? Read this piece from the back cover and tell me it doesn't hit the nail on the head:

"Sometimes I feel like a great chef who has devoted his entire life to monastic study of the art of cooking. I've gathered the finest ingredients, built the most advanced kitchen and prepared the most exquisite meal. So perfect, so delicious, so extraordinary. More astounding than any meal ever created. Yet each day I stand in my window and watch 97% of the world walk past my restaurant into the McDonald's across the street."

Most people considering this book should already been familiar with Fake Steve Jobs in his original blogging form. His writing works better in that medium than in this novel -- Fake Steve Jobs is funny when commenting briefly on events in the news, but he's too thin to support an entire novel. The book is episodic, as FSJ deals with various groups though a period corresponding roughly to 2006. We see him dealing with Apple engineers and executives, with lawyers and government prosecutors, rock stars, silicon valley plutocrats, and politicians. With the exception of Larry Ellison, who appears repeatedly, and some fictional lawyers, most of these people get one scene with FSJ then depart the tale.

The funniest parts of the book, in my opinion, relate FSJ's interactions with Hillary Clinton, Yoko Ono, and a fictional retired chip executive named Misho Knedlik. These exchanges all involve nasty insults being launched by characters against each other (FSJ is typically delivering the rockets, though he is sometimes their target as well). Author Daniel Lyons has a gift for amusing nastiness.

As an occasional reader of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, I picked up this book thinking that it was a collection of the "best of" entries already published. Instead, I was totally surprised to find a coherent novel that is even more engaging and hilarious than the blog that got it started.

I couldn't help reading whole passages out loud to my amazingly patient wife while trying not to laugh. While the satire gets more ramped up with every chapter, a lot of the outrageousness is especially funny because it seems so close to the truth.

While I doubt that Steve Jobs has ever had Sting spoon him on a dirty floor while both tripping on ayahuasca, it's not hard to imagine Jobs ping-ponging between believing he is an under-appreciated genius and wallowing in self-doubt and isolation, not just as a reflection of El Jobso, but as one of our cultural obsession recapturing a lost sense of "childlike wonder."

It turns out that the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog can write, and well. This isn't quite as constantly laugh-out-loud funny as that website is, but this is a really enjoyable and fast-paced read. You don't have to be an Apple-fan to like it, but you'll probably like it a lot more if you are. The celebrity cameos (Larry Ellison, Bono, and Al Gore) are very funny indeed. FSJ has pulled off a difficult trick: a satirical character based closely on a real person, but who really stands as a character on his own. If the book were totally fictionalized, rather than based on Real Steve Jobs' public persona, it would still be almost as good.

The hilarious cruelty Fake Steve shows on a daily basis on his blog is here in the first part of the book, but is tempered a lot as the story (yes, there's a real narrative and plot) goes on; there are parts that are actually quite sweet and touching.

Options is in the same vein as, and at least as good, to me, as anything Douglas Coupland ever wrote.

Steve Jobs is a brilliant but insane/crazy genius. Very typical. Brilliant people are often nutty. But you gotta love the guy... This book in parody form captures the madness and is truly hysterical.

For starters, this book has some packaging problems. You'd never know from the wrapper that it was meant to be a novel, rather than (as you might expect, based on the blog) a collection of short essay-like zingers about the tech industry. And while the jacket designer picked the right font (Myriad) the book as a whole suggests not The Steve's aesthetic perfectionism but a cynical make-it-shiny-it'll-sell approach. For goodness' sake, the glue used in this book's binding *smells* terrible. Neither Fake nor Real Steve should have permitted that kind of sloppiness to be attached to his name.

Moving on to substance: this book doesn't have much. The plot, such as it is, is driven by El Jobso's "persecution" by the SEC for options backdating, which causes him to think about dropping out of the industry. This topic is less than gripping, even for Apple cultists. It's dressed up with some enjoyable boardroom backstabbing and we see Steve fire and betray numerous colleagues in amusingly derisory fashion. But the long-form plot you might want from a novel is mostly missing, as the book is written in episodic little nuggets whose connections are sometimes unmotivated. And the Fake Steve character doesn't really develop, beyond the shallowest of eventual revelations (he doesn't really believe he invented the iPod; he worries but then eventually just accepts that he's sociopathically selfish). Meanwhile the novel's other characters are an awkward mix of real names (Jobs loves to get stoned with Larry Ellison, and Hillary Clinton turns out to be kind of mean, ha ha) with fictional and/or fictionalized ones (most of the other Apple staff we meet, the designers and engineers and board members, are composites). You get the feeling some real publishing lawyer told Fake Steve to tone it down at risk of a libel suit, and as a result we're left with a roman a clef whose key doesn't unlock much of interest. Even people who attend WWDC and have read Sculley's autobiography (why would you do that to yourself?) will sometimes be left wondering whether the book is retelling real Apple-history incidents or not.

The zingers you've enjoyed from the blog are here, though less consistently hilarious than you might expect. Sadly, the blog's writing style did not adapt well into the sustained voice you'd expect from a real novel. All the sentences here sound alike: there's little variety of pace or rhythm, and as a result the Jobsian insult-humor punch lines that were the blog's meat and potatoes (ha, vegan joke) instead too often end up as predictable clunkers. The blog is successful partly because it's so topical, with each entry delivering a single point; the book feels meandering and unfocused by comparison.

But you'll still LOL once in a while. There are episodes and moments here as cleverly imagined as anything in the blog, from Jobs prank-calling Sculley to his negotiations with the music industry to his quickly quenched qualms of conscience after visiting a Chinese iPod factory. (Some of this is transcribed verbatim from the blog, in fact, but it's still funny.) It's nice, and sometimes funny, to see the Fake Steve character get a little more room to breathe without having to respond directly to the day's news; just a pity he doesn't have much else to respond to in this awkwardly plotted fake novel.

I didn't know a thing about the Fake Steve blog every review is talking about, but still enjoyed the book. Its fiction, but does give you a possible look into the personal life and thoughts of Steve Job's. And makes one wonder what his real thoughts/life might be like. Its an easy read, entertaining and enjoyable book. For the price, would recommend. Just realize this is fiction and I highly doubt the real Steve Jobs thinks like this. Or does he?

This book is not the actual history of Steve Jobs (even though there are some factual notes in the book). But it is a funny "fake steve jobs" story surrounding the period when the stock options backdating scandal was taking place and the iPhone was coming out.

"Options" is a great book for any Apple fan. It's fun, very well written and quite insightful.
It may be completely invented, but Daniel Lyons has a very sharp look on the real Steve Jobs and his company.

Somehow along the same lines of Accidental Empires Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, but the fiction angle makes for an even bigger-than-life Steve Jobs !

You'll surely remember many fun and sarcastic quotes after reading.
Although the overall tone is very humorous and you'll have a laugh every 2 pages, it deals with some issues. What happened to the valley entrepreneurship spirit ? How to run a company that used to make computers only, now turning into a media giant ?

The ending is true to its fiction approach and makes for a really good final twist on this great story.
Highly recommended.

Although this is not a true sequel to Pirates of Silicon Valley, it will please anyone who liked the 1999s movie.

The book is truly well written and very, very funny. It is a "must buy" for anyone that likes to follow the Valley news and gossip.

Steve is portrayed in such a coherent way along the book, that sometimes you may even forget that the author is faking. And, perhaps surprisingly, although the book was made from blog posts, there is a storyline and the whole book is consistently funny.

While reading, in many times I have laughed loudly; it is a very pleasureful reading. The book certainly has many peeks, including all Larry Ellison's episodes, annoying lawyers with their Windows notebooks (always rebooting) and Zune players, Steve's zen style and many others.