For a book that targets (and caters very well to) young males, "The Game" truly belongs in the hands of a twenty-something cynic.
Parts of the story read like a self-help book, which was very funny in and of itself. But what I found to be interesting (on some level, perhaps) was that Strauss has taken his version of "rags-to-riches" and turned it into colorful, sexual, hopeful prose that reveals a protagonist traveling down a highway of mayhem to a destination of confusion. Fun. I imagine this is how a script for an infomercial reads; like Chuck Norris demonstrating some back-breaking exercise machine or Paula Dean pushing a spray-on chocolate sauce, this is a how-to-make-your-life-better-by-jumping-off-a-cliff type story.
Despite the author's experience as a writer, it wasn't written very well (each chapter ends with some lame, unbelievable tidbit), the story was a bit dull (a guy called "Mystery" goes "Peacocking"...c'mon), and it left me with an overall sense of "Why?".
(I'll tell you why, because when you're stuck in the London Heathrow passenger terminal for 6 hours and you have to make a choice between a black leather-bound #1 seller and something about sisterhood and traveling pants, you choose "The Game".)
That said, it passed the time. Borrow it with low expectations.

It's interesting how one man who was a nerd and had low self-esteem becomes one of the greatest PUA in history. I've read his second book the rules of the game back in my early 20s. Me personally I prefer Mark manson book models because it teaches you an healthy way to approach women. Of course this book is funny hearing how he became an PUA.

Spectacularly bad book. This notorious book written by (to be fair, since reformed) pick up artist Neil Strauss. Strauss ought not be flattered, l read everything.
The book’s target audience is frustrated men and it teaches them how to be manipulative and weird. The whole book was one sad cringe.
The book published 17 years ago started an online cult of pick up enthusiasts. The author, a journalist, infiltrates a pick up clique to report on them and goes completely native. Even after he published his article he lingered and gave classes and started a commune.
He left the community when he met his match and married her. Then he wrote The Game.
Since then he cheated on the love of her life with her best friend, lost her, won her back and wrote another book called ‘The Truth’ where he disowns this playboy persona and admits that while it got him women, it never kept them around, or got him love. It was like trying to fill a bucket that had a hole in it.
Aside from the thesis statement, it was an entertaining and well written book. I thought to give it two stars but opted not to bump its rating.

This book was fucking terrible. I'm ashamed to have read it.

Impossible to put down. This is a fascinating tale of a guy with marginal skills with the ladies (despite fame), who sets out on a life changing mission to master picking up women. I dare you to try and not get hooked in the first few pages. The characters are philanderers, gigolos, wannabes, braggarts, and every dysfunctional category in between.

Their quest is obvious, and thrust in your face; to hook up with as many beautiful women as possible. Strauss becomes prolific at the social marketing skill, and becomes addicted to his casanova killer abilities. But as is so often the case, the higher levels of his skill (seduction) lessens the inner drive and excitement he feels towards his conquest. The chase becomes not only boring, but a bit frightening. Not a spoiler here, but the author reflects. He ponders. He accidentally finds an inner moment observing from third person where his life has now taken him. He wonders if it is all he wants to become. He looks closer at his bizarre friends. All of them have major issues. Is this what he really wants?

Strauss has written several best sellers, as well as for Rolling Stone, and literally has no competition when it comes to spinning tales of this type.

For this genre, I recommend picking up the best three.
The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed
Written by the guru of the seduction community. His encyclopedia-like book reads like a PHD college course on seduction. It is the template for what Strauss uses in the Game. It lays out the techniques, terminology, and methodology for anyone to learn.

The other great one is  The_Professional_Bachelor_Dating_Guide_How_to_Exploit_Her_Inner_Psycho.
This is a devious sexual persuasion guide for hooking up, written by a psych doc who cruised the nightclubs with great success for a decade. It also contains an asset protection guide to set up pre-marriage to shield you from divorce.

Get these three, and get ready to laugh and learn. Really interesting books.

The only reason this is not 3-stars is because those last few pages were simply so emotionally moving, gently revealing the author's views of the human condition. After everything the book has gone through (from worse to worse for the characters) it was a dramatic turn and caught me woefully off-guard. I like it so much that here it is. I mena, I also got to the end of the book (this part) on my birthday! I had started the book before I would have believed this was typical human biology. However during the course of reading the book I fell deeply in love with someone amazing and had... the.. exact... same... experience... and shock as the author. So taken together the timing that I got to reading this part of this particular book makes it perhaps one of the most memorable moments of my reading life.

Note that the person crying was for most of the book considered one of the best pickup artists in the world.

When I walked to the kitchen later that night to get a drink I saw Mystery nursing another cocktail in front of the TV. He was watching a video of Karate kid and crying. "I never had a Mr. Miyagi." He sobbed, wiping tears off his reddened cheeks. He was drunk. "My dad didn't teach me anything. All I wanted was a Mr. Miyagi." I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we needed to win at life: the nightly code of conduct, the ways of the Alpha-male, that's why we found each other. But a sequence of manoeuvres and a system of behaviour would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage.

Lisa and I spent the next day together, and the day after that, and the day after that. I kept worrying that I was going to ruin it, that we were spending too much time together and that she was going to get tired of me. Rick H had always said: "give her the gift of missing you." But we couldn't seem to part. "You are so perfect for me," she said as she lay in my bed for the fourth night in a row. "I've never had sex with a guy I like this much before. I'm afraid I'll get attached." Beneath that tough exterior she was scared. All her push-pull wasn't a pre-planned psychological tactic. It was her heart warring with her head. Perhaps the reason she had been so reluctant to open up was that she was protecting something fragile inside. Like me she was afraid to actually feel something for someone else: to love, to be vulnerable, to give someone else control over her happiness and well-being. When I slept with all those other girls I just had sex with them once a night, and if I liked them enough a second time in the morning. But something amazing happened with Lisa when we had sex for the first time. After I had an orgasm it didn't go down. I did it with her a second time, it was still ready to go. We did it a third and fourth time that night and it never went soft. I couldn't understand it. My dick which I had thought was a completely mindless animal desperate to stick itself in any hole actually responded to emotion. It had feelings too. It wasn't just built up anticipation. It stayed up for three or four orgasms every time Lisa and I made love. We fucked in cars and alleys and restaurant bathrooms and in the vending machine room in a hotel hallway where a maintenance man caught us and tried to extort $20 from me.

When I'd gone impotent in the bathroom with a porn star perhaps it didn't have anything to do with the whiskey. My body was responding to the lack of emotional foreplay. I neither cared about nor really desired her and I'm sure she felt the same. It was just entertainment. Sex with Lisa was not entertainment. It was not about validation and ego-gratification like all those pick-ups I'd been so proud of. It was about creating a vacuum where nothing else existed except the two of us and our passion. It made the rest of existence seem like a distraction.

It's also terrifying to think had I been introduced to the pickup artist community at younger age that I likely would have bought right into it. It's kinda sad and bizarre reading this book and seeing the lives of people far older than me going through troubles in their dating life that I used to go through but now to which I see so many solutions that I now see as common-sense.

Before anyone asks, I wish I could say I "just magically matured," but in reality I'm largely thankful for resources like the Mating Grounds podcast for covering the same ground this book covers with regards to the flaws of the pickup community, but also providing far more in-depth practical advice - which is grounded in the best science we have - when it comes to accomplishing your goals (whatever that might be) with regards to dating. I have no doubt I'd still be on a very sad self-isolating road to self-destruction if not for this empowering podcast.

Oh, and it's all free:
http://thematinggrounds.com/new-start...

I spent the first 100 pages utterly confused. Was the point of The Game to meet lots of girls, get a girlfriend, or just have lots of sex? One wannabe-PUA crows about losing his virginity - it's a horrible, painful experience which he can't wait to end. But afterwards, he says that he's excited because this will take the pressure off, and allow him to approach more women, presumably to have even more painful, awful sex with women he doesn't like.

After a few hundred pages I realised that The Game isn't about sex, or getting a girlfriend, or falling in love. It's just about showing off in front of other men. They're collecting women, but it could just as easily be fast cars, or the high score on Zelda, or bear carcasses. PUAs go out, recite their lines, get phone numbers or a 'kiss close' (a girl kisses you, then leaves), then go home to type up their conquests on PUA message-boards. They could just make the whole experience up, and they would have the same response. Strauss himself realises that "it was really shared emotions and experience that creates relationships, not seven hours of [PUA] routines followed by two hours of sex".

I learned a few rules of succeeding in The Game:
1. Don't care about women. That way, if they knock you back, it doesn't matter. They're just numbers to you, so anything hurtful they say or do is irrelevant.
2. Get used to rejection. One wannabe-PUA spent a weekend trying to chat up exactly 100 women - and "even managed to get a few phone numbers". If 3-5 women gave him their numbers, that means that 95 didn't. It takes unshakable self-esteem to be rejected 95% of the time and still push on.
3. As soon as you can, puff up your chest and crow about your successes to any other PUA who will listen.

The most disturbing part of the book - hypnosis - is mentioned, but never explored. Strauss mentions a PUA who "approached the girl...and within thirty seconds she was passed out in [his] arms". This is never mentioned again in the book, but is the most sinister aspect, crossing the line from harmless pickup routines into nonconsensual sex.

Excluding that aspect, I do feel the need to defend The Game. It's just a series of behaviours and word patters, and women don't just 'fall for it'. We can be dumb sometimes, but we're not that dumb. As the book says, women want sex just like men do, they "just don't want to be pressured, lied to, or made to feel like a slut". If a woman wants to go home with a guy, she will. If she doesn't want to, she won't. Is there really any harm in a guy trotting out some bullshit lines, just to get a girl to notice him? These men are sad, lonely, and socially inept. They need all the help they can get.

As I'm sure you can guess, in the book I discovered, word-for-word, a routine that was used on me a few months ago. I met a guy in a club, he started reciting all the lines. We talked for a while, and when he asked for my number I reminded him that I had a boyfriend - to which he said that he just wanted my number so we could continue our conversation about Wuthering Heights (you at the back, please stop laughing at my gullibility). He seemed pretty harmless - I certainly wasn't going to sleep with him, but new friends are always good - so I gave him my number. He texted a few times, then started to mention sex, at which point I told him to please go away, then deleted his number.

At the time, I figured that he hadn't got anything out of this interaction. I clearly wasn't interested in him, and we never met up again. Yet, in terms of The Game, he won. He left with a girl's number - a girl with a boyfriend, no less. He could have gone home and bragged online about the pocketful of phone numbers he got, even if they wouldn't have got him any closer to sex or a girlfriend. He could have had approval from other men, and that is the whole point of The Game.

Is it possible to deep dive at the shallow end? The Game gamely tries to.

The book is dedicated to the shallowest of male pursuits, that of meaningless sex with strangers you just met. A bunch of socially inadequate boy-men run extremely successful 'game' creating set-pieces that make women weak-kneed. How they do this, though complex to summarize, is engrossing at an animalistic level. They break down all interactions between people into bare components, create 'routines', memorize then, and administer them in the 'field'. Sort of like American Football, except that the ball being handled here is some unsuspecting woman (or women), the people doing the handling are gangly, awkward nerds who grandiosely call themselves 'artists', and the goal is ... well, you know what the goal is. So that's the how.

Why they do it, now that's a whole other matter. The characters in the book (yes, I realize this is non-fiction, but it has such an other-worldly feel about it that one can only think of the people populating these pages as 'characters') go about their obsessive set of routines to 'develop game', and collect fists-ful of phone numbers and notches on their belts. But when someone first asks themselves why they do what they do all day and night, the response of all the men involved is a collective head-scratch, shoulder shrug and 'just'.

So yes the men in the book are wildly sexist, lack any basic level of decency or respect for women, and seem oblivious to the utter tedium and pointlessness of their desperate attempts to f* their way to social acceptance and love.

So why the three stars then? Well, you have to grant Neil Strauss this - these are some bizarre 400 odd pages! There is a whole other world out there that this book opens your eyes to. And components of social dynamics these 'artists' exploit, which open your eyes. There is also the grudging respect you develop for people who can give so much devotion to anything, however trivial we ourselves might find the pursuit. And of course, Neil Strauss is a wonderfully talented writer, who has an eye for character, the talent for storytelling, and, apparently, the inventiveness to create an entire oeuvre of routines to pick up women.

Anyway, enough with the defensiveness. I give it three stars inspite of the content, because I did enjoy reading many parts of it. Now that it is done, I need to go take a shower.

I don't usually say I've read a book when I haven't finished it. But I simply can't read the second half of this book without losing little parts of my soul on every page, and I damn well want recognition for those parts of my soul I have already lost. So here I am, reviewing a book I haven't really read.
Let's start with something important - Neil Strauss is a very talented writer, His style is not only engaging but often even literary, and I didn't just enjoy turning pages quickly but was quite comfortable in the warm bath of his prose.
So full points for style (no pun intended). It's the content that stinks. you see, fundamentally, Neill Strauss is a big nerd. The kind that is scared of women - and we all know fear breeds contempt, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation. He admits his nerdery freely, but what he seems to have missed in the detail of this horrifically graphic, autobiographical book of sexual exploration and psychological navel gazing, is that pick-up does not transform him. While he is swept up in a world that gives him magical powers to overcome his own shortcomings (again, no pun intended), he doesn't understand that the essential problem in his sex life is that he doesn't see it as social life - in other words, he still sees women as objects, not people. 'Style' is just Neill Strauss in a cowboy hat, with a poorly-written script and a hard-on.
Style still doesn't understand women because he has failed to identify with them. If this is a book about freeing your sexuality, it is also a book about stifling your humanity. It is about using your words to manipulate, and using sex to dominate. Without throwing a single punch, it is fundamentally violent. It claims to be about demystifying women, but really it is about stripping them of all reality and moulding them into what some men would rather they were - mindless, obedient pliable, and constantly, overtly sexual.
There may have been some kind of redemption later in the book, but I could not wait around for it - too much had already been said. Too many stereotypes had been promoted and too many coded ways of undermining women had been let loose into the slimy gutters and the minds of readers.
I couldn't handle this book. It made me nauseous. Mr Strauss, please use your powers of writing for good next time.

Edit (2019): I wrote this 7 years ago; forgive me for being naive. I didn't know what an incel was, or that PUA culture was already the sewer of the internet. I now know this book is partly responsible for fuelling the rise of violent misogyny that normalised and formed the breeding ground for the resurgent far right. This book is garbage and if you have a copy, I recommend incinerating it. Zero stars.

When I started to read this book, I found it to be very interesting and different book, being out of the ordinary, but after two hundred pages it started to feel a lot like the same, where as the story as repeating again and again.
The ending was a bit suprising/unsuprising, because I felt that it was going to end the way it ended, but at the same time it could suprise me anyways.
Anyway I have found the book really interesting and it gave a really interesting inside story of this secret society, that Neil Strauss was part of, by the name of Styles.

It's amusing to read that PUA gurus exist, its scary to think that there are hordes for paying customers for this service. Sad indictment of todays Incel/MGTOW culture i suppose!

Okay so I didn’t think this book was gonna be that interesting. I bought it cause I heard it on a podcast and saw it for $8 at a used bookstore. Best $8 I ever spent. People critique it because they say that the content is demeaning or rude to women. And uh yeah, that’s the whole point. It never seemed, to me, that Neil Strauss had ever intended to make you like him or what happens in the book but rather it’s drawing attention to the fucked up things that men do. And however alluring pick up artists, or anything, may be, there is always a dark side of it. And when you create an echo chamber like what’s in the book, shit always goes bad. But at the same time, it’s about how sometimes bad things create good outcomes, his found confidence, better journalism skills, and eventual leaving of the community and finding his girlfriend. There’s nothing wrong with hating parts of it but you can’t deny the importance of it.