Ákaflega sérstök bók. Hreinskilin og opinská svo mjög að hún fór oft út fyrir þægindarammann en um leið fyndin og tragísk á köflum. Mun betri en ég átti von á og veitti innsýn í klámiðnaðinn í BNA af hispursleysi. ( )

The story of a popular porn star in the 2010's who tells some of her life story in this book. The problem I have is she does not use the full names of people she talks about in the book. I mean if you are going to tell stories let us in, so we can follow. ( )

This was a pretty random selection for me; I wanted to try a biography of someone outside the normal tech/business/science/engineering/military types I usually read. Porn star!

It's pretty "porny" in places, where she talks in detail about scenes, but the interesting parts for me were her background (sort-of-rich around obnoxiously-rich kids in NYC), details about how an industry I don't know much about works, etc. Probably cliche, but she's surprisingly "normal" in her motivations, and seems like a decent person overall.

Works best as an audiobook, since it was read by the author. Not sure if I would have bothered in text form. ( )

In "Insatiable," Asa Akira lets the reader know that she's wanted to work in the sex industry for about as long as she knew that she could. She's described the day on which she shot one particularly difficult porn scene as "the happiest day of her life." After she was arrested for shoplifting, she spent hours in a holding cell talking about life with a madam/working girl who'd just been busted and had a great time. Her mother once forbade her to sleep with covers on so that she wouldn't fiddle with herself before falling asleep. The title of this book isn't an empty boast: the author's one of those driven, all-or-nothing personalities. She readily admits that she is -- or has been -- addicted to pills, food, attention, money, cigarettes, sex, exercise, success, recognition, and, well, power. The striking portrait of her on the book's cover, which was done by noted LA street artist and accidental Facebook millionaire David Choe, is a pretty good representation of what she's about. Whatever else Asa is -- and she doesn't always present herself as an admirable figure here -- she's intense.

The traditional porn bio is essentially a tale of somebody's tragic downfall: the standard story is that a too-trusting young woman makes some bad choices and gets her life ruined by the industry. Asa, on the other hand, seems to have been saved by dirty movies, in an odd sort of way. The product of an exclusive, multinational New York City school, she was a kind of prep school rebel who had the sort of impulses and addictions that usually make for troubled adulthoods. Porn, which seems to channel her appetites into a high-paying, relatively creative position, seems to suit her perfectly. A lot of "Insatiable" reads like an argument for satisfying your desires: Asa was just smart enough, or lucky enough, to turn her worst habits to her advantage without getting hurt too badly in the process. She seems aware that she can't do it forever, and she's ruthlessly realistic about what porn consumers want and how fast fame fades in the industry. She was still a young woman when she wrote this book, and who knows how she feels about the industry now? But a lot of "Insatiable" reads like the work of somebody's whose happy to have found herself, even if it was in an industry that involves a lot of weird bodily fluids and painful hair removal.

As for the book's other attractions, we get some good porn stories and some inside dope on the more grueling, less glamorous, aspects of being a porn queen. Asa discusses the industry's biases: strippers are considered trashy, but performers are okay, while gay male porn is regarded as some mysterious foreign country. She's fearlessly honest about her own faults: her neediness, her occasional childishness, her insecurity. Since she met her future husband on set in a scene involving another guy, we get the weirdest "How I Met Your Mother" story since the body doubles had a meet-cute in "Love, Actually." It's in letter form, addressed to her future children. Honestly, what I might have enjoyed most about this one is her account of being a prep school girl who lived a fast, dangerous life as sort of privileged delinquent. Her teen years seemed to have been filled with sex, drugs, and missed classes: both exquisitely comfortable and seemingly completely unsupervised. It's perhaps the sort of teenage experience that's only possible in New York, and provides a charmingly seedy, viscerally exciting portrait of a certain time and place. What this book doesn't provide is a really deep analysis of what porn does to its performers psyches and the role it plays in our society, but then, that's hardly this book's reason for being, and Asa strikes me as a person who's usually happy to live in the thrilling, adrenaline-soaked moment. Whether or not she received any help writing it, it's very much her story, and it's a light, fun, filthy and oddly inspiring little book. Someday, I hope to find a profession that I'm as well-suited to as Asa is to hers. ( )

I think this book was padded with words that were not Asa's. Can I call it a ghostwritten book? I'm not sure it qualifies. I mean, sports related biographies have supporting writers all the time. Does one need to be a cynic to doubt the provenance of an autobiography? The one stumbling block for Asa Akira's veracity is that she tells us she enjoys the sex on camera every time. That she comes every time. And that she falls in love during the shoot. That is fake. It's a lie.

She tells us a lot about herself, yet we don't have much of a picture at the end. Is she vulgar in her habits? Is she more than streets smart? I don't have the foggiest idea of her sense of humor. Despite that, this book was easy to read. It made me think I haven't totally wasted my time, although I suspect otherwise now. I don't know what other porn star's bios are like but I'll not be seeking them and making a habit of reading them. Once is enough. ( )