Anna

I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis (work is bullshit) and the proposed solution (UBI). The original essay might have been enough for me though.

Could've used some input from economists in the final section about UBI and maybe a bit more solid data in the middle.

Incredibly silly, but I admit I read it in one sitting.

One star because it's packed with scientifically inaccurate HIV fear mongering, which is a real shame in a bestseller.

It's been some days since I finished this book and I still keep discovering new ways in which it is meta.

The narrative about-face in the second part of the book is a neat trick, of the sort that makes you want to immediately reread the story, this time questioning everything.

I really appreciated the style too - it seemed like the author wasn't trying very hard, and only towards the end when they identity of the narrator is once again thrown into question did this make all the more sense to me.

Someday soon AI will get really good at generating fiction and it will be a lot like this book. I'm just not convinced that Little Children wasn't written by a robot. The characters try really hard to pass as real people but they're like fairly decent CGI at best.

Excellent. Highly rewarding if you enjoy works by authors who take the reader's ambition as a given. Full of eccentric aristocrats and slow-developing delicious scandals. Good reminder that nation-states are a new and unnatural construct in Europe. Brush up your French!

What a strange book. Not what I expected but can't see much point to it other than the twist.

I really enjoy Kathryn Davis' specific weirdness but I struggled to make sense of this one until the very end. She can write one hell of a sentence but sometimes they just don't connect for me at all. I have no idea what The Silk Road was even about.

I guess I'm too late to this.

Oh well. Film adaptation it is.

“Or The French Roots of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Franchise.”

In conclusion:

‘Mais enfin, qu'est-ce que l'existentialisme?' (I'm still not sure)

Heidegger — what a dick!

Sartre — too cool for everything

Simone de Beauvoir — all kinds of awesome

Husserl — the OG

Marleau-Ponty — an emotionally stable male philosopher (!!!)

Camus - my problematic fave - did not get as much book space as I hoped for. There were some weird shifts in chronology and a couple of repetitions that made the whole thing feel like more of a collection of essays than a coherent book. Really great insights into the mentality of the French immediately pre- and post-WW2 though.

So as not to spoil the delight of discovering the main theme of Trinity for yourself (it's expressly stated some two thirds into the book, by Robert Oppenheimer himself), I'd suggest not reading the reviews too closely.
It'd also be hard to explain how the character of Oppenheimer relates to the stories told in this book without leading anyone into conclusions that are best arrived at on your own.
(I realise that this is a non-review but just trust me on this.)

This strange and convoluted novel might be the closest that you can get to understanding how expat Israelis feel about Israel – it forces you into a vantage point from which multiple points of view, truths and realities cohere.

As an immigrant myself, I really liked the idea of forgetting the details of previous your life once you've crossed the border between worlds, and comfortably making home in a different reality, complete with an alternative history and geopolitics.

I'm still not quite sure why the author made some of the decisions he made. While I get why each character's POV would be written in a different person, I struggle to see why the inspector character, the only one written in first person, would have access to other characters' feelings and perspective – it was a bit jarring and made the story that much harder to follow, and in the end wasn't explained (unless I missed something).

There were a few standout stories here (I liked all the animated corpses/skeletons doing things but it might just be my aesthetic).

For the most part though, reading this collection is like listening to someone recount their dream: hard to follow, generally boring, and most likely pointless to you.

Some things work better as TED talks/articles on Medium.

As cliché as it sounds, I didn't expect to like it — it's an old-fashioned dude book (as more than one of my friends noted upon seeing the hardback edition, it looks “like something my dad would read”) and written with the sensibility of an old-fashioned dude (that is to say, it's problematic af at times). Conroy's heart is in the right place though, and if you can look past the requisite myopia and non-PC language and read its more controversial tropes as an honest depiction of a complicated time (the 60s) in a very complicated place (the South), you'd find that it's a fascinating, unflinching look at masculinity, social stratification, tradition, the idea of “honour”, loyalty, rebellion and herd mentality.
Alternative reasons to read it: the plot (cadets! secret societies! immoral aristocrats! young love!); the Joker-from-Full-Metal-Jacket-like voice of the main character; a fun homoeroticism drinking game.

I will never not find goulash hilarious after this.

A solid debut. Some imperfections here and there (a few cliches, an occasional mixed metaphor, weird inconsistencies of character etc) but ultimately it was
1. something I haven't read before
2. exactly what I wanted to read right now.

I found it very hard to resist the impression that the author must have lost a bet that forced him to create a story out of a randomly generated string of words/ideas but Vandermeer is so good, his writing so lucid that in the end it works extremely well.

Those poems made me think that I might possibly get poetry a bit, sometimes. Either that or Zapruder is just my guy.

Possibly my favourite unreliable narrator to date — so completely fucked up and hilarious and moving, I couldn't get enough of her voice and her weird filter.

I fear that saying any more than that would spoil this delightful book. My #1 release of 2017 so far and it will be very hard to dethrone.

I'll never be able to think of “the abyss” again without laughing.

Worth it for the art alone, but I wish the writing was more dramatic. The amount of exposition was mildly insulting.

Could've done without all the foreshadowing – it felt unnecessary, the suspense was unbearable enough without it (in a good way). The last 100 pages or so were incredibly stressful. I can't wait to see it on screen.

This series is amazing: so preposterous and out there and at the same time so emotionally pure. Those monsters' struggles are just incredibly moving. Every single Mechazon POV panel makes me choke up, and I had to disengage from Electrogor's storyline a bit because it was just too damn sad and dark.

At the same time, this is some of the funniest stuff I've ever read. It self-consciously plays with tropes while maintaining a cast of probably the most multi-dimensional villains since The Wire.

If I could propose an alternative title for this book it'd have to be DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. Human Smoke is a masterpiece of presenting facts in a way that makes it almost inevitable for you to agree with the author (and he states his intention quite clearly in the afterword).

The whole book is a collection of factual snippets — letters, speeches, recorded conversations, missives, but mostly news — arranged in a hugely meaningful way. One might call it manipulative but honestly, if you have ever read an editorial or watched a particularly hard-hitting interview, you know when you're being led. This book will not brainwash anyone into pacifism. Though the author pushes the antiwar/quaker movement super-hard in the Human Smoke, it's in no way a foolproof argument, and I still have questions like: what exactly would've been the pacifists' solution to the Shoah and the annexation of Eastern Europe? Their actions seemed to consist of praying, signing petitions and refusing draft. Gandhi is extensively quoted, only his thoughts and speeches on non-violence are presented side by side with the Allies' politicians delighting in air raids on civilians (which makes him sound very reasonable), when they should've been presented against descriptions of the Warsaw ghetto and the first mass murders of Jews (try being a cheerleader for Gandhi and his talk on leaning into your oppression when your oppressor is calmly project-managing your annihilation).

There's plenty here on the horrors of war of attrition and the blood-chillingly asinine warmongering on all sides (Churchill was such a dick!) but I for one came out of this book unconvinced by the pacifist argument (then again I'm Polish, so good luck trying to convince me that a truce with Hitler would've been just fine because hey, cathedrals!) if not even more any-means-necessary minded than I already was.

But even though I might disagree with the central thesis of the Human Smoke, I found it incredibly moving. Would never have expected to find this method of writing about war to be more emotionally affecting than the usual human-interest-story but to me at least it was. There's a real feeling of witnessing the buildup of events and the chaos that ensued in a very unfiltered way — it's like watching a feed that shows you all the missed chances for peace. Heartbreaking stuff.

Love the genre mashup & visual jokes & countless references but on the linguistic side - maybe a little bit problematic, sometimes?

I'm super into Electrogor's character arc though. The trials that megafauna's been through, sheesh!