Anna
This book is so full of 1970s buzzwords — ‘groovy', ‘cosmic', saying ‘pilgrimage' when you mean just living your life — that it reads like a heavily timestamped artifact of the past, even though the message is basically timeless: an adult should be no man's disciple. This book should really be recommended to the Coelho fanbase — they'd recognise their favourite ‘spiritual' language and the gist is something they should probably hear.
One thing that I found seriously disturbing though was Kopp's naivety about his patients at the sex offender facility. I wonder, was his thinking common in the 70s? Did people really believe that you could psychoanalyse pedophilia and sexual violence away? That as soon as a pedo realises that he's only looking for his absent father's love or for his ice-queen mother's hugs or something, he'll be cured and ready to go and pursue healthy relationships with consenting adults? It's not hard to see why convicts whose chances of parole depend entirely on a shrink giving them an all-clear would play this game, but why would he?
I'd be curious to see statistics from kindles and such for how many readers actually get to the end of any of Gibson's books. He always makes the first half so goddamn confusing. But if you stick with it, the rewards are plenty.
I don't know how Gibson does his research or synthesizes his ideas but I imagine that he takes one long look at the internet and then goes on to assemble a Keyser Soze future out of our current fears – environmental threats, collapsing economies, widening class divisions, loss of agency that affects everyone but the very rich.
My fellow Londoners will find that The Peripheral's future London ruled by a kleptocracy of Russian and Saudi oligarchs hits really close to home.
Also, The Peripheral feels destined to be adapted for the big screen by JJ Abrams — so many of his favourite tropes!
I didn't take to this book as fast as I did to Yanagihara's debut; it was more of a slow burner.
There were several moments where I almost quit reading: about halfway when I realised just how sad it was going to be, then again at about three quarters in when my perspective shifted from a reader following a plot to someone perched on the writer's shoulder as she tortures a voodoo doll of a character. If this was a manuscript I would've sent it back right then bookmarked at around page 400 saying “this is where I become disengaged”.
I thought she'd completely lost me when I started finding all those calamities grotesque and when my analysis fixed itself on “UGH Yanagihara give this man a break!!!” At that point the only thing that could redeem this book for me was an elegant ending.
And boy did she deliver. It was so smooth I almost missed it. I finished the book late at night, desperate to be done with it and with all the sadness and when it was done I went to sleep a bit sad but also unburdened. But then a few hours later I woke up like OHHHHHHHHHHHH and I got it, and I gave Yanagihara a mental slow clap for it. Then I cried for a couple of hours because it was just so damn sad.
I'm so emotionally drained I'll be reading nothing but non-fiction for several months now.
I'm embarrassed to admit that for the entire time of reading I'd been thinking of Styx instead of Rubicon. The story made so much more sense to me then. Now I'm just confused.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
I'm amazed by the author's skill to answer all my nagging questions without being explicit. It actually felt like I almost figured it all out by myself.
I read the trilogy as a single-edition hardback and I have to say I don't really get why it was released as 3 separate books. Marketing, I guess? This FSG edition is amazing and it felt like a very well-structured, very long novel in 3 parts.
There are so many things I loved about the whole trilogy (the expeditions, the nature writing, the mystery and the hair-raising unexpected details, I could go on) that at times it felt like Vandermeer peered into my head and took some old terrors out as part of his research. I spent years as a kid being paranoid about getting a splinter that would turn me into someone else, like the splinter from H.C. Andersen's tales. Vandermeer made me re-live that horror, bless him.
I'm enjoying this series so much. Vandermeer does a neat trick of implanting the suspicion that the books' reality might have been compromised, in one of several ways, from a very early stage in the story. Here he takes this a bit further still. Everything is unsettling. Yet the compounding of mysteries never feels like too much (think late seasons of Lost).
At some point close to the end of the book, the hapless protagonist of Satin Island finds himself the centre of attention at an industry conference where he's not a speaker. The audience and the speakers alike fist-bump him and pat him on the back and congratulate him on a job well done, despite the preceding 170-odd pages of him doing and saying nothing of any substance - just musing about his childhood, having illusions of greatness, obsessing over random news stories and imagining himself smarter than everybody else. Such is the life of a straight white dude with a corporate job. That is all.
An extra star for the quality of the prose, and another for how disturbingly easy it was for me to relate to the protagonist (I don't expect anyone else to share this affinity).
Competently written, but it just didn't move me. Actually no, it did gross me out quite a bit but other than that, no.
The amount of ‘quirky' was through the roof, very early 00s peak-hipster era, before the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope got us rolling our eyes.
Also most of it was about babies and I'd never have picked it up if I'd known that.
I gave in to the hype so that's probably made the disappointment worse, overall it was an enjoyable and hilarious read. Not sure what I expected.
What the hell happened to the doctor?! His absence was glaring.
Still very good, but I really missed Rossmo's amazing artwork from Vol 1. I hate to say it was a disappointment but I'd grown really attached to Fillmore as a character, and now I see that it was in a large part thanks to Rossmo's rendering of him. Fillmore's madness seemed a lot more present and just hardly kept from boiling over the surface in Vol 1. In this book, I was constantly aware that these were just drawings of people.
The writing is decent but I'd prefer to have more of Fillmore's voice and less voiceover.
Overall this series just made me want to get everything by Rossmo and not necessarily to follow Spencer (though I think he'd be an amazing television writer with his ear for dialogue).
I can recognise the greatness but I didn't enjoy it. It was a slow, extremely painful read.
The author's legendary aversion to commas imposes a certain tempo, and most sentences require at least two run-throughs before the syntax falls together correctly.
At the same time though, many of those sentences were so wonderful that I re-read them over and over; some of them I must have read dozens of times. This has never happened to me before on a scale quite like this.
There are so many images in Blood Meridian that are absolutely horrific and that induce compassion fatigue and nightmares and that deter from picking up the book again for days. I almost gave it up after the snakebitten horse, and that was nothing compared to what was coming.
I don't know if I can recommend this to anyone; it's hard to handle all this lyrical beauty when it wraps so much extreme violence.
One to come back to when I'm older, wiser and more cynical.
Not disappointed — this is absolutely worth all that praise & hype that made me read it in the first place (on top of the fact that Ferrante is not Knausgaard). When it comes to describing the dynamics of female friendship and the sober reality of growing up underprivileged, this is a bottomless well of quotables.
I took a star off for the horrible edition (saccharine cover art + out of line printing that made every page look like a crooked frame on a wall and drove me nuts) and the fact that nothing that surprising actually happens — it's all a bit Anne of Green Gables for adults. I loved Anne of Green Gables though and I'll definitely read the remaining 3 books of the Neapolitan series, but it all feels a bit ‘pleasant escapism without ever being made to think'.
This is more like a 3 and a half, because I really enjoyed reading it and I think Beukes is an amazing writer.
I read the bulk of the book on a cross-Atlantic trip spit between two flights. My first flight was just over 9h and I got to the grand denouement just before the plane landed. I now wish I'd stopped reading then and never finished the book.
The problem I have with it is that the buildup is so perfect, the plot is just the right amount of mysterious and also perfectly paced, and the characters are all so very likeable — especially the two teens Layla and Cas who are both too cool and too witty to be convincing (think Sorkin) — but the ending spoils it all by being didactic.
There's a moment in the book when the events really start taking off and the whole thing turns symbolic and dreamscapey, which seemed to me really uneven and confusing, and the return to the realistic that happens after leaves many events unexplained.
It's probably the most contemporary book I've ever read, and it handles modernity and the Internet culture with grace (an author who uses words like Creepypasta and NyanCat and Snapchat in the right context is a rare animal indeed), but sadly, it ends up being preachy. I get the author's point but I'm also a Millennial through and through and I can't help but roll my eyes at Gen X'ers getting righteous about our use of social media and about the Internet culture. I felt like in Broken Monsters, Beukes demonises these things in an overly literal and preachy way. I also resented her a bit for turning the characters that I loved so much into puppets in a morality tale.
Great concept, executed perfectly.
There's a lot of violence in here, but the story doesn't feel like violence porn at all. The victims are all female but they're also all very compelling as characters, which makes their fates feel all the more tragic, and the killer's demise all the more satisfying.
Bonus points for saucy Polish expletives.
There are parts in this book that really made me gasp. Given the author's young age at the time of Wild Heart's publication (23) it really is an astonishing achievement, and it's unlike anything I'd ever read.
And yet, reading it often felt like a chore. The protagonist, Joana, was exhausting in a way that a severe alexithymic is exhausting. It was like observing and interpreting a person constantly observing and interpreting herself.
Still though, it really made me want to read Lispector's later works. For a debut work this is amazingly good.
