Mars

Iconic, historic, inspirational but difficult to read. Filled with its own vocabulary, perspective changes, time shifts, and disruptions. The reading process was not enjoyable and the imagery, although well described, was difficult to picture and feel a part of. As the inspiration behind so many visual content like the matrix and cyberpunk, its no surprise that visual recreations of this book have been great. But, as a book, the descriptions and imagery just wasn't there enough for me to connect to. 

A slow burn in the beginning that leads to an interesting story and character arc that's worth reading, but I wish some of the themes and fantasy components were explored in more depth. Also, I was convinced this was a book on mythology, it's not.

Filled with clever dark humor, and such creative insults. Humbert is hilarious and disgusting all in one. 

Very dry.

It's really a problem when a character driven book has characters that aren't likable. I really couldn't get past the surface level discriptions of the side characters, especially the way the female characters were described or should I say not described at all beyond being sexual objects. In a world created so beautifully, more effort was put into describing scenery than describing any person in the book. Absolutely a loss of opportunity here to discuss themes such as mental illness, death, wartime. Instead, the author minimizes all of these to background noise and focuses on hyper sexualizing every character as a way to cope with being a very one-dimension main character. A complete bore of a book and anyone who says otherwise is reading between the lines things that are simply not there.