Ryan

While originally written in 2016 by Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami, Under the Eye of the Big Bird hit western shelves in 2024. But despite that, the book feels almost like it was written for 2024, in a time when climate change is causing real-time changes, fascism is on the rise, and humanity is still recovering from a global pandemic.

While the book doesn't speak on these issues specifically, it focuses on the thing we fear most as a result of them:

“What happens when we go extinct?”

Told over the course of 14 interconnected stories about humans on the verge of extinction, I found myself a little confused and skeptical in the first 2–3 stories as I was thrown into a world set hundreds of years from now. But as more was revealed to me, confusion was replaced with a very specific sadness that is summed up perfectly in the penultimate story, through the eyes of an AI character:

“You often talk about feeling lonely. I'm unable to experience that emotion, but I do have the ability to internally simulate an analogous response. For some reason, that is the response that arises whenever I tell your story. It's not something I can explain. It never happens when I talk about other things.”

But this book is more than just an act of doomscrolling in book form, and that's what makes it so refreshing.

Instead, the final chapter caught me by surprise, leaving me in tears as our tale ends not on a note of despair, but one of hope. Kawakami ends her book with a brave tale of how, even at the lowest point of human history, there is still the possibility to face the abyss and ask:
“Is this really the end?”

This book had so much potential, but just could not live up to the interesting plot. While I get that worldbuilding needs to be done, I felt the book got too sidetracked in the first half with it. By the time we started getting into the meat of it into the final three-quarters, I just wanted it to be over.

The dialogue is OK, and I found the author uses many of the same turns of phrase for different characters, resulting in no one character sounding any different.

Strewn about are also some small grammatical errors. Things like words being repeated twice, words that are missing, and quotes that aren't closed off appropriately.

The plot itself was interesting and there were some pieces I did enjoy, but I just think this book needed some more TLC from either the author or a closer eye from the editor. It has so much potential, but it's just not there.

A charming little story about smart appliances in a smart home watching over the senior man and woman living inside it. As appliances, they don't quite understand concepts like "beauty" or metaphors, but they are trying and slowly do learn about them over the course of the book.

Edie, the wife, becomes ill, and life for everyone becomes upended - even for the appliances - as they navigate through this challenge.

Some authors have a way of building tension slowly throughout the entirety of a book, and Glenn Dixon did this wonderfully in this one. The whole time I was reading I was both excited and apprehensive as to what would happen next, becoming attached to both the human characters and appliances in the process.

This book has some simple but beautiful prose, some nice musical imagery as there is some piano playing involved, and an interesting idea at the heart of it all. The ending was beautiful and really tied it all together too, bringing me to tears in the process (I have been picking tearjerkers as of late, apparently).

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish and highly highly recommend.

I was originally going to give this book a 2.5 stars or maybe a 3, but it really picked up in the last quarter of the book.

The books suffers from a bit of bloat, making some of the humor get tiresome. For the good first half I couldn't help thinking what was the point of it all... But it was interesting enough that I wanted to see it through, so here we are.

I wish the author delved more into Ryan's thoughts and really explored them more as things feel a bit surface level and basic at times. There was also a lot of ground covered in the book with two main factions, I ended up feeling lost for a bit of the book.

But at the end it somehow ties it all up decently enough that I'd be willing to give the next book a chance.

So is it worth reading? Maybe, maybe not. If you really dislike the humor, I'd say no, but if it's at least tolerable, then maybe. There are some legitimately funny bits, but at other points the jokes don't land the best.

Overall not a half bad book, just has a reaaaaally slow buildup.

Pretty good book. I was laughing at some funny things at the very beginning, but as time went on I found myself starting to get a touch bored by the book here and there. It was overall a fascinating one to read though and I still enjoyed it quite a bit, so I still would recommend it.