Laith
Book club for June
I didn't think I had this much to say, but damn, I guess I cooked. _________________
I was really excited about this pick, it’s rare that the book club selects something that I was already interested in reading. Maybe it was having expectations that made this a gut punch for me. I don’t want to call this a bad book, it’s not bad at all, it’s fairly interesting and relatively solid when you consider it’s also an author debut, but I was let down.
Do you remember that episode of Futurama where Fry eats an egg sandwich and gets those parasitic worms that make him smart? Not necessarily the part where the crew shrinks down to fight the worms, but the part where Fry has to decide between being the “new” him and being his natural self.
What about Animorphs- do you remember the evil slug guys that would crawl into someone’s ear at the start of every book, the Yeerks?
The Lives of Tao remembers.
In fact, The Lives of Tao is a mashup of those two ideas. What if the Yeerks had a civil war, one fought right here on Earth—one which altered the course of human evolution, and now the war hinges on a new, Fry-esque, host. I am oversimplifying it, but not by much—the aliens aren’t slugs (not really sure what they are? A type of gas?) and they aren’t necessarily evil either, rather they’re just trying to get home.
The setup: Roen Tan is an out-of-shape IT guy whose life gets turned upside down when an ancient alien entity called Tao takes up residence in his body. These aliens, the Quasing, have been inhabiting humans for millennia, secretly influencing history and evolution. They’re split into two factions: the Prophus (the “good” aliens who want to help humanity develop so they can eventually build ships to get home) and the Genjix (the “bad” aliens who want to strip-mine Earth’s resources and leave). Tao, a Prophus agent, needs to train the hapless Roen into a competent operative to continue their shadow war against the Genjix
That premise had me hooked. Body-snatchers stories are criminally underused, and when they’re done right, they deliver a specific kind of psychological thriller: the creeping paranoia of never knowing which characters are threats, the mounting tension of whether you can trust the voice in your head. The best part of having an alien passenger should be that constant question mark—is this thing actually helping me, or am I being manipulated? Are the “good aliens” really good?
But I never felt that sense of unease with the Prophus. They pass every moral litmus test because they’re simply “the good aliens.” The book does flirt with this tension—there’s a moment where Roen questions his own sanity, and Tao “proves” he’s real by rattling off the capital of ancient Assyria. Roen takes this completely at face value and never bothers to verify it himself. There’s even a callback to this moment later, as if it settled the matter! The story plays with the idea of making us doubt Tao, but it’s Roen and his apparent 17 IQ points that prevent this from going anywhere meaningful.
Which brings me to my biggest issue with the book: Roen’s transformation from couch potato to combat-effective secret agent. We’re told repeatedly that he’s this lazy, out-of-shape guy who can’t get a grip on his own life, but somehow he becomes a willing participant in an ancient alien war without any convincing psychological journey to get him there.
The most glaring example comes when Roen, who’s been getting flattened in combat training, somehow manages to repel a gang of trained attackers by himself. What makes this particularly frustrating is that it happens during a moment when he’s regressing into his old habits—his victory feels completely unearned because of it. After this scene, you’d expect Roen to have some kind of reckoning about the danger he’s putting his friends and family in, right? He does eventually think about it, but only after the metaphorical gun is put into his hand at the conclusion, (view spoiler). It's this moment, (view spoiler) that finally spurs Roen's half-hearted attempt to address the danger at the very end of the book. But it comes much too late to be anything but hindsight.
Instead, Roen just goes along with Tao despite his reservations, seemingly for no other reason than it’s his character trait to obey orders. He never tries to back out of the arrangement, never really pushes back in any meaningful way. The story frames this as ultimately Roen’s choice, but it never feels like he needed any convincing—or if he did, it all happened off-screen while we weren’t looking.
This points to a bigger structural problem throughout the book: important developments keep happening off-screen or between chapters, leaving you feeling like you missed crucial scenes. Roen’s training progresses in time jumps, but we never see the changes reflected in any meaningful way other than these weird action sequences where the “non-combatant in a combat zone” is somehow demolishing special forces operatives (or at least holding his own). His lethality and competence appear and disappear as the plot demands, with no visible progression to justify it.
It’s frustrating because there are genuinely good ideas and cool concepts scattered throughout - the problem is they’re never fully explored or properly integrated with one another. The book feels underbaked, like it needed another draft or two to really develop these elements. Maybe those glimpses of Tao’s past lives at the beginning of each chapter could have been used as a mechanism to show Roen maturing through dreams or visions. Maybe we needed more scenes of him actually grappling with the moral weight of what he’s doing. Instead, we get told about character growth rather than shown it, and concepts that should connect meaningfully just exist in parallel.
I chalk a lot of this up to it being a debut novel, but that doesn’t make it less immersion-breaking when you’re reading it.
That said, the book isn’t without its strengths. The worldbuilding around the aliens secretly influencing human history is genuinely compelling, though I suspect if there had been more of it I probably wouldn't have liked it as much. There's a cheapening effect when all of history's mysteries suddenly have "Quasing" as the answer. What killed the dinosaurs? The Quasing. The Black Plague? The Quasing. The goddamn Han Dynasty? Also Quasing! Literally any more and i'd have rolled my eyes out of my skull, but the book avoids this trap and peppers in more historical flavor with Tao's past. Those little blurbs of Tao’s past lives at the start of each chapter were some of my favorite parts of the book, and honestly, I wish there had been more of that material. It’s exactly the kind of deep historical integration that makes the world feel lived-in and believable.
The dialogue is also pretty solid, especially the human to human conversations. When characters are just talking to each other without the alien plot overshadowing everything, the interactions feel organic and charming. There’s a natural flow to how people speak that suggests the author has a good ear for realistic conversation - it’s just that these moments tend to get buried under all the alien warfare stuff.
The core premise remains strong too. Body-snatchers plots are genuinely underused in fiction, and there’s real potential in this take on it. The foundation is there for something really engaging, and I am sure the sequels will improve on it. But being a first novel doesn’t excuse the fundamental issues with character development and story structure that kept pulling me out of the experience. When your protagonist’s entire arc happens off-screen and his victories feel unearned, it’s hard to stay invested, no matter how cool your aliens are.
Ultimately, The Lives of Tao feels like a missed opportunity. The ingredients are all there - an intriguing premise, solid worldbuilding, decent dialogue - but they never quite come together into something greater than the sum of their parts. I keep coming back to that word: underbaked. There’s a good book lurking in here somewhere, but it needed more time in the oven.
Maybe if I hadn’t gone in with expectations, this would have landed differently. But when a book promises you Futurama’s identity crisis meets Animorphs’ paranoia and delivers neither the psychological depth nor the creeping tension, it’s hard not to feel let down. The Lives of Tao remembers those stories, but it doesn’t quite understand what made them work.
PS: Totally forgot but this is a Chicago book as well, and you couldn't miss it, there's a whole chapter about eating Lou's deep dish. Not my favorite Chicago portrayal; it nails some details, Wabash does indeed look dark and shitty under the L, but-and I think I've said this before- there's more to the city than deep dish and crime.
Book club for June
I didn't think I had this much to say, but damn, I guess I cooked. _________________
I was really excited about this pick, it’s rare that the book club selects something that I was already interested in reading. Maybe it was having expectations that made this a gut punch for me. I don’t want to call this a bad book, it’s not bad at all, it’s fairly interesting and relatively solid when you consider it’s also an author debut, but I was let down.
Do you remember that episode of Futurama where Fry eats an egg sandwich and gets those parasitic worms that make him smart? Not necessarily the part where the crew shrinks down to fight the worms, but the part where Fry has to decide between being the “new” him and being his natural self.
What about Animorphs- do you remember the evil slug guys that would crawl into someone’s ear at the start of every book, the Yeerks?
The Lives of Tao remembers.
In fact, The Lives of Tao is a mashup of those two ideas. What if the Yeerks had a civil war, one fought right here on Earth—one which altered the course of human evolution, and now the war hinges on a new, Fry-esque, host. I am oversimplifying it, but not by much—the aliens aren’t slugs (not really sure what they are? A type of gas?) and they aren’t necessarily evil either, rather they’re just trying to get home.
The setup: Roen Tan is an out-of-shape IT guy whose life gets turned upside down when an ancient alien entity called Tao takes up residence in his body. These aliens, the Quasing, have been inhabiting humans for millennia, secretly influencing history and evolution. They’re split into two factions: the Prophus (the “good” aliens who want to help humanity develop so they can eventually build ships to get home) and the Genjix (the “bad” aliens who want to strip-mine Earth’s resources and leave). Tao, a Prophus agent, needs to train the hapless Roen into a competent operative to continue their shadow war against the Genjix
That premise had me hooked. Body-snatchers stories are criminally underused, and when they’re done right, they deliver a specific kind of psychological thriller: the creeping paranoia of never knowing which characters are threats, the mounting tension of whether you can trust the voice in your head. The best part of having an alien passenger should be that constant question mark—is this thing actually helping me, or am I being manipulated? Are the “good aliens” really good?
But I never felt that sense of unease with the Prophus. They pass every moral litmus test because they’re simply “the good aliens.” The book does flirt with this tension—there’s a moment where Roen questions his own sanity, and Tao “proves” he’s real by rattling off the capital of ancient Assyria. Roen takes this completely at face value and never bothers to verify it himself. There’s even a callback to this moment later, as if it settled the matter! The story plays with the idea of making us doubt Tao, but it’s Roen and his apparent 17 IQ points that prevent this from going anywhere meaningful.
Which brings me to my biggest issue with the book: Roen’s transformation from couch potato to combat-effective secret agent. We’re told repeatedly that he’s this lazy, out-of-shape guy who can’t get a grip on his own life, but somehow he becomes a willing participant in an ancient alien war without any convincing psychological journey to get him there.
The most glaring example comes when Roen, who’s been getting flattened in combat training, somehow manages to repel a gang of trained attackers by himself. What makes this particularly frustrating is that it happens during a moment when he’s regressing into his old habits—his victory feels completely unearned because of it. After this scene, you’d expect Roen to have some kind of reckoning about the danger he’s putting his friends and family in, right? He does eventually think about it, but only after the metaphorical gun is put into his hand at the conclusion, (view spoiler). It's this moment, (view spoiler) that finally spurs Roen's half-hearted attempt to address the danger at the very end of the book. But it comes much too late to be anything but hindsight.
Instead, Roen just goes along with Tao despite his reservations, seemingly for no other reason than it’s his character trait to obey orders. He never tries to back out of the arrangement, never really pushes back in any meaningful way. The story frames this as ultimately Roen’s choice, but it never feels like he needed any convincing—or if he did, it all happened off-screen while we weren’t looking.
This points to a bigger structural problem throughout the book: important developments keep happening off-screen or between chapters, leaving you feeling like you missed crucial scenes. Roen’s training progresses in time jumps, but we never see the changes reflected in any meaningful way other than these weird action sequences where the “non-combatant in a combat zone” is somehow demolishing special forces operatives (or at least holding his own). His lethality and competence appear and disappear as the plot demands, with no visible progression to justify it.
It’s frustrating because there are genuinely good ideas and cool concepts scattered throughout - the problem is they’re never fully explored or properly integrated with one another. The book feels underbaked, like it needed another draft or two to really develop these elements. Maybe those glimpses of Tao’s past lives at the beginning of each chapter could have been used as a mechanism to show Roen maturing through dreams or visions. Maybe we needed more scenes of him actually grappling with the moral weight of what he’s doing. Instead, we get told about character growth rather than shown it, and concepts that should connect meaningfully just exist in parallel.
I chalk a lot of this up to it being a debut novel, but that doesn’t make it less immersion-breaking when you’re reading it.
That said, the book isn’t without its strengths. The worldbuilding around the aliens secretly influencing human history is genuinely compelling, though I suspect if there had been more of it I probably wouldn't have liked it as much. There's a cheapening effect when all of history's mysteries suddenly have "Quasing" as the answer. What killed the dinosaurs? The Quasing. The Black Plague? The Quasing. The goddamn Han Dynasty? Also Quasing! Literally any more and i'd have rolled my eyes out of my skull, but the book avoids this trap and peppers in more historical flavor with Tao's past. Those little blurbs of Tao’s past lives at the start of each chapter were some of my favorite parts of the book, and honestly, I wish there had been more of that material. It’s exactly the kind of deep historical integration that makes the world feel lived-in and believable.
The dialogue is also pretty solid, especially the human to human conversations. When characters are just talking to each other without the alien plot overshadowing everything, the interactions feel organic and charming. There’s a natural flow to how people speak that suggests the author has a good ear for realistic conversation - it’s just that these moments tend to get buried under all the alien warfare stuff.
The core premise remains strong too. Body-snatchers plots are genuinely underused in fiction, and there’s real potential in this take on it. The foundation is there for something really engaging, and I am sure the sequels will improve on it. But being a first novel doesn’t excuse the fundamental issues with character development and story structure that kept pulling me out of the experience. When your protagonist’s entire arc happens off-screen and his victories feel unearned, it’s hard to stay invested, no matter how cool your aliens are.
Ultimately, The Lives of Tao feels like a missed opportunity. The ingredients are all there - an intriguing premise, solid worldbuilding, decent dialogue - but they never quite come together into something greater than the sum of their parts. I keep coming back to that word: underbaked. There’s a good book lurking in here somewhere, but it needed more time in the oven.
Maybe if I hadn’t gone in with expectations, this would have landed differently. But when a book promises you Futurama’s identity crisis meets Animorphs’ paranoia and delivers neither the psychological depth nor the creeping tension, it’s hard not to feel let down. The Lives of Tao remembers those stories, but it doesn’t quite understand what made them work.
PS: Totally forgot but this is a Chicago book as well, and you couldn't miss it, there's a whole chapter about eating Lou's deep dish. Not my favorite Chicago portrayal; it nails some details, Wabash does indeed look dark and shitty under the L, but-and I think I've said this before- there's more to the city than deep dish and crime.