Kate
I got to page 13, after the forward and introduction, before quitting. The writing sucks.
Danielewski has managed to find a medium in which he can partially disguise the fact that he's telling rather than showing. Kudos to him, but it's painful to read.
For instance, after a brief scene in which Will Navidson is looking at his partner Karen's hairbrush, we get a whole paragraph of academic analysis about how Will removing a clump of her hair from the hairbrush indicates how much he loves her. Same with a scene in which Karen is anxious for Will to return home, but “has quite effectively masked all her eagerness to see him.” We are told explicitly, “What both these moments reveal is how much Will and Karen need each other and yet how difficult they find handling and communicating those feelings.”
Gee, thanks.
Readers of Ready Player One (also terrible in the same emotionally stunted way) will love this book.
This felt like a transition piece to set up the next story and not a story in itself. I had a few problems: I was confused about the plot at first, so I had to re-read Network Effect and come back. Then the plot only started getting engrossing half-way in, which was a lot of book to get through without enjoying it as much as usual (which is a high bar - I love Murderbot!)
I can't wait to read the next book, and hope that the effort I put into this one pays off.
I really enjoyed this, but there are plot holes galore (or at least, lots of things in this world that don't make sense with what we know so far), and it reads like R-rated YA.
Read it if you liked the Hunger Games, Divergent, and the love triangle between Kate, Sawyer, and the annoying guy in Lost.
4.5 stars for comparison to the rest of the genre, 3 stars for it as a book.
I started off not wanting to like this. It seemed like one of those adaptations where you change a few dates, change the character's occupation, and voila, you have a book.
But I'm glad I persevered, because I actually really enjoyed it. It was clever and funny. Lydia and Kitty are jobless and into Crossfit, which made me snicker but fits perfectly. Mrs. Bennett was believably awful and high-strung, and into online shopping. Darcy is a surgeon, and Bingley is loveably daft.
The premise was interesting, but I had to stop reading. The weight of the argument often rested on psychology studies: studies that are probably not replicable, and thus probably not true. Reading while basically tossing out all the evidence and then trying to figure out what might still be true was a slog.
[Edit: I almost forgot that Jen reveals that Annie Dillard didn't actually have a tom cat rub blood on her, as Tinker at Pilgrim Creek would suggest. That story was taken from someone else (!!)
“But she has also conceded that her tremendous opening line with its heraldic wildness—'I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest'—was appropriated. Writes Saverin, When I asked about the tomcat in the first sentence, she told me she'd heard a similar story from ‘some poor graduate student' named Frank McCullough over lunch at the Hollins snack bar.”]
In the small, the writing is lovely. Arch observations and very funny scenes. But our main character manages to travel the entire world without living in it once.It has to be purposeful, but every time Arthur has to deal with something emotionally difficult, it's at arm's length: a hard conversation with someone who is dying happens over Zoom. A hard conversation with someone Arthur wronged, just never really happens. Arthur never talks to his best friend/arch nemesis apart from a few sentences. Yes, he's literally running away from his problems (that's the premise), but surely over the course of the novel something has to break.What would it be like to have to struggle to take care of a child? To take care of an elderly person? To stay committed to a single person for your whole life? To build a house with your own two hands? To revitalize a town, to save someone's life, to care for a rescue animal, to say what needs to be said, no matter how difficult? To pull the plug on someone, to accidentally hit someone with your car, to confront a rapist, etc etc. Arthur's story is devoid of most everything that makes life actually hard, so one of his biggest challenges is not being as attractive as he once was, and that makes the force of the novel quite weak, even if the writing is well done.I realized that perhaps this isn't entirely the fault of the character or the author. Among Arthur's friends, people are worn like clothes and are equally disposable. One must be young, attractive, fun at parties, not old and a bore. There's not really a sense of community through thick and thin, or room for disability or age (very young or very old). In some sense, Arthur's preoccupation with his age is a problem for him not because he is unusually vain, but because of the very real danger that he might be abandoned if he's no longer sparkly. I was disappointed that it ended with Arthur's boyfriend returning to him, since it seemed like the wrong thing for Arthur to learn. If it were more heterosexual, and a old superficial man was rewarded at the end with a hot young woman, I'd think that was awful. “Still got it!” is the wrong lesson. I would have liked to see Arthur stretched to become a larger person, like the protagonist in [b:Senlin Ascends 35271523 Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1) Josiah Bancroft https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1502224161l/35271523.SX50.jpg 24467682].
I loved this. We start with priggish headmaster Thomas Senlin and his young bride going to the center of civilization on their honeymoon, and things start going wrong for Tom quickly. I had entirely forgotten how delicious an unlikeable protagonist is, and Tom is pretty unlikeable!
This book is almost as if Jasper Fforde or Nick Harkaway wrote Piranesi. It's zany, horrifying, sweet, and action-packed.