Location:Bengaluru
I am lost for words after finishing the final entry of this trilogy - it took every expectation I had of it, destroyed it to smithereens, and came up with something unprecedented.
With this concluding work, Cixin Liu has cemented his place among the greats - this is the best hard sci-fi work written since Asimov's ‘The Last Question'. The works of sci-fi landing in ‘unprecedented scope' was generally mutually exclusive with ‘actually mind-blowing for once', but Cixin Liu has demolished those barriers effortlessly.
It moves so much beyond its initial foundations of first contact that it is barely recognisable - but it is all the more better for it, as it is not chained to a particular niche. Exploring concepts as varied as dimensional flattening and time warping, and making sure that the plot stays on track, is an underappreciated talent that potential sci-fi writers would do good to take note of.
This series is the closest I've seen a sci-fi series come to the platonic ideal of ‘sci-fi' - the literature of ideas. The trilogy is a must read for anyone who has ever read sci-fi and would like a more serious take on it.
“I thought of that phrase, “It's just business.” It's never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
This was a very engrossing memoir, made all the more say by the very likeable personality that is Philip Knight.
He takes you on the rollercoaster ride of Nike and himself, his ambitions, his fights with the government, with his former creditors, with Adidas and Puma, and much, much more.
You can absolutely taste the depths of Phil's despair and the heights of his joy, leaping at you from the pages, which is a marvellous quality for a writer to have, but even more so when you're writing your own autobiography.
TL;DR - must read if you're into memoirs. One of the best such pieces ever written, as is apt for such an unconventional life.
TL;DR - a true blue masterpiece, and one that is going to make me start a classics binge shortly.
Whether it is the characterisation, the heady Faustian themes, and a surprisingly great plot - my first foray into Wilde's literature was nothing short of spectacular. Lord Henry's cynicism was laugh-at-loud at parts, and somewhat deep at others, but where the novel truly shines is in depicting Dorian's corruption - first as a charming and uncorrupted seventeen-year old, but then whose countenance grows darker the more he revels in his senses. What I liked the most in this depiction is that we get to know about Dorian's behaviour second-hand, and that too in parts - thus the misuse of the omniscient PoV is kept to a minimum.
A slight addendum - there are slight socialist undertones I got from this (for example, the depiction of vacuousness of the people having inherited wealth is unsubtle), to the point where I began to wonder if Wilde was a socialist - which he was? Unsurprising, but it only added to my appreciation of the text.
Edit of an older review:
When I first read this book, I was too involved with the nostalgia to notice anything else.
Now, once I glanced over it with an unbiased eye, it's a mediocre exercise in vanity - replete with things such as horseshoe theory, transphobia, racism, xenophobia and beautiful lines such as ‘the Internet was the best thing that had ever happened to women and people of color' because you could choose a ‘white male avatar'. Absolutely astounding as to how this guy even got a publisher in the first place.
The villains in the plot have nothing to do with the world's near-destruction - they're just people who want to put a monthly subscription fee for the Internet in place, which is apparently disgusting? As if everything else is okay in the first place and only ‘net neutrality' is worth getting hyperactive over. I thought it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the net neutrality issue in the States, and the protagonist would eventually turn his attention towards more serious issues such as literally anything else, but that never happens? The end result is that Ready Player One is not a decent read at all.
The nostalgia is decent enough, I suppose. Worth reading if only for that. Someone should compile all the '80s references as a community Wiki which we all can lose our minds over, because as it stands the flimsy plot, the narcissistic characters and Ernest Cline himself gets in the way of appreciating those.
1,028 Books
See all