Anna
great character voices, some seriously hilarious dialogue that would work great in a film. would've been 5 stars if it wasn't for the teacher character whom I found boring and completely unconvincing.
“How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?” - Michael Lewis did it pretty well!
loved it! wish I'd bought it in a more textbook-like form instead of this flimsy paperback.
Can't help thinking that I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if I was able to picture all the NY addresses mentioned throughout the book (there's is a lot of them!).
There are parts in this book that really made me gasp. Given the author's young age at the time of Wild Heart's publication (23) it really is an astonishing achievement, and it's unlike anything I'd ever read.
And yet, reading it often felt like a chore. The protagonist, Joana, was exhausting in a way that a severe alexithymic is exhausting. It was like observing and interpreting a person constantly observing and interpreting herself.
Still though, it really made me want to read Lispector's later works. For a debut work this is amazingly good.
Stars for the thorough research that the author must have conducted for this. Shame she packaged it so plainly.
There were some great bits here, but also a few puzzling ones. Where were the editors? Perhaps I'm supposed to be puzzled, but overall those parts felt pointless and glossed-over. Meh.
Interesting enough, although quite dated in how it glazes over the entirety of online journalism with a single paragraph. Then again, the central theory of it still holds, no matter how irrelevant some of Lule's language might be when he talks of his field.
It was fun to be able to think of contemporary examples for each of the eternal myths that the book lists.
I don't think the author is a great fan of The New York Times.
There were so many tropes here that I liked.
Lepucki's vision of the post-collapse world is very similar to mine, although I had doubts about sustainability of the economy in which the Communities were supposed to prosper, given the lack of mass market and such. Where does all the money come from and how come it still has value? But hey, that's just me being picky.
I enjoyed reading this a lot.
Great concept, executed perfectly.
There's a lot of violence in here, but the story doesn't feel like violence porn at all. The victims are all female but they're also all very compelling as characters, which makes their fates feel all the more tragic, and the killer's demise all the more satisfying.
Bonus points for saucy Polish expletives.
This is more like a 3 and a half, because I really enjoyed reading it and I think Beukes is an amazing writer.
I read the bulk of the book on a cross-Atlantic trip spit between two flights. My first flight was just over 9h and I got to the grand denouement just before the plane landed. I now wish I'd stopped reading then and never finished the book.
The problem I have with it is that the buildup is so perfect, the plot is just the right amount of mysterious and also perfectly paced, and the characters are all so very likeable — especially the two teens Layla and Cas who are both too cool and too witty to be convincing (think Sorkin) — but the ending spoils it all by being didactic.
There's a moment in the book when the events really start taking off and the whole thing turns symbolic and dreamscapey, which seemed to me really uneven and confusing, and the return to the realistic that happens after leaves many events unexplained.
It's probably the most contemporary book I've ever read, and it handles modernity and the Internet culture with grace (an author who uses words like Creepypasta and NyanCat and Snapchat in the right context is a rare animal indeed), but sadly, it ends up being preachy. I get the author's point but I'm also a Millennial through and through and I can't help but roll my eyes at Gen X'ers getting righteous about our use of social media and about the Internet culture. I felt like in Broken Monsters, Beukes demonises these things in an overly literal and preachy way. I also resented her a bit for turning the characters that I loved so much into puppets in a morality tale.
I kept thinking that I might not be this book's intended audience and feeling all those missed references going over my head. Jacobson is a very eloquent writer and J is so beautifully written. It was fun figuring it out.
It reminded me of The Believer (the film) in many ways.
Tula Lotay's artwork is magnificent. I'd totally get most of the panels framed.
Ellis' writing's solid as usual. I love the whole universe-as-a-quantum-computer-simulation theory so this book rubbed all my mental sweet spots.
The only thing I didn't love was the Professor Night storyline — I suppose it's some kind of a Dr Who reference? I think I would like to live in a version of the universe where Dr Who doesn't exist. I guess it might be a reference to the original Supreme series which I haven't read. Those parts and characters brought nothing into this story though.
What the hell happened to the doctor?! His absence was glaring.
Still very good, but I really missed Rossmo's amazing artwork from Vol 1. I hate to say it was a disappointment but I'd grown really attached to Fillmore as a character, and now I see that it was in a large part thanks to Rossmo's rendering of him. Fillmore's madness seemed a lot more present and just hardly kept from boiling over the surface in Vol 1. In this book, I was constantly aware that these were just drawings of people.
The writing is decent but I'd prefer to have more of Fillmore's voice and less voiceover.
Overall this series just made me want to get everything by Rossmo and not necessarily to follow Spencer (though I think he'd be an amazing television writer with his ear for dialogue).
Competently written, but it just didn't move me. Actually no, it did gross me out quite a bit but other than that, no.
The amount of ‘quirky' was through the roof, very early 00s peak-hipster era, before the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope got us rolling our eyes.
Also most of it was about babies and I'd never have picked it up if I'd known that.
I gave in to the hype so that's probably made the disappointment worse, overall it was an enjoyable and hilarious read. Not sure what I expected.
Am much better informed and also much more terrified now having read this. Can't really rate 5 until I've become the millionaire I've been promised. Will report back in a few decades.
I'm embarrassed to admit that for the entire time of reading I'd been thinking of Styx instead of Rubicon. The story made so much more sense to me then. Now I'm just confused.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
This book is so full of 1970s buzzwords — ‘groovy', ‘cosmic', saying ‘pilgrimage' when you mean just living your life — that it reads like a heavily timestamped artifact of the past, even though the message is basically timeless: an adult should be no man's disciple. This book should really be recommended to the Coelho fanbase — they'd recognise their favourite ‘spiritual' language and the gist is something they should probably hear.
One thing that I found seriously disturbing though was Kopp's naivety about his patients at the sex offender facility. I wonder, was his thinking common in the 70s? Did people really believe that you could psychoanalyse pedophilia and sexual violence away? That as soon as a pedo realises that he's only looking for his absent father's love or for his ice-queen mother's hugs or something, he'll be cured and ready to go and pursue healthy relationships with consenting adults? It's not hard to see why convicts whose chances of parole depend entirely on a shrink giving them an all-clear would play this game, but why would he?
Pretty solid as far as debuts go, but lacks emotional depth. Many instances of narrative devices waving OHAI I'M A NARRATIVE DEVICE flags.
Great story though! I'd have loved to watch it play out from a much closer vantage.
Basically The Room set in 1939 London, only not funny – one exception being the ending, for which I give an extra star.
Objectively not that great but I'm heavily biased towards Russian folklore, and we're back to Snegurochka and Dad Moroz in vol 2 so I couldn't be happier with the storyline.
Brb catching a rabbit to hide my soul in.
