Peter
I often read just to escape from the horrors of the real world for a moment. Read this during second year of pandemic and there were moments when I had put down the book and rather read the news.
Bleak? Yes sir.
Believable when it comes to prediction of human behavior in catastrophic scenarios? Arguably yes.
Should you read this? OH YESSS!!!
A word ‘masochism' comes to my mind when I think about this book. And in a good way - the bleakness hits you hard but the writing is stellar.
In contrary to the popular opinion I don't think that this is book w/ just a high shock value. The story contains a vast amount of hard-pill-to-swallow observations - sometimes hidden, other time explicitly stated. You may not like the nihilistic tone or story in general, but it would be wrong to categorize this as pretentious or irrelevant.
Many (not only work-related) phenomena described by Graeber are imo crucial glitches of our current society which tend to be absent from a public discourse.
I think that it's not because we are not aware of them - on the contrary, we know very well that there is a problem but have no idea how to deal w/ it. Therefore even discussion is difficult & painful (the same can be said about the climate change).
Well-written and surprisingly hard book to put down but:
* pretty dense sometimes (especially if you lack the proper philosophical/legal education like me).
* IF you'll finish this you may want to re-read it in the future.
* after finishing you may want to find some good critique of this (like me right now).
Excellent eco-dystopian piece w/ some of the most dreary visions of future maybe not as distant as one would think. Harsh, but in some sense psychadelic universe full of scents, sweat, biologically modified creatures (who however still resemble humans/animals just enough for reader to relate to or identify w/). Solid underlying concepts included. Unique off-the-wall gem of contemporary sci-fi.
This is what I like about some of these old school sci-fi authors: they don't fool you w/ crapy plot that just contains superepic-space-opera battles here or superduper-i-know-science-named weapons there.
I don't mind those but there should be present at least one solid underlying concept. Dick seems to excell here – he managed to include multiple hidden philosophical niceties worth of discussion over a beverage of your choice. Yet, the novel is still light and readable.
- Realistic dystopia when it comes to physical world of Gilead. No futuristic weapons, aliens, natural disasters, mutants, etc. None of that baloney, thank GOD!
+ Questions asked and problems described by Atwood are crucial. Book can greatly serve as a starting point for such a discussion regardless of your gender, religious belief or current year.
+ Masochistic (that itch was scratched well).
- Narrative style is really incoherent ( anyone else? just me?). It's a pity because the story had a huge potential.
- I wish I've read this earlier before TV series was a thing (didn't watch it though). Maybe my expectations were too high because of all the hype. I tend to avoid such a hot novels. Now I remembered why.
I feel as I should give this another try later on.
If you have a background in computer science and/or biology, you'll be familiar with many topics and concepts presented here. Dr. Mitchell nonetheless succeeded in creating an introduction to complex systems understandable to wider public.
Big plus: she described actual experiments and didn't waste time with history lessons.
Beauty of Wise Blood lies in combination of absurdity and grotesque, sometimes even hideous characters. O'Connor depicts both faith and its crisis as warped states of mind.
She redefined Southern Gothic for me. Book isn't preachy, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead it tries to deal with the dark aspects of human nature, accepts them in a way - the irrationality/necessity of faith itself.
Franzen sometimes tries to shove his view down your throat by not giving reader an opportunity to jump to his own conclusions. Risky approach - if you don't like the characters/are bored/Franzen's world and style irritates you after first 100 pages, you have no reason to finish this book.
Not my experience however. Introspective, great description of relationship dynamics and even though I tend to avoid “big novels”, this one was very enjoyable.
