Sylvia Chi

Terribly written on every level. Characters and plot were unbelievable, one note, and tiresome. Extremely contrived composition shtick (“before” and “after”) that did not serve any purpose in telling the story. Not a plot twist or suspenseful moment in the whole damn thing, nor an interesting or likable character to root for.

Sentences and paragraphs were clobbered together. The author does not know the meaning of several words that she chose to use anyway, especially when they sound hoity-toity (e.g., “The doctor and I decided amongst ourselves that we would increase her sessions to two times per week.” You mean “between,” there are only two people involved, and P.S., you're not British.) The writing was distractingly bad throughout.

In the event that I ever get my fantasy career as a literary critic off the ground, I'm calling dibs on comparing this book and Piketty's Capital.

Trigger warning: may make you even more anxious than you already are.

My chief beef with this book is that I thought it was going to be a thriller and it wasn't, really. As a novel about family life, it was quite good, especially regarding sibling relationships.

It's more like reading a lot of solutions to word problems than like reading a novel. I think you can probably watch the movie instead of reading the book.

Good criticism and nice book design, but a distracting abundance of typos.

The biggest problem with this book is that the main character is a jerk.

Also, I posit that this book has the most frequent usage of the word “maculated” in any novel written in the 20th century.

These essays are a little too loosey-goosey for me; they read more like ambitious LiveJournal entries or showboating exercises with a vocabulary list than essays. I learned far more new words from this book than any other book I've read in a long time (or ever), including: “entelechy,” “anfractuous,” “goldbrick,” “cicatrized,” and “scilicet.”

I think I would've given this book 4 stars until I got to the last (long) essay, on a Richard Hugo poem, which I just found to be the most indulgent and navel-gazey - not to mention tiresome - kind of literary criticism.

I only wish the narrator had a posher accent.

Didn't get a lot out of it; too lightweight and insubstantial, although I agree with basically all of it.

I'm convinced.

The main character is both very realistic and very unrealistic at the same time, but I think that's intentional. It's hard to believe, for example, that Nate could be so perceptive in some ways yet so dumb in other ways, but that's pretty much how it goes with the human condition.

I liked the concept (gimmick?) and was happy to read it right after finishing The Love Affairs, but was quite disappointed that the voice sounded so much like Nate's.

I would not recommend that anyone hire Dave Eggers as a futurist, or even a present-ist.

The key to good speculative fiction is sustaining an understanding of how humans behave - otherwise it is too far removed from the human experience that it is boring. Dave Eggers fails to do so; in particular, he seems not to know how real life people use the Internet or relate to each other in general. Or if he does, he asks far too much of us in terms of suspending our disbelief. In the first 20 pages, he asks us to believe that society has done away with online trolls and anonymity. Over the course of the next 400, we are to believe that no one (except for two characters, maybe) has ever studied or achieved any level of understanding of sociology, law, political science, or history. Somewhere along the way, the Constitution and rule of law have mysteriously poofed out of existence. It's just too absurd to take seriously. To be fair: it takes until about page 400 for Godwin's law to manifest itself.

Also, I am highly skeptical of his representations about marine ecology but I am less qualified to rant about that.

I can't even get into the gender dynamics.

Not to mention that the speculative technology is not even novel! It's like, 2005 telegraphed and wants its cutting edge technology back, Mr. Eggers.

I wouldn't be so outraged about this book except that I suspect that the people who are currently, in real life, throwing bricks and vomiting on the tech worker commuter buses in the Bay Area seem to have read this book as if it were unadorned fact.

And it is not even well-written. An example I could not resist taking note of: “There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The décor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional.” Wait, Dave, I still don't get it. Can you hit me over the head about it one more time?

It's weird, because I remember his first two books as being really well-written. So, in sum, I like his older stuff better.

“To paraphrase Martin Luther King., Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. We think the data support this.”

Some really interesting ideas about society embedded in here, but I totally could not relate to the first person plural narrator. Basically all of the relationships involved are unconvincing. Prose style was also pretty weak.

Cybernetics, geodesic domes, the WELL, the start of Wired, and everything else awesome. This book made me briefly consider going to grad school to write its sequel as a dissertation.

Environmental politics were so different back in the '70s. I wish there was some kind of contemporary version of this.

My first Cory Doctorow book. It reads like a technoparanoiac's fanfic about a slightly-counterfactual near-history, mashing up Anonymous and Occupy. This is one of those YA novels that is hard for adults to appreciate. I did not find it enriching to read a 17-year-old's rants about LARPing, city planning or basic crypto principles. It's also sort of distracting how the story seems to take place around 2008 (when the book was first published) so the technology described in it sounds just slightly obsolete. However, overall, the story moves fast and is fairly entertaining. I imagine it'd make a pretty good movie.

An interesting, fast read, although it left a couple of major areas un-addressed. In particular, I think there's a lot more to discuss about why the Internet does not generate so much revenue. Cowen basically states this as an inevitability due to the nature of the Internet, but I don't see why it's not a matter of the market hasn't rationalized it yet. Cowen also has kind of a cartoonish view of bureaucracy, with no consideration for the many good reasons the administrative state exists. I think the basic analytic framework is pretty interesting (we've plucked all the “low-hanging fruit,” ranging from the Industrial Revolution to communications technology, and gotten accustomed to a rate of economic growth associated with those innovations), though I'd be interested in reading how historians of science have responded.

Actually surprisingly full of good ideas, especially with techniques (e.g., cryo-blanching; pre-hydrating pasta before cooking) and some interesting ingredient/flavor combinations (popcorn-white chocolate gelato). I only skimmed through the last section for professionals, because as a home cook, I'm definitely too lazy to go out and find transglutaminase or measure out ratios of kappa carrageenan to locust bean gum.

I appreciated the scientific explanations of what's going on at a cellular/molecular level when you're cooking.

The writing is distractingly bad, unfortunately.

So good! I was amazed how well it matches the tone and spirit of the animated show. It seems to fit in, plot-wise, after Season 2.

I'm probably going to disagree with this review, but it is a [thought-]provoking review: http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/modern-life-is-rubbish-tao-lins-taipei.html

And this one: http://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/numerical-madness/

I think I might have spent more time reading reviews/criticism on this book and Tao Lin than the book itself.

Well, I'd rather reread Infinite Jest.