Joshua Strozzi
This is a book about death, acceptance, life/living, feelings, but it's written with such camp and the characters are so unlike actual people that it just lost me. No one talks like a webtoon character or like a MTV sitcom/drama show character as these people do. No one develops from a POS lawyer to saint, no matter the situation. This book is so unserious while trying discuss serious things like that I just plain can't enjoy it for either things it brings to the table, musings on death and campy fun goofy times.
It was okay.
What an insane roller coaster. I've owned this book for years and had I known that within its pages was this magnificent a speculative sci-fi thriller, I'd have read it sooner.
This book read look a movie, or TV show, which I imagine it would make a killer one, because I could see the scenes in my head playing out in the most magnificent of set pieces. The catastrophes, the glitch like loop instances. I'm enamored with this and only hope that I get a chance to read another like it soon.
Honestly, I didn't get it.
It had such an interesting point of view of pretty a pretty ridiculous series of events with various characters filing in and playing their absurd part in what is a silly court case.
But some of the things the main character chose to do didn't make sense as something a person with the barest of rationals would do and he didn't explain them sufficiently.
I want to understand, and that's possibly the point, that it's all nonsense and nothing really matters at the end, but my mind doesn't gel to well with that entirely.
I still enjoyed it, I can say that, but it didn't provide me with any revelations that left me in awe or anything like that.
Great mythical retelling, had me glued to the page consistently the whole way through. The life of a god that chooses to change and grow unlike all those others around her. It's a beautiful ode to life and death, how the latter gives meaning to the former.
What a wild book. Seriously I found myself thinking this world makes no sense. It's just so mundane, or so you think, then you realize you can't stop reading it, that the world is mysterious and quirky in just the right way that you can't stop and you much know more and keep seeing what happens.
Murikami is weird in a way I like. Hope his other books are better though, because if there was a point to all of this, I missed it. I can't say I understood the book wholly, but reading it was a delight.
A beautiful story of a man who's life, of little note from the outside perspective, was worthy nonetheless by pure virtue of it having been lived.
I can't say definitively that I've gained from this book all it wishes to give, nor that I meticulously scrolled over its words at a rationed speed to fully perceive all it's messages...but what I read and what I understood was the beauty of a life lived modestly.
I wish to come back to this book again and again.
Super cool book, steeps you in 2 dream-like lives that are drawn to each other...then the book becomes half about Kafka Tomura's underaged Oedipal ‘curse' and I just wasn't into that. Hated 15% of this book because of that. The rest is very cool though. Just could really do without that themes. They aren't interesting.
Merged review:
Super cool book, steeps you in 2 dream-like lives that are drawn to each other...then the book becomes half about Kafka Tomura's underaged Oedipal ‘curse' and I just wasn't into that. Hated 15% of this book because of that. The rest is very cool though. Just could really do without that themes. They aren't interesting.
I loved reading this. Such a clear voice, no fools tolerated, beautiful insights on the process of reconciling with one's faith and the loss of it. There's much I can directly relate to and I love the ways she puts words to her thoughts, to my thoughts sometimes. And, to those experiences I have never, could never experience first-hand, I value the point of view I'm privileged to read from, one that is precise and made universal.
I'm a new fan of Yaa Gyasi.
It is not the tear jerker I had heard it to be, most likely because I've seen the movie Troy, and I recognized the characters and their fates far in advance because of this.
But, I did get goosebumps reading the ending. Such a great and tragic relationship.
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I could hardly put it down to be present in during my vacation because it's so good. The comedy, the irony, the parody. Kurt Vonnegut was a master at weaving this wild series of events and all these ideas together to create an unforgettable story. READ IT.