Peter

If you consider yourself to be an introvert, it's a must-read. You'll finally stop to feel like a weirdo because of that. And if your family members/friends are extroverted, you can always loan the book to them ;)

Not one of those ‘things-you-already-knew' books. Offers new perspective for extroverts (let's face it - we all know at least one who !needs! to read this). Susan describes and tries to explain basic differences between introversion and extroversion, all backed up by a bunch of scientific research.

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.

Disturbing and even though I finished it just 2 days ago and it's still stuck in my head, it'll be hard to forget. Creepy without one blood drop or cheap action.

Author described Frederick's character so well, that I couldn't stop thinking during the whole book: did he made the main character so believable just because of his narrative talent? I mean, there are really good narrators, but some of them, including this one, are on the edge. They manage to create a character so real, that I always wonder, where the fiction ends and where they start to express their own secret motives and desires, no matter how sick or socially unacceptable those are. However, the author can still remain safe in the shadow of his own creations.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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).

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.

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!!!

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).