How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

by N. Katherine Hayles

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Theory, Technology, History, Academic

364 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1999

Reviews

[laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this book as a senior in college in preparation for my thesis, which was basically about issues of selfhood and agency in a deterministic universe. it was, at the time, one of the most difficult books i'd ever read and, correspondingly, one of the most satisfying. the language can be difficult-- it's a literary critic analyzing systems analysis, for goodness sake-- if you don't have a pretty firm grasp of academese, it will not be easy going. but having mined it, i not only learned just a ton about the movement of scientific thought in the 20th century (particularly the VERY difficult and VERY important move from a deterministic world-view to a probabalistic one), but found these little gems, which i added to my intellectual tool kit and have been thinking with and about ever since: the platonic backhand and the the platonic forehand.

"The platonic backhand works by inferring from the world's noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction. so far so good: this is what theorizing should do. the problem comes when the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives. then complexity appears as a 'fuzzing up' of an essential reality..." (Hayles, 1999, pp. 12-13).

anyway, this is a somewhat esoteric and challenging book, but if you're interested in thinking about consciousness, whether as a philosopher, biologists, computer scientist, psychologist- whatever- i highly recommend this one. and if you have dreams of uploading yourself onto a harddrive, existing bodyless in cyberspace, or living forever in a silicone body, it is absolutely required reading.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Theory book on cybernetics. I found it particularly inspiring in thinking about myself as a disabled person. The ways that we depend on machinery to construct our humanity grows and grows every day. The freakishness of disability is minimized by the minute, as we all wrap ourselves in metal.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me forever to get through this book, but it's worth the effort. Hayles' basic argument is that modern conceptions of artificial intelligence (and the posthuman body) privilege informational patterns over material instantiation. In other words, as a culture, we tend to emphasize cognition rather than embodiment. This is nothing new - after all, for centuries Western philosophers have been telling us that consciousness, and not embodiment, is the seat of human identity. Hayles returns to Descartes' mind/body dualism in order to understand why the idea still persists in modern-day discussions about AI.

Western philosophical traditions are pretty ill-equipped to talk about the body and embodiment, which is why theorists like Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva have made conversations about the body their bread and butter. Hayles adds to these discussions in a really meaningful way.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has some interesting stuff in it but mostly it’s one of those 1990s books on technology and culture that haven’t aged very well.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well-researched and smart text on the ongoing shift from our Western Liberal Humanist persona of humanity to a more posthuman cyborg (connection between human and intelligent machine).

I can't believe I just said that. As a self-chastised luddite, I preferred the sections of literary analysis. And although I suppose there's nothing I can do to counteract technology (I mean, I review books on an internet social media site) I still can't get over the annoying posthumans who walk into me as a result of Facebook status updating while sidewalk promenading and those who are face down to screens rather than face out to mountains. Still though, I'll take a bionic heart and live to 150. (Is it obvious that I only half-grasp most of what Hayles says? I bet she checks these reviews on Goodreads and when she gets to mine, will have to shake her head at my foolishness, plug herself into a Kurig machine, and brew herself a nice batch of disembodied informatics.)

[Addison Nugent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A staggering acheivement.
However,Hayles glazes over the disparity between between the richest and poorest societies on the planet. There has always been an uneven distribution of wealth, so uneven in fact that human society has divided itself into two separate worlds: the first and the third. The idea of the first world posthuman, adds another level of hierarchy to the already insurmountable one in place: not only are we now from two different worlds but two different levels of evolution. Therefore, when we talk about “our” future as amalgams of human and machine, beings with unlimited access to knowledge and transparent technologies, we may very well be talking about the birth of an almost superhuman ruling class. I'm not sure that should be celebrated.

[zynphull · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually finished this book a few months ago, but I never got around to updating it here, mostly because I dreaded having to write a review for it. In short, this is so because although I mostly loved Hayles' book and her reflections on embodiment and how it was erased by cybernetics (and later tech-influenced philosophical thought on the mind, as well, such as the whole of functionalism and all the Kurzweils and Wolframs and out there), I really am not much interested (to this day at least, which is as much as I can always say about my intellectual hunger) in literary analysis: no matter how philosophical it might be, I would mostly prefer to read theory, I guess.

In any case, I read Hayles mostly because of the history of cybernetics she presents. One of my interests in the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind is understanding how anyone could fathom such an absurd idea as "mind uploading" or "conscious machines". This is partly because of my path in these studies, I guess: I used to entertain the idea that machines might one day display conscious-like behaviour. Much like Alan Turing, when I learned programming, I too saw no good reason *not* to ascribe them consciousness - if they walk and talk like a duck... It was only when I was introduced philosophy of mind via Varela, Rosch and Thompson's critique of internalist, "disembodied", computational-based cognition in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience that I started to reject the idea of conscious machines. Human consciousness is itself far more ineffable and complex than our silly computational models can ever grasp. Funnily enough, Varela did not deny the possibility of conscious machines as I do (he was fond of the potential of Wolfram's automata for enacting consciousness).

Hayles pinpoints some very specific and interesting moments in the history of scientific development in the mind-brain sciences in the 20th century in order to exemplify many of the assumptions which have formed the field since then - such as a type of scientific realism regarding biological neural modeling using computational neural networks. I turn to this example (probably my favourite passage in the book) in the rest of the review as I think it represents the tone of the book and Hayles' main argument.

Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician in the 1940s developed one of the first theoretical accounts (or model) of a neuron cell as a basic logical unit. McCulloch observed that neurons' networked organisation made them "capable of signifying logical propositions" (Hayles p. 58). For instance, if neuron A is connected to neurons B and C, and the excitation threshold of A is equal to that of C and B combined, then this setup can be said to instantiate the logical proposition "if A, then B and C" (or B ∧ C → A). A natural-science-philosophical parenthesis: one should point out how much work has been done here: it is often only after a model has been proposed that interesting science can be done. As Steve Heims (apud Hayles) has said, "it [is] not easy to extrapolate from amorphous pink tissue on the laboratory table to the clean abstractions of the model". Logician Walter Pitts came later, and developed the network implications of McCulloch's unit neuron - for instance, demonstrating that a neural network [of sufficient complexity, I assume] was able to "calculate any number (that is, any proposition) that can be calculated by a Turing machine", i.e., it was Turing-complete. Such approach has proved a success by most measures. Today, a lot of neuroscience works exclusively with neural modelling using computational models. Neural network modelling has also led to huge developments in computer science and artificial intelligence in the last decade, as we all know.

For McCulloch (and many of our contemporaries), the success of his approach was vindicated by history. But what are the nature of models? How can a model of the brain prove anything regarding actual human minds? What does behaviour of artificial neurons, mere mathematical reductions, prove regarding actual nerve cells - or worse, regarding the human constituted by such cells? In 1947, a fellow cybernetician, psychologist H-L Teuber, asked this very question (more elegantly):

"Your robot may become capable of doing innumerable tricks the nervous system is able to do; it is still unlikely that the nervous system uses the same methods as the robot in arriving at what might look like identical results. Your models remain models-unless some platonic demon mediate between the investigators of organic structure and the diagram-making mathematicians."

McCulloch's answer, for me is exemplary of his fellow machine-functionalists to this day:

"I look to mathematics, including symbolic logic, for a statement of a theory in terms so general that the creations of God and man must exemplify the processes prescribed by that theory. Just because the theory is so general as to fit robot and man, it lacks the specificity required to indicate mechanism in man to be the same as mechanism in robot."

Second natural-science philosophical parenthesis: you may treat a theory (such as the neural-scientific view of the nerve cell, derived from McCulloch) differently depending on whether you believe it describes reality more or less accurately, or whether you take it as only a useful fiction, one that leads to productive science, but which purports to bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever. These positions have been called, in the analytic debate on the philosophy of science, respectively realism and anti-realism. However, an individual must not limit their stance to either accepting/rejecting a theory. You may treat what it says as true only as a methodological principle for making scientific observations, and ignore everything about its view of reality once you leave the lab. Thus you need not assume a mind if you are trying to do behavioural psychology (your subjects are just larger pigeons, after all!) - you can act, methodologically, as if all a person is is a pretty complex machine, always readly apt for (re)programming like any other, and still, outside the context of scientific observation (say, while you discuss results with your peers and carry on daily activity) act as if everyone has a mind, feelings, and so on (although you might try to manipulate those around you with 'positive reinforcement'...).

Neural-modelling-realism says that whatever brains are made of, they are *fundamentally* information-processing systems (or computers). Brains capture data from the external world via sense neurons in the retina or the nose and process this data in their internal wiring, and it is this aspect of neural behaviour (not, say, their chemical behaviour, although in principle that may also fit under a sufficiently loose definition of "computation") that is relevant for understanding mental phenomena (and definitely not then-dreaded Freudian psychology and all of its subjectivity-leading traps).

In the terms above, then, McCulloch believed that his theory ("backed" or not by empirical observation, that isn't the point here) not only explained neural behaviour in a way that was interesting, productive, or apt for the creation of technology (all very true) - it indeed provided us with the actual principles that governed the natural phenomenon under study. It is those principles, and not anything else, that make neural behaviour happen, he claimed. This is, I think, a complex philosophical position, but which is, as Hayles claims, a type of platonism. It is not dissimilar to those who are realists regarding the laws of physics, perhaps, for whom the laws described by physicists too are so general that God and man must obey. That is because, for McCulloch and others today, what "matters" is the organisational structure (or the functional behaviour, if you prefer) of neurons. And by matter, I mean what is necessary and sufficient for the emergence of mental phenomena - such as first-person consciousness or "qualia" (that is if the theorist grants them existence at all and is not an 'eliminativist').

Note that the distinction Teuber pointed out - between a model and the real thing, and the former's insufficiency in mimicking the full reality of the latter - is more at home in the traditional debate in the philosophy of mind, outlined above. A model is not reality, and we ought to debate how acceptable it is as a description of the latter. However, this distinction fades into the background in McCulloch's answer: he found a statement "so general" that whatever nature or man creates is its mere "example" - or in contemporary analytical metaphysical terms, it is an "instantiation" of it. What most essentially defines the ontology of a brain under this view, then, is the very organisation of its composing parts, as distinguished from the material substance they are made of. Given that the mind is a byproduct of the brain (a true given for materialists), and the brain is "only" instantiating general principles, it stands to reason (I suppose? I find this just crazy) that whatever medium is made to replicate the same principles (or structure, etc.), such as a silicon robot, shall also replicate whatever else a brain does - such as having a mind. Now, it is not so much that theory is seen as true, but it is seen as preceding reality itself.

Hayles calls McCulloch's epistemological (if not rhetoric) strategy a "Platonic backhand". In this move, one "works by inferring from the world's noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction" (Hayles, p. 12) observes the noise and complexity of reality and theorizes that some or other set of simpler, more understandable, general principles explains what is seen. This basic initial abstraction is of course part of science: the problem begins when the move "circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives" (p. 12). Laws "so general" are thought to be found that their occurrence (or modelling, I'd rather say) is itself seen as an occurrence of the phenomena they were supposed to model in the first place.

For Hayles, writing in a more general context of 1990s feminist critique of traditional Western rationality, the above process is one of the points in which the body was "erased" in order to give place to abstractions such as "bodiless information" (p. 12), or the idea that individuality = brain structure = information patterns. Philosophically, this occurs by foregrounding the importance the physical organisation of matter, rather than any special substantive quality of matter itself, in bringing about mental phenomena. For many reasons, I find functionalism untenable as a position in the philosophy of mind. Hayles provided me with more reasons, showing how shaky assumptions made by daring theorists can be turned into religious dogma for technologists a generation later, and inform projects such as the Blue Brain project - that aims to replicate a human brain (and by materialist-biased extension, a mind) using IBM supercomputers. One can only hope their bots can read Hayles after reaching singularity.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strengths of this book come from its three guiding questions (or stories) on virtual reality: 1) how information lost its body, or how it became a separate entity from the material in which it's embedded, 2) how the cyborg was created and how it became a "technological artifact and cultural icon" after World War II, and 3) how the "historically constructed" idea of the human is influenced by a different construction called the posthuman. These are A+ questions.

Hayles' narrative pivots on the first story above; she suggests that human consciousness is actually separate from humans. Basically, it might be possible to put human consciousness into a corporeal form that's not a human body. The age-old theme of human mind versus body isn't new, but it's complicated by the digital age in that history shows we may be able to test it by inserting human consciousness into computers. This begs the questions: should we? and to what extent is consciousness affected by our physical construction?

Anyway, Hayles buoys up her narrative with painstaking history, attention to detail, and quality connections. 3.5/5 stars.

[Kyrill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wide ranging and well researched book which gives some good intros to aspects of the history of cybernetics. The intro to autopoesis was particularly good. I found the mixture of cybernetic theories with Lacan, phenomenology and Foucault didn't really gel into a final synthesis. It weirdly concludes by endorsing Searle, as part of its general pitting of embodiment against cybernetics.

Lacan offers an interesting frame here but it seems the more Lacanian message, which Hayles gestures at but stops short of, is not that cyborgs are really women but that women are really cyborgs. Since this was a central thread, it was a bit strange that there was so little exploration of sexuation.

It goes down some alleyways in AI research which age the book but it does well to balance accessibility and technical depth.

I didn't get much out of the literary analysis though I've read most of the books mentioned and usually enjoy literary analysis. Perhaps it fell flat because after reading stuff that came out of CCRU at this time, it seems a bit tame for all its promise. She chooses good examples but something about the presentation drains their import.

[Emily Beall · Rating 5 out of 5]

the perfect coda to my late-summer incessant reading of octavia butler. i prize the freaky scholarly imagination it took to write this book

[Campbell Rider]

i will now savour my brief time as a Corporeal and Material Assemblage before my consciousness gets uploaded to the torment nexus

[Ivan Kapersky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This past semester I took the introduction course to Semiotics. I was so fascinated by the teaching methods and readings assigned by the professor that the class expanded my scope of reading. I requested references from my professor for my summer reading and he recommended Katherine Hayles’ How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics.

Hayles explains that the human condition as it is, is constantly evolving. Posthuman, does not mean the human existence after death or the cease of humanity. On the contrary; the human condition per se, as we are now, will continue to evolve as machines parts are integrated to the human body. As “disembodied” information grows, the human condition integrates this information, or “splices” (in words of the author) as part of the human body.

The author resembles the Descartes theory of mind and body; however, Hayles states that the mind will use the body as a medium in order absorb the information, therefore reducing randomness and creating meaning through pattern recognition. Since a machine works in binary sequences, pattern recognition will serve as methodology to construct meaning of existence as the posthuman emerges.

The book can be difficult at some points for those readers that are not acquainted with cybernetic literature. However, I highly recommend it for those searching for a way to expand critical analysis regarding the posthuman. Read chapter 10: “The Semiotics of Virtuality” it will blow your mind off!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hayles' book is a philosophical and cultural elaboration of the concept of the "posthuman". This is not an empirical claim, that we have built cyborgs and AIs and other such things which supersede humanity. The point of the book is that what we have taken "humanity" to be through the last few centuries of Western culture is in fact a local sort of cultural product. The posthuman is not a succession of mankind oriented into the future, but an unmasking of the human animal as a very different, very material, bodily, sort of being.

Chapters alternate between historical and philosophical analyses of cybernetics and cognitive science, the origins of materialism and mind/body problems and what have you, with chapters analysing science fiction novels and short-stories as a means of glimpsing the changing visions of humanity. Purists may be put off by this but I found it to make the book's arguments richer, not to mention more interesting.

The book is a smart complement to Dupuy's Mechanization of the Mind. In fact I came to Hayles through a paper of Dupuy's remarking on the close alignment of their views on minds and machines.

[Cole Stratton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deep, probing investigation of what it means to be human. Drawing on an incredible range of material - from the natural sciences to literature to philosophy - Hayles displays a commanding knowledge of the discourses that shape our self-perception. As computer science and cybernetic research have produced new epistemological paradigms, Hayles constructs an eloquent argument to ground us in our humanity and convince us that our embodied presence should forever keep us from confusing the systems of information we construct and study with our own unique existence.

[Karen Dich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Combines thoughts of cognition, consciousness and a lot of informatics - the latter of which I knew very little (and didn't understood half of it, damn you dobble masters!). I'm still digesting, but I'm certain to come back to some of the problems raised in the book.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayles traces the intellectual history of cybernetics, a mid-20th-century field that studied systems of control and communication in animals and machines, and examines its influence on literature, culture, and technology. She argues that the "posthuman" condition isn't simply about humans merging with technology but about a fundamental reconfiguration of what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated by information systems.

One of the book’s key strengths is Hayles' interdisciplinary approach. She weaves together analyses of scientific theories, philosophical debates, and literary works, such as those of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, to demonstrate how narratives shape and are shaped by technological developments. Her exploration of the "embodied mind" challenges reductionist views that equate consciousness solely with information processing, emphasizing the importance of physicality and context in human experience.

Her critique of the disembodied information paradigm, which treats the body as irrelevant to identity, feels particularly prescient in today’s discussions of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. By grounding her analysis in both historical context and speculative futures, she provides a framework for understanding how cultural and technological shifts influence our conceptions of selfhood and agency.

While some readers may find the theoretical depth intimidating, Hayles' insights are invaluable for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, culture, and identity. Her work challenges us to think critically about the ethical and philosophical implications of our increasingly digitized world.

Hayles not only maps the terrain of posthumanism but also invites us to reflect on what it means to remain human in an age where the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic are increasingly blurred.

[Can Urla · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my MA thesis, I had to finish this book in six days, but it took me forever to do so because it was the most challenging book I had ever read!

Hayles reflects on posthumanism as a theoretical frame in relation to informatics, literature and liberal humanism. Even though I could not quite find what I was looking for, in realtion to the cultural construction of the cyborg figure, this book is inevitable upon researching posthumanism as it is one of the foundational texts.

I learned a lot, especially in terms of the emergence and developments of cybernetics, and Hayles connects this perfectly well with posthumanist framework by also not excluding Hassan and Haraway.
As Hayles states, she aims to show how ''information lost its body, how the cyborg was constructed in the postwar years as technological artifact and cultural icon, and how the human became the posthuman'' (Hayles 291). She explores these three narratives in a hellish way regarding the reading experience but also in a fruitful way for the reader. Highly recommended! This book was my literary Everest and I am still surprised how patient I was.

[Tanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

too many captivating ideas and points made to write up here.
the tight couplings of technology, media, philosophy, and academic politics are introduced via a thoughtful, engaging, and well-researched dialogue of how exactly we got to many of the very strange and somewhat dystopian thoughts / beliefs that lurk in the present sphere (ie. uploading consciousness into computers, and the procedural 'black-boxing' of the human mind). the way that individual agendas play important and often overlooked roles in the shaping of new / advancing fields is kind of terrifying, and the ripples they create across seemingly unrelated landscapes are fantastic to delve into.
a long read, but fantastically meticulous and tons to chew on. like a sci-fi / academia / philosophy detective novel, but it actually happened in real life. i fucking love it

[Brady Turpin]

I don't think I can rate this book as I'm still not sure I even understood it all that well... That being said, Hayles argument of maintaining embodiment in a new human future is admirable and offers a more "human" approach to a posthuman future (as opposed to a more uber-humanist transhumanism).

Very clear from the beginning is Hayles erudition. I had to use a dictionary several times in each chapter (and even then it was a flip of a coin as to whether I understood what she meant). I learned a lot and her arguments were well presented.

As a foundational text for the field, I would recommend it. For pleasant evening reading, I would not.

[Jan D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The "upload your consciousness to a computer" is a posthuman idea: Instead of seeing people as mind inside a body and as possessing a body, the "posthuman" is data and thus can be understood and dealt with like computer programs.
The book draws on a wide range of sources including literature, cybernetics and cognitive science. The reading difficulty is OK: It is not easy, but it does not drown the reader in self-invented terms nor are the sentences super long and intertwined – for such a postmodern topic it's pretty accessible.

[Feral Academic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still processing, will probably write a blog post about it. This book laid a foundation that I needed like 5 years ago before venturing into new materialism and science and technology studies related stuff. Her literary analyses were, I was thought, of varying quality, but the survey of scientific and cultural ideas in conjunction with the literary readings was very helpful. She takes complicated and disparate ideas of the human, the machine, and information and tells a story that even this lil humanities scholar could follow. Mostly. There was some talk of coding.

[nick]

Great intellectual history of cybernetics, attuned to the personalities of the human beings involved and to the aesthetic upshots of these wide-ranging theories.

Like Haraway's cyborg writings, it sometimes feels like an artifact of a past in which it was more possible to imagine a cybernetic order that wasn't on the side of domination/capital/etc—at least when that felt like something that could be contested.

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly a book from the '90s, but that doesn't detract from some genuine ingenuity on Hayles' part. For instance, she does a nice job demonstrating how fear about 'cyborg' post-human life is driven by a concept of a liberal subject who is to remain autonomous and free from any and all interference. Similarly, 'post-human' need not be a term of either apocalyptic cries or Silicon Valley technoptimism, but a term and concept to be welcomed and embraced.

[Sasha Ambroz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Не зважаючи на назву, книга геть не про те, як ми стали постлюдством, бо виявляється, постлюдством ми були практично від моменту злізання з дерева, а про те, як зрозуміти, що усвідомлення себе як постлюдини - це не страшно і для індивідуума, і для науковця.

[Nan · Rating 3 out of 5]

She portrays here an archaeology of cybernetics, rethinking Bateson, Haraway, Weiner. I liked her idea that "our limits are built more than given".

[alzabo · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved it for the most part (but why to literary critics love gibson so much?) looking forward to reading more in this vein/author

[нєνєℓ ¢ανα · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking, multilevel, sharp...

[Marty Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun & interesting read. Slightly limited b/c of its age, but ideas are still very useful to examinations of contemporary technologies & posthuman imaginaries.

[Nick Bentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written and thoughtful archeology of cybernetic theory, and how it sets us up for the posthuman.

[Damian Stockli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a top contender for the most interesting book I have ever read in my life.

{obligatory melodrama because I am writing a Goodreads review}