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Oh -- my -- god. When I started reading this book I expected it to keep up the fairly light tone of the early chapters. Then it fucked with my heart bad. Don't believe reviews saying it makes no sense: it makes perfect sense, in the end, as long as you stop holding onto normal logic and start applying some dream logic. The narrator is unreliable, yeah, and he has attitude, and he knows he's telling a story, so there are bits that some people find irritating, like the way he keeps saying he'll te
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i want to take a pair of scissors to this book.
not to make confetti, or compost, of it, but to rearrange it.
the author is introducing quite central new characters on page 320, fer chrissakes! the last 15 or so pages of the book are a firehose of infodump (well-written infodump, but still), the streams of which tie the book together.
but how much better it could have been if those streams were introduced earlier as rills... it would have ameliorated the worst problems of the beginning, and made th ...more
not to make confetti, or compost, of it, but to rearrange it.
the author is introducing quite central new characters on page 320, fer chrissakes! the last 15 or so pages of the book are a firehose of infodump (well-written infodump, but still), the streams of which tie the book together.
but how much better it could have been if those streams were introduced earlier as rills... it would have ameliorated the worst problems of the beginning, and made th ...more
What a perplexing book. On the one hand, I certainly have never read anything quite like it; but then there are tons of aspects of the book that are irritating and unsatisfying, making the novel fall well short of brilliance.
The novel starts as an Adams-esque science fictional satire, complete with home appliances with snappy personalities. My suspension of disbelief wrestled with the setting for a while, until I accepted that it was satirical and surreal, and thus should not be expected to make ...more
The novel starts as an Adams-esque science fictional satire, complete with home appliances with snappy personalities. My suspension of disbelief wrestled with the setting for a while, until I accepted that it was satirical and surreal, and thus should not be expected to make ...more
It is rare that I read a book like this anymore because i've already read it if it exists or i know of it and am just not interested in it. Thus i read modern stuff because who wants to read mediocre old stuff when u could read new stuff that may not be merely mediocre? This is a nineties book through and through and that's all i'm gonna say. There is absolutely NO way u could predict the course of this novel, not knowing anything going into it. And that's how it should be read. In fact i've alr
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I thought I was going to hate this book, and initially, I didn't care for it. The slow build up or explanation of the world that is not-quite-ours was a little tedious and boring. A little too cliche, until the cliches worked.
It's a (murder?) mystery-thriller-psychological horror -thing. It is very imaginative, and once I got past the fact that it wasn't a real world (as far as I'm concerned), it got interesting. I think the p-sychological bits of it were the most interesting, and I did end up l ...more
It's a (murder?) mystery-thriller-psychological horror -thing. It is very imaginative, and once I got past the fact that it wasn't a real world (as far as I'm concerned), it got interesting. I think the p-sychological bits of it were the most interesting, and I did end up l ...more
3.5 stars.
Good. Very interesting. Felt a little lacking in something but I can't quite put my finger on it right now. Further thoughts coming... ...more
Good. Very interesting. Felt a little lacking in something but I can't quite put my finger on it right now. Further thoughts coming... ...more
Aug 31, 2008
Richard
rated it
it was amazing
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review of another edition
Shelves:
science-fiction,
5-stars
Oct 14, 2008
Ubik
marked it as to-read
Jan 14, 2013
mark monday
marked it as to-read
Mar 27, 2013
Eric
marked it as to-read
May 25, 2013
Gianni
marked it as to-read
Dec 16, 2014
Maria
marked it as to-read
Sep 09, 2017
Lori
marked it as to-read
Feb 07, 2019
Peter
marked it as to-read
