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What Members Thought
This is a beautiful book. A love letter to humanity, flaws and all. I want to photocopy the list of Things to Do toward the end and give it to my son. He won’t understand several of them, and you wouldn’t if you haven’t read the book, but it’s a lovely guidebook for life well-lived. Love is what is most important and I can endorse that wholesale.
This is a pleasant enough book that starts out promisingly, with a welcome dark wit, but soon enough it devolves into something that’s disappointingly facile and shallow, as it attempts to speak to the complexities of the human experience. I appreciate that Haig appreciates the beauty and contradiction of life and death, but ultimately I’m not sure he has quite enough new to say about it, and his twee approach winds up making characters’ revelations and transformations feel unearned.
Haig says this was written as an allegory: it's SF, but it's really about the "alienation of depression and how you get over that and how you can end up loving the world again."
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Done. Once I got past wishing it were SF, I forgave it for not making sense, and read it as a fable. Once I got into the flow of the voice and the style, I forgave it for being earnest and obvious. I love how it's both wise and silly, heartbreaking and escapist.
I love the quotes from different notable humans, includ ...more
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Done. Once I got past wishing it were SF, I forgave it for not making sense, and read it as a fable. Once I got into the flow of the voice and the style, I forgave it for being earnest and obvious. I love how it's both wise and silly, heartbreaking and escapist.
I love the quotes from different notable humans, includ ...more
Reviews on this book are mixed. I can see why - you have to be able to suspend belief in order to, well, fall for it. It's funny, happy, sad, a little sappy. It improved my day, so it gets five stars for now. :)
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3 1/2 stars
Nov 20, 2013
Kelly Flanagan
marked it as to-read
Dec 10, 2013
gloria
marked it as to-read
Aug 13, 2014
Drew
marked it as to-read
Sep 16, 2014
Brian
marked it as to-read
Mar 24, 2015
Karina
marked it as to-read
Aug 27, 2016
Ann
marked it as to-read
Dec 16, 2016
Nyssa
marked it as wishlist
Shelves:
science-fiction,
speculative-fiction,
humor,
fantasy,
contemporary,
age-adult,
format-standalone,
aliens
Jan 17, 2017
Ric
marked it as to-read
Jun 29, 2017
Barb
marked it as to-read
Sep 28, 2017
Mairéad
marked it as to-read
Oct 02, 2017
Tommy Erhardtsen
marked it as to-read
Jul 06, 2018
Amina Farha
marked it as to-read
Oct 08, 2020
Sara
added it
Oct 28, 2020
seak
marked it as to-read
Aug 05, 2021
Karigan
marked it as to-read
