The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August in What's the Name of That Book???

Oct 16, 2017 Grace rated it liked it

I'm glad I wasn't the only person who thought this book dragged in the middle. I always wonder if I'm just reading slowly or if my attention is wavering for other reasons. The beginning was interesting and compelling while you're learning about the Kalachakra and then once the plot gets going near the last third things pick up again, but I found myself bored in the middle and had to force myself to read at some points with the hope that things would get interesting again.

Given the strong beginni I'm glad I wasn't the only person who thought this book dragged in the middle. I always wonder if I'm just reading slowly or if my attention is wavering for other reasons. The beginning was interesting and compelling while you're learning about the Kalachakra and then once the plot gets going near the last third things pick up again, but I found myself bored in the middle and had to force myself to read at some points with the hope that things would get interesting again.

Given the strong beginning, I expected more from this book. It wasn't terrible by any means, but I'm surprised by the rave reviews. It was decent. A safe three stars, as "safe" feels like the optimal word here.

To start off with positives: It's got a cool set-up. Harry's reaction to his first few lives and struggle to come to terms with his reality ring true. To me, it was one of the more interesting parts of the book and where he displayed the most personality. The strategy for passing information backward and forward was clever. The general boredom and disinterest of the other Kalachakra also seemed realistic to me.

The negatives, which are somehow always easier to write: If there were no paradoxes, it was only because the author went into little explanation of how anything functioned and the actual timeline was nearly impossible to follow. Throughout the entire book, there were random flashback-like chapters to needless events in Harry's lives. If they had done more to shape his character, it would have been fine, but most of them felt entirely pointless and only confused the timeline.

I had two major problems with the concept of the Kalachakra. One, the number of Kalachakra struck me as completely absurd and unnecessary. We hardly meet any, so there's no point for there to be so many. That would also just be a lot of very powerful, very rich people running around and needing to be controlled by the Cronus Club. It also seemed like that many of them would inevitably be changing the timeline drastically no matter what they did. Two, there's no exploration of what the Kalachakra are or how they come to be. The biggest paradox to me is the fact that their number of lives don't match up. When Harry is on his third life, he meets Kalachakra much older than him, but also everyone should be on the same timeline going by the other events in the book. So, is Harry's first life the first time that there was a Harry August? Or at some point did a "linear" person called Harry August suddenly become a Kalachakra?

Like many of the other negative reviews, I found Harry to be a pretty boring protagonist. He was a bit more interesting in the final third of the book, as his relationship with Vincent is genuinely compelling. There's a line that went "I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died." A good line that wasn't quite deserved. The reader should have felt Harry get to that point, but his development wasn't clear. He just sort of ends up at that point. The jumbled timeline does nothing to help the feeling of little character development.

Okay, that was a lot of complaining. I did really like the relationship between Vincent and Harry. (view spoiler) The strongest parts of the book warrant four stars, but the weaker points really drag it down for me. ...more

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May 25, 2021 Cheryl rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book was a bit of a tough one for me to review. I would give the opening 4 or 5 stars, as the author lays out the premise - - -that being, Harry August dies, but is constantly reincarnated in the same life, over and over again.

However, about mid-book, I’m as tired of Harry’s life as he is. He finds an arch-nemesis in his friend Vincent, who Harry believes will ultimately destroy the world with his quantum mirror. At this point, the technical jargon simply lost me, as did the repetitive nat ...more

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Jan 23, 2019 Karen rated it liked it · review of another edition

I was at least halfway through this book before I started to have the sense that it had a plot. And then, I didn't quite get the plot. I mean, why is it so harmful to the world to introduce technology ahead of its time? Did I miss this because I was only skimming by a certain point? The book felt weirdly imbalanced to me, like way too many insignificant anecdotes about his various wives and travels, and too little about what it would actually feel like to be living over & over. At first I enjoye ...more

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Jun 24, 2014 Nicole rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley, read-in-2014

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. God, I don't even know where to begin with this book.

Let's start with some facts:
* NetGalley gave me the opportunity to read this book - thanks for that!
* I'm a rabid fan of time travel/life-after-life type books.
* This cover is pretty rad.

Strictly speaking, this book is not about time travel. It is a play on The Eternal Return, wherein the protagonist repeats the same life over and over again. He's not alone, though, and there is an entire race of these repeaters called kalachakra or ourobora ...more

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Apr 29, 2014 Maria Elmvang rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned-ebook, 3-stars, sci-fi, 2016

I don't quite know what I think of this book... it was a surprisingly slow read while simultaneously being surprisingly fascinating as well. At about the half-way mark I commented that I could neither get into this book nor put it down, and that seemed to be the case until the very end.

A fascinating story with a very unusual plot. It focuses on a different sort of immortality from what is often portrayed in books, and I think Claire North handled it very well. I can't quite make up my mind as to ...more

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Jun 15, 2020 Laurie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, popsugar2020, mttbr2020

I only finished this due to wanting to use it for a reading challenge. To me, it was slow and repetitive and I was not interested in the characters. I’m also not generally into the trope of using physics to understand the world. The book is well constructed and well written but was not for me.

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