Massive

Product Information

I personally would have edited down the first half of the book, since it takes awhile to really get going. I'd like to say it was unrealistic in that I can't believe that none of the family members saw what was happening and stepped in. One thing I like about Fukuyama is that he’s one of the only prominent political thinkers I’ve come across in the US who actually says, “I got things wrong,” and then explains why and what he learned from it.

Bringing a hundred-kilo mass of “I think it’s alive” into her elevator didn’t sound super appealing. I'm going to age myself a bit here - but one writing choice did come across as pretty jarring when I first started reading because there's no warning it's coming. But it doesn't do it well, it is all very flat and nothing really happens, and though i know that not all books need happy endings it just really didn't have a happy anything. while keeping the concept of an infinitely improbable variety of trouble your heroes can get into, Load into merchandising t-shirt cannon, and fire on full automatic until the air is full of pages.I felt the book didn't give a proper insight into Carmen's personality or motives, despite the entire book being in a first person narrative. But when a mysterious shapeshifter from an ambiguous world lands on top of her elevator, intent on stopping a plot to annihilate hundreds of floors, Carissa finds herself stepping out of her comfort zone. My eyes found themselves skimming and glazing over until those sections were over because I was overwhelmed by the information and had trouble picturing what it was trying to describe. Some people find the book tedious (the first time through, I did at times), but once you fall into his style, Wallace’s unique ability to constantly observe life in ways you didn’t know existed makes you feel as though you’re getting smarter simply by reading him, even if it’s a paragraph about something mundane like tennis shoes and chewing tobacco.

Hofstadter employs a boatload of clever gimmicks, analogies, and fun mental games to get his point across — the most prominent ones being Godel’s incompleteness theorems in mathematics, Escher’s paradoxical drawings, and Bach’s recursive musical inventions. Each scene contains a character arc, moving the story further in a linear yet multi-layered matrix of events. Well, that's coola boola, because we've put together the most massive, mighty and manky collection of Irish slang in history, or at least in donkey's years.I also wrote and co-edited the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook while I was working at the University of East Anglia, which is also published by Macmillan. If Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an intricate arrangement of blocks to create a maze which, when viewed from above, spells out a rude word, then this book uses those blocks to make a random mess that, when viewed from above, forms a QR code to a broken webpage. There were too many sections that were just on the verge of being exciting and propelling you through the story, and then there would be another long exposition slump. There are some exceptions, and perhaps Carmen's mom is a narcissist, but it is never specified whether she is or isn't. Learn to speak French well enough to understand the passages in the beginning of the book without footnotes.

We have a bunch of players in the story - Carissa, Rindasy, Andasir, Tabitha, and so on, but they are truly just players in a much larger, centuries-spanning narrative of "The Building". But for me, with a binary education and a binary familial life, and -let's face it - a binary vocabulary, it was a little off-putting in the beginning, and broke the flow of about the first "Episode" as I got used to it. Don't get me wrong, it was sure fitting and still kind of satisfying in itself, but I felt cheated, when so many crucial characters to the story were just left behind and unaccounted for.

I accept that that's subjective but it did make me enjoy the book more than I usually would so it's only fair to recognise it.