Reading Glasses - Fan Group discussion

This post is to discuss anything that occurs in casefiles 1-143.

I find myself more and more intrigued by the unnamed interviewer, Mr. Warm and Fuzzy. I can't make up my mind quite how I feel about him. He is hyper-rational, almost robotic. He is only showing himself to be quite manipulative. Everyone has a different take on the ends justify the means. However I would hazard a guess that my line would be different from Mr. Warm and Fuzzy, "a thousand seems like a reasonable figure." I'm looking forward to finding out more about the robot and about all the characters. This is an interesting book.

I enjoyed this portion of the book a bit more than the first. I'm still not entirely convinced this story wouldn't be better told in a regular narrative rather than the structure it's using, but I'm not going to dwell on that and it's certainly not affecting my enjoyment of the story. I really enjoyed the twist with Ryan and Vincent; I certainly did NOT see that coming. lol I had mixed feelings about the budding romance between Ryan and Kara, but now that I see that it was ultimately leading to this crazy development that has potentially thrown a wrench into the whole operation, I like it.

I also think the unnamed interviewer has officially become the most interesting character for me. He's an interesting enigma because in some ways he seems completely emotionless and pragmatic; he believes the ends justify the means when it comes to this discovery, and that as many as a thousand deaths is acceptable collateral damage. But in other ways, as Alyssa Papantoniou (the TRUE pragmatist of the book) indicates, he seems like he may be developing genuine emotional attachments to team members. Or is he? One minute he's reassuring Vincent that everything will be OK, and the next he's strong-arming a surgeon into performing risky experimental surgery on him that, oh by the way, could result in intense pain for the rest of his life.

(Incidentally, I'll be curious to see how Vincent is handled in the next section. It seems like he's going to have inverted mechanical knees, which is cool as hell, but if he's also in constant pain, how is he going to be able to pilot this robot? Unless maybe the robot somehow heals his pain, since we've already seen it has the capacity to heal its pilots? I'm looking forward to finding out.)

Am loving the development of the interviewer character, even though trying to maintain the mystery is a bit annoying at times. Hope the alien robot story picks up a bit again, but gripped by the way the explorers are getting sucked in to the mysteries of the robot.

I also enjoyed this part more than the first part. We got a look into more of the relationships in the book and found out more about the personalities of the characters. So, it's obvious Mr. Warm and Fuzzy will go to crazy lengths for this project if he will risk experimental surgery on Vincent. One of my favorite parts in this section was the conversation with the Dr. Pavel Haas, Chief of Surgery. I had to re-read/re-listen like 3 times to make sure I understood what they were going to do to Vincent!!!! We see Kara sleep with both of the men she works in close quarters with. We see Dr. Franklin act out of character for herself as she goes to visit Ryan in prison. We see Ryan try to kill Vincent by running over him. I didn't see that coming at all. Most excited to see how this experimental surgery is going to turn out!

I’m really enjoying the book so far. The character development is super interesting. The interviewer just keeps getting more and more intriguing. I really want to know who he is and how he got so much power. He scares me a little bit for sure! He seems to have zero qualms about hurting people or getting them out of the way if it serves his purposes.

Does anyone else think it was SUPER convenient that something happened to Vincent’s legs, and, subsequently, they can try to give him new “legs” that just so happen to match the ones he needs to be able to operate? I think that’s super questionable.

Leenie wrote: "Why didn't they just sedate Vincent and have him put the helmet back on to see if it would heal him without having to go thru all the experimental surgery? They know it healed Kara, it seems like t..."

This is a very very MINOR SPOILER for the next part of the book, but... Kara suffers a nose injury later and says the helmet doesn't repair it because "the helmet doesn't come down that far." So it doesn't sound like the helmet would've been able to heal Vincent...