Play Book Tag discussion

I was so looking forward to reading Census because it combined many favorite elements, a quest, an aging protagonist guiding a younger and in this case the man's son with Down syndrome, and a dystopian setting. To add to that, Jesse Ball wrote it as a tribute to his brother with Down syndrome who had recently passed away.

Ball explains in the prologue that he wanted to start with a blank and then fill in what we don't know. I felt as if I never left the blank. I was always trying to fill in the the space of the strange world in which we were traveling from A to Z to take the census. I never really felt as if I had a sense of the son, in the way I desired.

That being said, I found passages of the book quite beautiful and made full use of my high lighter:

For his part, he simply lived without regret. It is hard to feel someone owes you anything when they live without regret. What you do for them you do for yourself, isn’t it so?

My wife used to say, all flesh is continuous. By that she meant—anything fleshed can mirror another fleshed thing, can feel somehow immediately anything felt, and that it is even sometimes possible to compel another to feel that which you feel.

We who are masters of nothing—who must change things in order to dominate them, cannot understand what it is like to be naturally, a master—to obtain a sovereignty that does not grasp, but extends in somehow palpable lines from the edges of every feather, from the point of the beak, the globes of the eyes. For us, we must diminish those beasts, those cows, those goats, that we would lead, we must break the brain of the horse that we would ride, so that we can crow that he lets us ride him. But anything changed becomes artifice, becomes less than it was, when it is made to suit the human hand. Our human victories by their nature have no glory

It is certainly true that at all times the world is fascinating. At all times all parts of the world are eternally fascinating. There is no legitimate rubric that could be used to choose the doing of one thing over the doing of any other. So when he chooses to simply observe this or that, and, I presume, leap out of his heart into some empathy with the thing observed, whether it is a Ferris wheel or a tortoise, I have never been capable of objecting, and certainly, I have never sought to change what is essentially to my eyes, a basic resourcefulness that finds at any moment something profound.

Sadly in the end I concluded that this book just wasn't for me. I would not want to discourage anyone from reading it as it has received high accolades from critics and readers. Thanks to the PBT decathalon for pushing me to finish it.

It does sound interesting from the description, but from your reaction, I think I'll put it on my mental 'wait and see' list.

Jgrace wrote: "It does sound interesting from the description, but from your reaction, I think I'll put it on my mental 'wait and see' list."

It just didn't capture me the way I thought and hoped that it would. I never got a real sense of the son, although I could see that he was greatly loved.

You can see that there are elements of writing which are interesting, by my examples. I suppose part of it was just the lack of realism.