Mishehu > Recent Status Updates

I’ve discovered the readerly equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. Paradoxically, the fewer pages left to read, the longer this piece of dreck stretches before me. What a colossal waste of paper and ink. Nearly every step in this narrative is a misstep, every reveal ludicrous, every bit of dialogue stilted and unlikely. And if I have to read the words “Shovel Pig” one more time...

This truly is one of the least imaginative and most uninspiredly written books I have ever read. Thus far, I cannot imagine how it was published. Of course, if the author has sold lots of other books (which I gather he has) then from a purely commercial perspective I get it. But did any reviewer ever, honestly, give this book an enthusiastic appraisal? What a fruitless slog it has been to this point.

Please, for the love of God, tell me this book improves (significantly) in its second half. It’s shaping up, thus far, to be one of the lamest novels I’ve ever read: an opaque and completely dull “mystery” with cardboard characters, insipid internal monologues, and a cloying pretense to significance. This is my first Vandermeer novel. I reckon that bodes very poorly for the others on my shelves…

"At the same time, they elicited fears that we might calculate everything and ourselves to death without emerging from all the data-mining any wiser in the end." And...: Drink!

"In Descarte's time as now, distinguishing the real from the fake was politically and philosophically pertinent." You don't say? (I'm beginning to see the outlines of a new drinking game...)

She didn't just write "...poke the bear of our imagination," did she. (Checks the book.) Yes, she did. So much lousy phrase-turning. So many insipid observations. (Note: I've decided that Goodreads progress check-ins will serve as a kind of reader self-therapy in the days ahead; anything to get me through this...)

I never do these mid-read check-ins, but I'm so disappointed in this one so far that I feel compelled to sound the alarm. Just finished the intro. Reads like it was written by a precocious high school student. Professional historian of science? Seriously!?

I can't believe what a completely mediocre piece of writing this is so far. Princeton University Press? Seriously? I have the sinking feeling the jacket blurbs are pure hyperbole (friends or former teachers of the author perhaps?). I can only hope the book improves as Canales plumbs the depths of her topic. But I'm not holding my breath. Such an unpromising start. Really shocking.

I'm only 11 pages into this book, but feel compelled to pause and say: holy sh#t! This may be the most prescient novel ever written. Freaky. The next 526 pages will (dis-/)confirm my hunch...

The concept has merit. The execution, however, is philosophy's equivalent of an incrementally shifting endless series of groundhog days. Almost 400 pages to go...

OMG, almost 400 pages to go! My reading mood has completely shifted. This book has a borderline psychotic quality -- or at least an obsessive compulsive one. It may be essential reading for philosophers of desert, but it's pretty dismal intellectual fair (even for them, I suspect).

The line between meditative and mind-numbing is getting thinner...

This may be the strangest work of philosophy I've ever read, and the only one that I can legitimately claim to have been able to write myself. And though I can't imagine why it was published, nor that it will ever attract any but a marginal readership, I'm completely compeled by it. It is a curiously meditative read...

I never update my progress, but am making an exception in this case (in the event any prospective readers are debating whether or not to invest their time in reading this one) to say: man this guy can write! One fifth of the way in, this is shaping up to be one fantastic book!

Lord a'mighty, this is one long and slow novel. Can't believe I'm only half way through. Gonna be a mighty way's creepin' towards that tunnel ending light. Can only hope it's worth the journey...