Alexis > Recent Status Updates

How can a book simultaneously be so interesting and so incredibly boring?

This book... I still really appreciate the tone. It's long and rambling and keeps you engaged like an old timer telling you a story to keep you in your bar stool buying them drinks all night. I'm going incredibly slowly because it knocks me right out at bedtime.

But I'm... pretty squicked out by this being a non-intersex author deciding they could tell a story that better describes the intersex experience.

I am so excited to finish this terrible book.

Boy... two in a row that just haven't really clicked with me.

It's immediately and unsubtly clear that the main character is dealing with intense trauma, but the way the author conveys it is *deeply unpleasant* to read. Personal conversations and digital conversations switch between each other, leaking and bleeding in styles and fonts. Time stretches and compresses and scenes feel infinitely long and then warp you forty paces forward.

Honestly might give up.

I keep making the terrible mistake of trying to read this in bed. I've woken up my partner multiple times by just cackling to myself in the dark.

Oh god is this book testing me. It's so boring, and I just can't keep track of what's happening, sometimes even in the same paragraph.

This book reads like the 3rd in a trilogy.

I feel like in a good murder mystery you never know who to trust because character motivations are hidden and you only have one person's perspective. But in this case we have an omniscient narrator who describes every character pulling out a gun, cocking it, and stating out loud, to their own reflection in a mirror, "they'll never find out my dark secret."

Cheezus Crisps, this book is pretty fantastic.

Honestly this is wild. Reading this book has confirmed that I don't like Neal Stephenson's writing, but it absolutely works for (most of) this story. I love it.

No, Alvaro. You're not allowed to spend all day in the breakroom reading.

I am pretty hardcore hooked now. Like "walking an extra lap through the park in the Texas heat to squeeze in another few sections" hooked.