Andrea McDowell > Recent Status Updates

It just keeps getting worse and worse

This novel unintentionally parodies the worst parts of covid conspiracy theories from the last two years, which is just pissing me off. Let's see if I can manage to finish it.

Listening to the audiobook. It auto-returned to the library on me when I had 8 hours to go and will be weeks probably before I can sign it out again, so:

I am finding it, first of all, very dull; I am also finding all of the main characters to be Stephenson in disguise. I think I know where this is going, and that I will have a one- or two-star review to come. We'll see.

You could swap out "nuclear warfare" for "climate change" in this book and the conversations would be pitch perfect. It is in places physically painful, as someone who has been in these spaces for so long, to read these conversations and see them analyzed so clearly.

I can't resist commenting on the irony of a book that attacks environmentalists as too sincere, too serious, and too scientific, and encouraging us to use irony instead, coming out mere months before The Uninhabitable Earth & Greta's school strikes marshaled sincerity, seriousness and science into movements that are inspiring millions of people worldwide and getting governments to move policy.

So badly out of date that I'm having a hard time finishing it.

"it was perhaps most popular in the 1950s, as new consumer society began confidently rolling off the production line, and the age of literary science-fiction arguably reached its peak."

I can't think off the top of my head of anyone else, outside of sad puppies and other regressives, who believes literary sci fi peaked in the 1950s.

This does not bode well.

This is a book composed 95% of anecdata, and which totally ignores actual evidence when it exists. Taking bets on whether I'll finish it.

This is the 7th book on this year's Canada Reads longlist I've read, and so far, the first I am not enjoying. At all.

Maybe it'll turn around in the next 150 pages, but if not, hang tight for a truly scathing review.

You don't use pins on leather, Nina.

Trying hard but it's a tough slog so far.

So far so dull.

Still waiting for Bruks not to be a dickhead.