Ben Haskett’s Reviews > Stand on Zanzibar > Status Update

What a relief. This book looked so daunting and almost incoherent in the first few chapters, but it's revealed itself to be pretty easy. It has 188 chapters, but only 42 of them are the "plot." 32 chapters are disconnected short stories or vignettes within this world, 28 are advertisements or pretentious essays from a fictional author, and 16 are just straight-up noise—like scrolling through a social media feed.

Okay, now it's just a good book. Kind of easy to follow actually. Even the "Happening World" chapters aren't so bad. They're intended to be an avalanche of information snippets, emulating the overload of (noticeably incomplete) information people of this imagined future are subjected to. But they resemble today's social media feeds.

Still quite difficult but... readable?

I am intimidated by this large book.