Scan barcode
amybraunauthor's review against another edition
5.0
Not what I was expecting, but it did not disappoint. Definitely worth checking out!
colorfulleo92's review against another edition
4.0
Been wanting to read something by S.G Browne for a while, have saved almost all his novels on my book app and today I finally did it. Big egos was a great deal of fun, written with a lot of humor and thought fullness is was very entertaining and I'm definitely excited in reading more by S.G Browne.
karrynnagel_author's review against another edition
2.0
I really adore this author; I do. I have followed his career for several years, and think that he has some important comedic and thoughtful things to say. This book in particular, however, was not my cup of tea.
junekramin's review against another edition
5.0
As I expected, it's another keeper. I don't think I was even 4 pages in before I had to write on the author's fan page "You had me a Vinnie Barbarino!" Keeping up with all the characters & celebrities he names, I realized someone did as much TV/movie watching as I had! I always love his MC's personality. It's a fun/new idea with it's own unique twists and turns. I eagerly wait for more from SG Browne!
alexctelander's review against another edition
4.0
S. G. Browne, author of Breathers and Lucky Bastard, is back with his next book and this one’s a real humdinger, pushing the reader’s believability into the arena of compelling science fiction. Big Egos feels like a possible future that could well happen, and like most books of this nature, it is a cautionary tale from which we have much to learn.
Big Egos is the ultimate company that can make your dreams come true. For a considerable fee you can become just about anyone you want to, especially if you share some of said person’s looks and characteristics. With the injection of a DNA-laced cocktail for six to eight hours you can become your favorite dead celebrity and live that life you’ve always wondered about. It’s the ultimate role-playing fantasy from Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, aka EGOS.
Our main character is one of Big Egos’ favorite employees and everything is seen through his eyes. As an employee he is also required to sample the product and readers get a taste of the Elvis ego, among others. The problem is there is a growing black market of egos, but the quality isn’t as good and sometimes the person using it doesn’t recover all the way, they can be left changed.
And now bodies are starting to show up. Big Egos announces that it’s all because of these pirated black market egos, but our main character is brought in to investigate and find out where and how these black market egos are turning up, only things are starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. Is it because he’s been sampling too many egos too often? And why is his boss totally refuting their clandestine meeting about his secret job? And why are some important people at Big Egos now starting to turn up dead?
Browne has a lot of fun with the various egos, setting the stage with descriptive action of all these celebrities and how they might interact with each other, even though they may have never met. It’s another great example of one of his fun novels, original and enthralling that keeps you reading to the end.
Originally written on September 23, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
Big Egos is the ultimate company that can make your dreams come true. For a considerable fee you can become just about anyone you want to, especially if you share some of said person’s looks and characteristics. With the injection of a DNA-laced cocktail for six to eight hours you can become your favorite dead celebrity and live that life you’ve always wondered about. It’s the ultimate role-playing fantasy from Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, aka EGOS.
Our main character is one of Big Egos’ favorite employees and everything is seen through his eyes. As an employee he is also required to sample the product and readers get a taste of the Elvis ego, among others. The problem is there is a growing black market of egos, but the quality isn’t as good and sometimes the person using it doesn’t recover all the way, they can be left changed.
And now bodies are starting to show up. Big Egos announces that it’s all because of these pirated black market egos, but our main character is brought in to investigate and find out where and how these black market egos are turning up, only things are starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. Is it because he’s been sampling too many egos too often? And why is his boss totally refuting their clandestine meeting about his secret job? And why are some important people at Big Egos now starting to turn up dead?
Browne has a lot of fun with the various egos, setting the stage with descriptive action of all these celebrities and how they might interact with each other, even though they may have never met. It’s another great example of one of his fun novels, original and enthralling that keeps you reading to the end.
Originally written on September 23, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
drtlovesbooks's review against another edition
Made it five pages into this before putting it down. There's something about the writing in this one that just turned me off from the start. Browne's work tends to be hit-or-miss with me, and this one missed.
hollowspine's review
3.0
3.5
I really enjoyed the beginning of this story about memory and the nature of the self, but as the story wound on Browne seemed to spend more and more time hitting the reader over the head with the character's many literary references and mind-blowing discoveries about the nature of "Truth". (Capitalized). In the beginning I was invested in the story, I wanted to find out the cause behind the mysterious symptoms of prolonged Ego use and became somewhat disillusioned when Browne turned the story from something original into a Sci-Fi version of Fight Club. Complete with Palahniuk's favorite device, a line repeated so often by the narrator that the reader becomes increasingly sickened by the sight of it.
That line, in particular, became bothersome. It usually went something like, "Truth is, subjectivity is the only truth" or "Truth is, no one really knows what the truth is." This totally unreliable narrator constantly delivering quips about the 'Truth' was a bit much for me. At one point he quotes Oscar Wilde saying, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." Then the narrator adds, "Truth is we're all just looking for the right mask." To me, that didn't fit at all. Wilde was speaking more to the value of anonymity, of protecting the public image of self, rather than of pretending to be someone else, another Ego instead of one's own.
A better quote would have been something about "All the World's A Stage" or something that would focus on the fact that we all play roles all the time and perhaps we are all looking for the right role, the right mask.
Overall, although I enjoyed the premise of the story, the author was a bit too pretentious to make it an immersing reading experience. The Holden Caulfield chapter was especially painful. The aspects of the story that interested me, the characters other than the narrator, quickly drop off, leaving the reader in the sad company of a self-obsessed Ego-Maniac (and I mean that both in the sense of his overuse of Big Egos the product of the book, but also just in the well-known and simple fact of the characters narcissism.)
In the Acknowledgements section Browne starts out, not by thanking anyone, but by telling anyone reading how much research he put in and how many important works he's read to write this thing. He lists a paragraph of name and lit drops, "Just to name a few." He says that since he needed no help to use the Internet there's no one to thank aside from the anon compilers of that info, "Whoever you are." Then, only after he's thanked himself and told us what a genius he is, does he name the little people, like his editor, for their help.
I don't usually care about authors personal lives, when they write well, frankly I don't care. But when the author seems present in the work to the extent Browne is, it does bother me. I feel like he wants readers to know, not that the story is good, but that he did a lot of hard work to make it the literary masterpiece it is. Oh, and that he's much more well-read and intelligent than we'll ever be. That does not make for a happy reader.
I really enjoyed the beginning of this story about memory and the nature of the self, but as the story wound on Browne seemed to spend more and more time hitting the reader over the head with the character's many literary references and mind-blowing discoveries about the nature of "Truth". (Capitalized). In the beginning I was invested in the story, I wanted to find out the cause behind the mysterious symptoms of prolonged Ego use and became somewhat disillusioned when Browne turned the story from something original into a Sci-Fi version of Fight Club. Complete with Palahniuk's favorite device, a line repeated so often by the narrator that the reader becomes increasingly sickened by the sight of it.
That line, in particular, became bothersome. It usually went something like, "Truth is, subjectivity is the only truth" or "Truth is, no one really knows what the truth is." This totally unreliable narrator constantly delivering quips about the 'Truth' was a bit much for me. At one point he quotes Oscar Wilde saying, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." Then the narrator adds, "Truth is we're all just looking for the right mask." To me, that didn't fit at all. Wilde was speaking more to the value of anonymity, of protecting the public image of self, rather than of pretending to be someone else, another Ego instead of one's own.
A better quote would have been something about "All the World's A Stage" or something that would focus on the fact that we all play roles all the time and perhaps we are all looking for the right role, the right mask.
Overall, although I enjoyed the premise of the story, the author was a bit too pretentious to make it an immersing reading experience. The Holden Caulfield chapter was especially painful. The aspects of the story that interested me, the characters other than the narrator, quickly drop off, leaving the reader in the sad company of a self-obsessed Ego-Maniac (and I mean that both in the sense of his overuse of Big Egos the product of the book, but also just in the well-known and simple fact of the characters narcissism.)
In the Acknowledgements section Browne starts out, not by thanking anyone, but by telling anyone reading how much research he put in and how many important works he's read to write this thing. He lists a paragraph of name and lit drops, "Just to name a few." He says that since he needed no help to use the Internet there's no one to thank aside from the anon compilers of that info, "Whoever you are." Then, only after he's thanked himself and told us what a genius he is, does he name the little people, like his editor, for their help.
I don't usually care about authors personal lives, when they write well, frankly I don't care. But when the author seems present in the work to the extent Browne is, it does bother me. I feel like he wants readers to know, not that the story is good, but that he did a lot of hard work to make it the literary masterpiece it is. Oh, and that he's much more well-read and intelligent than we'll ever be. That does not make for a happy reader.
alexctelander's review
4.0
S. G. Browne, author of Breathers and Lucky Bastard, is back with his next book and this one’s a real humdinger, pushing the reader’s believability into the arena of compelling science fiction. Big Egos feels like a possible future that could well happen, and like most books of this nature, it is a cautionary tale from which we have much to learn.
Big Egos is the ultimate company that can make your dreams come true. For a considerable fee you can become just about anyone you want to, especially if you share some of said person’s looks and characteristics. With the injection of a DNA-laced cocktail for six to eight hours you can become your favorite dead celebrity and live that life you’ve always wondered about. It’s the ultimate role-playing fantasy from Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, aka EGOS.
Our main character is one of Big Egos’ favorite employees and everything is seen through his eyes. As an employee he is also required to sample the product and readers get a taste of the Elvis ego, among others. The problem is there is a growing black market of egos, but the quality isn’t as good and sometimes the person using it doesn’t recover all the way, they can be left changed.
And now bodies are starting to show up. Big Egos announces that it’s all because of these pirated black market egos, but our main character is brought in to investigate and find out where and how these black market egos are turning up, only things are starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. Is it because he’s been sampling too many egos too often? And why is his boss totally refuting their clandestine meeting about his secret job? And why are some important people at Big Egos now starting to turn up dead?
Browne has a lot of fun with the various egos, setting the stage with descriptive action of all these celebrities and how they might interact with each other, even though they may have never met. It’s another great example of one of his fun novels, original and enthralling that keeps you reading to the end.
Originally written on September 23, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
Big Egos is the ultimate company that can make your dreams come true. For a considerable fee you can become just about anyone you want to, especially if you share some of said person’s looks and characteristics. With the injection of a DNA-laced cocktail for six to eight hours you can become your favorite dead celebrity and live that life you’ve always wondered about. It’s the ultimate role-playing fantasy from Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems, aka EGOS.
Our main character is one of Big Egos’ favorite employees and everything is seen through his eyes. As an employee he is also required to sample the product and readers get a taste of the Elvis ego, among others. The problem is there is a growing black market of egos, but the quality isn’t as good and sometimes the person using it doesn’t recover all the way, they can be left changed.
And now bodies are starting to show up. Big Egos announces that it’s all because of these pirated black market egos, but our main character is brought in to investigate and find out where and how these black market egos are turning up, only things are starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. Is it because he’s been sampling too many egos too often? And why is his boss totally refuting their clandestine meeting about his secret job? And why are some important people at Big Egos now starting to turn up dead?
Browne has a lot of fun with the various egos, setting the stage with descriptive action of all these celebrities and how they might interact with each other, even though they may have never met. It’s another great example of one of his fun novels, original and enthralling that keeps you reading to the end.
Originally written on September 23, 2013 ©Alex C. Telander.
For more reviews, check out the BookBanter site.
More...