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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
Peeling back an onion makes you cry and incline your head in confusion. Compiling code and characters is tricky indeed. The ending was neat, altough a trope I dislike. An interesting exercise for sure.
I knew going into it that this book would be complex, but I didn’t really understand how complicated it would get. Not only were there 5 or 6 different plot lines all only faintly connected, most of those worlds were very different from our own, or had elements of art or technology that is beyond what we have now. It required my utmost attention for almost 700 pages, with big words, a multitude of narratives, and complex universes. Reviews said that the work would be worth it in the end. And yet, I’m not sure the ending was that satisfying. I don’t think I really understood how things wrapped up completely. I sort of thought that because the worlds were so confusing, the author could just make stuff up and the reader would be like “that makes sense because this universe is beyond my understanding!” But that doesn’t sit well with me. I’m still thinking about this one. Soon I’ll have to sit down and write a review on it and I feel like I have a lot to say but also not a lot. I read so many pages yet I’m not even sure how to articulate what happens.
A puzzle box of interwoven stories and people in a full surveillance state of the near future. Not an easy ready but worth it and I'm sure I'll be pondering this for months and perhaps years to come. Harkaway's writing engaged me and perhaps swallowed me up like the shark in the story.
There might have been an interesting story in there somewhere, but there's so much crap piled on top of it that I could never find it. Way too many asides/interjections/extraneous details/free associations/non sequiturs/... There was a telling moment in the book, where the narrator tells the Alexa-like artificial intelligence to stop using colloquial/informal language, and I thought, AMEN. Your book was trying to tell you something, Mr. Harkaway. You have a fine grasp of English, now how about some refinement?
Good. I'm glad I bit down hard and committed to this book. The audio version may have been easier to follow because there were variable voices, but I loved how all the stories intertwined and changed because of the other stories. Again, ending was a bit predictable but not unwelcome.
This is a huge weird mess but it's also pretty damn compelling most of the time.
The structure is fairly similar to Cloud Atlas - it opens all its stories before it starts to close them - but there's still a knot of unresolved stuff that has to be picked apart at the end. That isn't so successful, but I'm not sure there was a satisfying resolution to this weirdass monstrosity.
Cautiously recommended, especially by folks who have read something from Harkaway before, but if you're not very intrigued around the 50-page mark, best to move on to something else.
The structure is fairly similar to Cloud Atlas - it opens all its stories before it starts to close them - but there's still a knot of unresolved stuff that has to be picked apart at the end. That isn't so successful, but I'm not sure there was a satisfying resolution to this weirdass monstrosity.
Cautiously recommended, especially by folks who have read something from Harkaway before, but if you're not very intrigued around the 50-page mark, best to move on to something else.
Full review here
I was introduced to Nick Haraway during my final year at university doing my dissertation. He has a unique style: his world-building is always complex and his characters are six-dimensional, let alone three! Nothing is what it seems in his books.
I wanted to read Gnomon – I wanted to see where he wouldtake a reader next. I kept putting it off – this is a hefty book and I wantedto commit to it properly. I’m glad I did as it took a while!
I have really mixed feelings on this book.
On one hand, I had no idea what was going on for most of it! There are a lot of characters – whether they are real or not is up to you – and you get snippets of their stories in different orders before eventually seeing them blend together. But just as you get used to one character, everything changes and you’re back where you were – you think.
There is an intricate plot being twisted through the different narrations. There are times when I felt like I had a handle on it, and then times when I was totally lost. The parts set in ‘reality’ were the most confusing: the society set-up echoes ‘Big Brother’ and how the use of technology can undermine our freedom. While that seems simple, there’s a lot going on that left me bemused.
The switching of the characters worked…sort of. Each had their own story and you eventually see how they connect. But as the stories blend together, it felt the characters lost their individuality. Which is the point when you know the plot, but you get invested in these characters and it doesn’t feel like they have satisfying endings.
Despite the confusion, the writing quality is so strong that when I could figure out what was going on, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters are well-defined and the dialogue was natural and amusing. There are times when the tension increased and I was gripped: I wanted to see how each story arc played out.
This is a really hard review to write. I wanted to like the book, and I can’t say I disliked it. I just got so confused at times that I can’t look back and say it’s an enjoyable read. The length didn’t help either – it meant the pacing was steady to the point of slow, so you’d spend a day with one character, then flick to the next and by the time you got to the fourth, you couldn’t remember where in their story you were.
If you’ve enjoyed Harkaway’s complex world-building before, then I’d give this book a go: I’m ultimately glad to have read it. But if you want something you can get swept up in, this possibly isn’t the best choice; you have to concentrate throughout.
Am I glad to have stuck with it? Yes. Would I read it again? Possibly not. But I’d definitely be interested in his future books and it was fun being challenged.
I was introduced to Nick Haraway during my final year at university doing my dissertation. He has a unique style: his world-building is always complex and his characters are six-dimensional, let alone three! Nothing is what it seems in his books.
I wanted to read Gnomon – I wanted to see where he wouldtake a reader next. I kept putting it off – this is a hefty book and I wantedto commit to it properly. I’m glad I did as it took a while!
I have really mixed feelings on this book.
On one hand, I had no idea what was going on for most of it! There are a lot of characters – whether they are real or not is up to you – and you get snippets of their stories in different orders before eventually seeing them blend together. But just as you get used to one character, everything changes and you’re back where you were – you think.
There is an intricate plot being twisted through the different narrations. There are times when I felt like I had a handle on it, and then times when I was totally lost. The parts set in ‘reality’ were the most confusing: the society set-up echoes ‘Big Brother’ and how the use of technology can undermine our freedom. While that seems simple, there’s a lot going on that left me bemused.
The switching of the characters worked…sort of. Each had their own story and you eventually see how they connect. But as the stories blend together, it felt the characters lost their individuality. Which is the point when you know the plot, but you get invested in these characters and it doesn’t feel like they have satisfying endings.
Despite the confusion, the writing quality is so strong that when I could figure out what was going on, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters are well-defined and the dialogue was natural and amusing. There are times when the tension increased and I was gripped: I wanted to see how each story arc played out.
This is a really hard review to write. I wanted to like the book, and I can’t say I disliked it. I just got so confused at times that I can’t look back and say it’s an enjoyable read. The length didn’t help either – it meant the pacing was steady to the point of slow, so you’d spend a day with one character, then flick to the next and by the time you got to the fourth, you couldn’t remember where in their story you were.
If you’ve enjoyed Harkaway’s complex world-building before, then I’d give this book a go: I’m ultimately glad to have read it. But if you want something you can get swept up in, this possibly isn’t the best choice; you have to concentrate throughout.
Am I glad to have stuck with it? Yes. Would I read it again? Possibly not. But I’d definitely be interested in his future books and it was fun being challenged.
I was taken in by all the positive blurbs on this one. And I've read this author before (Angelmaker) and enjoyed the book. But I maybe should have paid attention to what 2-star reviewers were saying about this book. Ten-dollar vocabulary words don't faze me, but the long stream-of-consciousness type chapters where you don't really know how they tie in to the story are a slog. Apparently that type of thing is a big part of the book. This is a science fiction near future kind of thing with an emphasis on a surveillance state and a way to get into peoples heads (almost quite literally). But oof! What a slog. I gave up on page 166 (of 660).
There was huge potential for this to be an excellent book, which was utterly ruined by the pretentiousness and self-importance that this author wrote it with. I haven’t read any of Nick Harkaway’s other books, but if he talks about how clever he is in those books as much as he does in this one I think I’ll give them a pass.
The world Harkaway has created has a lot of really interesting points to make about the positives and negatives of the kind of big brother, surveillance society that our world is becoming. The other narratives integrated into the narrative are also, individually, also really interesting. But ultimately it didn’t make a lot of sense, and frankly would have been much more impressive if we weren’t being told how bloody genius it was all the time - one of the big reveals is that a character’s name spells something important when it’s written backwards, for crying out loud. In one cringe-worthy moment towards the end, the fourth wall is broken and the author/narrator asserts how much we now care about one of the main characters - which was pretty embarrassing, since Neith had been the vehicle for some of the author’s most nonsensical philosophical ramblings and leaps of logic, and was probably the least interesting character in the whole book.
The writing is (purposefully) dense and difficult to read - keeping a dictionary on hand or reading on kindle so you can look up words is strongly recommended. There is a logic given for this, in the form of an anecdote about how writing something in a complex way forces the person reading it to actually think hard and learn, but I rather suspect this author just wanted to show off his vocabulary. Needing to google certain obscure terms does not teach the reader about the complexity of the human mind, or the importance of choice in human life. I think probably the single biggest critique I’ve got is that this book SORELY needed a heavier edit. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that.
Overall - conceptually interesting, but insufferable in the execution. Do not bother!
The world Harkaway has created has a lot of really interesting points to make about the positives and negatives of the kind of big brother, surveillance society that our world is becoming. The other narratives integrated into the narrative are also, individually, also really interesting. But ultimately it didn’t make a lot of sense, and frankly would have been much more impressive if we weren’t being told how bloody genius it was all the time - one of the big reveals is that a character’s name spells something important when it’s written backwards, for crying out loud. In one cringe-worthy moment towards the end, the fourth wall is broken and the author/narrator asserts how much we now care about one of the main characters - which was pretty embarrassing, since Neith had been the vehicle for some of the author’s most nonsensical philosophical ramblings and leaps of logic, and was probably the least interesting character in the whole book.
The writing is (purposefully) dense and difficult to read - keeping a dictionary on hand or reading on kindle so you can look up words is strongly recommended. There is a logic given for this, in the form of an anecdote about how writing something in a complex way forces the person reading it to actually think hard and learn, but I rather suspect this author just wanted to show off his vocabulary. Needing to google certain obscure terms does not teach the reader about the complexity of the human mind, or the importance of choice in human life. I think probably the single biggest critique I’ve got is that this book SORELY needed a heavier edit. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that.
Overall - conceptually interesting, but insufferable in the execution. Do not bother!