Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dsamorodnitsky 's review for:
Solaris
by Stanisław Lem
Solaris starts out taut and gripping like no book I've read recently. It goes from zero to total psychodrama in about 10 pages. Best first half of a book I've read in years. At first it's a smooth, mid-century scifi story, with cool glass and sterile surfaces, but when the narrator arrives at the space station where the story takes place, he finds a mess. One man, alone, shell-shocked, with blood on his hands but no body to account for it. And then the hallucinations start. It's tense.
At about the halfway mark the book crashes hard. Worst second half of a book I've read in years. Lem either lost his nerve, thought 20 pages of unnecessary backstory would be fun (one of the most baffling narrative choices I've ever seen), or had some philosophical musings about love, gods, and human nature he just had to put into a book. An author with trashier taste could've made this into HP Lovecraft crossed with Alien, which would've been great.
At about the halfway mark the book crashes hard. Worst second half of a book I've read in years. Lem either lost his nerve, thought 20 pages of unnecessary backstory would be fun (one of the most baffling narrative choices I've ever seen), or had some philosophical musings about love, gods, and human nature he just had to put into a book. An author with trashier taste could've made this into HP Lovecraft crossed with Alien, which would've been great.