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3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

Towards the end I started liking it more.

I think like 5 years ago I would have liked the meta commentary on tech more. Now it seems kind of trite and, as apparently the first employee at Instagram, I feel like the author is too embedded in the world he's satirizing to effectively be critical of it.

I liked the fact that there were no simple answers at the end. There were some interesting things about memory and identity and so on that were still vague by the end. I was left feeling like the story was going somewhere interesting thematically and never quite got there, but the journey was still enjoyable

Very quick and engaging read, I did not mean to read it in one setting but did. It's tense and you want to find out what happens next - it's funny that this is the protagonist's motivation for being involved, in part. It feels very much like a mystery story. A lot happens in a very small amount of pages

Picked it up from the library because I recognized the name from the Internet. I don't really have high expectations of novels which are about politics first, since often what makes a good essay makes a bad novel (and vice versa) but this surpassed my expectations. It is kind of leftist infighting: the novella. It is definitely not escapist literature.

I didn't love that the narrator immediately knew who the "bad guy" was. The point that charismatic people who put people at ease can be bad people did not need to be stated explicitly. But that's my only complaint in terms of characterization. All the characters feel very real.

If you don't at least know some anarchists irl I don't think this story will make a lot of sense to you

When I say that the book seemed more optimistic than cynical, I think about the ending when the protagonist is tortured. 1984 is the comparison that comes to mind, but while 1984 ends with the protagonist utterly broken, this one ends on a pretty hopeful note - the protagonist remains a revolutionary, though he has lost faith in that one particular revolution, he remains an idealist though he knows he will perhaps do to others what was done to him. It's the sort of cynicism or optimism that looks at the world as it is, at human nature as it is, and says that nevertheless we must continue.

It is also fairly critical of I guess the entire concept of ideology as it butts up against the more complicated nature of humanity. Some people have criticized the entire section where he eviscerates Hollywood as gratuitous but I think it's pretty essential to the book's themes. The contrast between the straightforward stories that we tell - colonialism, American exceptionalism, capitalism and the American dream, Communism and independence - and how they butt up against the complexities of the world. And yet it is the real and concrete suffering we see in the book and in real life that makes it morally imperative to try and change things, to pick a side. The protagonist's greatest crime in the end is doing nothing.

I think my favourite scene in the book was when he tries to reveal his identity as a spy to Sonny who doesn't believe him, and then he completely botches murdering him. It sort of I guess foreshadows the end, where he cannot prove he has been a good communist all along, where his self-perception as a heroic figure doing only what is necessary for the cause falls apart. The protagonist has also told a lot of stories to himself and they, too, fall apart when confronted with reality.

I feel like I should reread the book with the new knowledge that I have and how it recontextualizes things.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

Well maybe more like 3.5.

I wanted this to be a very specific book and it wasn't that book at all. I picked it up in a bookstore and understood the premise to be that the main character is dead and has forgotten who she was when she was alive but also is still very much around. And this is true.

But it is kind of a zombie story, from the perspective of a zombie, and I wanted it to be, I don't know, Kentucky Route zero.

Nothing really happens in this book, so if you are expecting things to happen you might be disappointed, but I was kind of actually expecting fewer things to happen. The short bursts of violence seem kind of incongruous and irrelevant. The whole crow thing also did not land for me. I don't think anything really needed to mean anything or to symbolize anything. The dismemberment worked, though, the sort of alienation both from the world and from the self. And the sense of wandering around an abandoned world.

I read it all in one sitting. I'm a little disappointed because it's only like 80% of the extremely specific story I hoped it was. I'm not sure if I'm exactly recommending it. But I am glad I read it.