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One by one, you're introduced to a cavalcade of unlikable characters, waiting for an actual narrative to begin. It starts in the last 50 pages, with brutal descriptiveness, and stops abruptly shortly thereafter without providing much of any resolution.

After reading it, I felt more disappointed at the missed opportunity to tell an interesting story in the world that was built so laboriously than anything else.

It's an interesting set of memoirs by someone who's closely a narcissist on his days as America's highest-profile hacker...though most of what he does in the book is subvert local phone systems and social-engineer people from spoofed phone numbers. Language advisory, as Mitnick and others have no qualms about dropping F-bombs. Still, the book is paced just right to keep you interested all the way through.

Wright's theology is one not of sin needing propitiation and atonement, but of disunity needing reunification. Several of his "discussion questions" are just pointed attempts to reframe a passage and explain why Romans isn't so much a book about our sin and Christ's atonement for it (as one might understand by reading the first 6 or so chapters and taking them to actually mean what they say), but is instead a book about how God just wants to be together with us and wants us all to be together with each other.

This is a shallow Unitarianism, not Biblical truth, and the way Wright tries to get the reader to his same conclusion is through pretty obvious linguistic gymnastics, constantly nudging that "you might think the passage means this, but it actually means this other thing!"

Wright's theology is one not of sin needing propitiation and atonement, but of disunity needing reunification. Several of his "discussion questions" are just pointed attempts to reframe a passage and explain why Romans isn't so much a book about our sin and Christ's atonement for it (as one might understand by reading the first 6 or so chapters and taking them to actually mean what they say), but is instead a book about how God just wants to be together with us and wants us all to be together with each other.

This is a shallow Unitarianism, not Biblical truth, and the way Wright tries to get the reader to his same conclusion is through pretty obvious linguistic gymnastics, constantly nudging that "you might think the passage means this, but it actually means this other thing!"

The central plot point of this fiction novel is the rape of a small child, described in grotesque detail, and constantly dragged out again and again for extra shock value.

That should tell you everything you need to know about this book. Had my college English professor not had a sick mind, I probably never would've been subjected to it.