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The dialogue is beautiful, perfect, written by a screen writer.

There is little to no novel craft - again, written bu a screen writer.

It goes on and on and on and on and on .... written bu an out of work screen writer.

of course, it was made into a film.

The good:
- Great idea - a message from the stars
- a major installement of Mr Lem's theme: we incorrectly think of aliens as psycologically human.
- enjoyable to read
- lots of other good ideas along the way


The not so good:
- too much philosophy, a too low philosophy:action ratios.
- to me, it just kinda finished. "Oh, that's the end?". Yes, our hero had understood something, but there was really much more.

This book reminded me a lot of Solaris. Where Solaris had chapters about the academic history of the study of the sea, this had philosophizing.

Another once-over of modern quantum ideas, built roughly around the double-split experiment. Lots of great ideas and filled in many of my (nearly infinite) gaps of knowledge.

However, despite having studied physics at university and having read (mostly 'listened to') many of these physics I got lost some times, which is OK. But worse, it somehow got kinda boring.

Three stars

Couldn't put up with it for long, but what I got was pretty dire. The rude bits would have to be pretty good - pretty rude - to make up for the rest.

Tight, concise, Sci fi with some character development. Oh, and a film. Never knocked my socks off, but better than a lot of the crap novels Im been reading

It's a well paced, tight story. Nothing to challenging . . . and he saves the world and gets the girl, so that's good.

Interesting, refreshing . . . but not groundbreaking.

Twice: as soon as I had finished I started again.

History just how I like it: important, familiar yet new, openly opinionated.

Virtually every sentence was interesting, but especially intriguing were:
Islam as a heresy, not as a new religion
Today's disbelief, rejection, as a heresy
The continuing anti-joy purity of successive heresies
The development of the Protestant split from a series of other problems - it was nearly impossible in isolation.

Good to great feeling of oppression from the small-town, small-brain, in your pocket mentality.

Good to great 'living it' representation of an Irish city under British occupation, living among the 'renouncers', the entirety of the population.

Passable narrative of a young woman's everyday life, including being half stalked by an unwanted admirer ...

... but it just got too boring, in the middle just started to waffle, really, so I gave up on it.

As dire as described in all of the 1-star reviews:
terribly written, young-adult fare
big strong alpha-male hero who can do everything,
clumsy clumsy clumsy
all characters are one-dimensional
* all scenes are one-dimensional.

I mean, it's just awful, and when the big strong green-eyed hero switched to recounting the bone-damagingly boring story of his ONE-TRUE-LOVE, then I just couldn't take it any more.

Shame on all those who give this pile of amateur crap 3 stars or more.

Would have been 3-stars, but it is well structured, paced and with a uniform tension that this other-wise perfectly-average, perfectly-good novel gets one more for novel-craft.

Somewhat interesting - but novels are supposed to be, so nothing special there. Some vaguely novel ideas - but that's what you'd expect from a novel, so nothing special there, either.

All in all, a well done, perfectly readable, otherwise average novel.

Unfortunately I'd seen the film, so it'd been kinda ruined. Would have been 4 or 5 stars otherwise.

It's tight, economical, clear and overall well done. Almost sculptured at times. Character development and small spiritual journeys. Unique. All good.

Has a weird 'morality', lots of sayings and religious references, interrogations about good and evil, and hell scenes for the wicked and, later, the innocent. This morality and the hints and reality of the bad being punished was interesting but didn't really add anything.

Yet another view into all pervasive, 360-degree surround sound American corruption. Detailed (enough) but easy going, interesting and informative. I especially enjoyed the aspects of the abstract technical becoming human: move my server to the east side of the room, the race for microseconds along fibre optic lines.

AND this was, I think, missed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial disaster.

Worth reading.

Clumsy examples shoe-horned into unimagniative platitudes about "being prepared" and "the firstest with the mostest" (well, no, but like that). A famous baseball player "forgetting his previous at-bat" as an example of not fighting conflicts using out-of-date concepts.

A book designed by a publisher to sell millions, so it was a success.

Just what I'd expect from Dylan
- A constantly interesting wander.
- Nicely jumbled
- the small and the big of the music industry
- well done and well crafted.

There's a good angle here of Bob being completely uninterested in the role he was cast in ("leader of a generation"). "All I was interested in was my wife and family" he says.