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kit666's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 wish it had been longer
Initially I was gonna give it 3.5 but the ending bumped it down
Initially I was gonna give it 3.5 but the ending bumped it down
bloom's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
This book fools you right until the very end. Nothing is as it seems, and even though you expect twists to come, they’re nonetheless surprising and unexpected. It seems Lethem enjoys making readers distrust his characters and distrust themselves even more.
zivan's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
What if dreams effected reality?
Lethem takes us to a disjointed post psychotic break America.
Amnesia Moon, with its psychedelic dreams and social experiments, took me back to 1960s Sci-Fi.
Lethem takes us to a disjointed post psychotic break America.
Amnesia Moon, with its psychedelic dreams and social experiments, took me back to 1960s Sci-Fi.
leep's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
margaret_adams's review against another edition
Brief review written in the post-book fugue: Visiting Lethem's brain is an unnerving experience, and I liked being unnerved. Really good writing that was too real and not real enough at the same time. I guess that's kind of the point of speculative fiction. Especially when it's this dense with social commentary.
littoface's review against another edition
3.0
This book paints a very strange, surreal landscape of post-apocalyptic America. I loved the journey itself, and some parts had me twisting my mind. But the entire book I though I was being taken towards some sort of realization or explanation that never came, making it a bit of a disappointment.
anatomydetective's review
3.0
3.5 stars. This is the Lethem I enjoy, the surreal Lethem, not the nonfiction writing one. If Philip K Dick wrote [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573], it would have been something like this novel. Ultimately, it was an exploration of the process of identity formation, how our memories and our friends influence who we are and how we see ourselves.
seanmft's review against another edition
5.0
Amnesia Moon is a permanent chill up my spine.
PKD pioneered the language, Lethem learned to speak it. Just as you cannot read an English novel without first understanding the English language, so you cannot read Amnesia Moon without first understanding the language of PKD. If every dystopian world ever imagined by PKD is a single word, an atomic concept unto itself, then Amnesia Moon may be the first novel written entirely in such a language.
There is no science fiction future, no apocalypse, no alien invasion, no virtual reality. The reality of Amnesia Moon is our reality. The cards are shuffled round and round until the dynamics of the deck, the bare structural violence of society is all that remains clear. If you read this book and understand it, your world will be flipped inside out; The world you entered from will exist only as fiction, and the world around you will forever after be the world within the book..
PKD pioneered the language, Lethem learned to speak it. Just as you cannot read an English novel without first understanding the English language, so you cannot read Amnesia Moon without first understanding the language of PKD. If every dystopian world ever imagined by PKD is a single word, an atomic concept unto itself, then Amnesia Moon may be the first novel written entirely in such a language.
There is no science fiction future, no apocalypse, no alien invasion, no virtual reality. The reality of Amnesia Moon is our reality. The cards are shuffled round and round until the dynamics of the deck, the bare structural violence of society is all that remains clear. If you read this book and understand it, your world will be flipped inside out; The world you entered from will exist only as fiction, and the world around you will forever after be the world within the book..
edgeworth's review against another edition
3.0
Jonathon Lethem’s second novel, Amnesia Moon, centres around a man named Chaos living in the post-apocalyptic town of Hatfork, Wyoming. The bombs have fallen, society has crumbled, the sky is tinted with radioactivity and the mutated townsfolk are reliant on a tyrant named Kellogg for their food. Less than 30 pages into the book, after making him admit that he can’t remember how long ago the bombs fell or what he was doing when they did, Kellogg convinces Chaos that the truth of their world is “a little more complicated,” and Chaos sets out on a post-apocalyptic roadtrip to uncover the truth.
Lethem’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, felt like a neat concept for a short story that had been stretched out into a novel. Amnesia Moon feels more like a collection of short stories patched together to make an extremely surreal novel, and I was unsurprised to learn, after finishing it, that this is precisely the case. Chaos travels across an America devastated by wildly different apocalyptic events – everybody agrees something bad has happened, but it appears to be different everywhere he goes. The only unifying element is that each location is dominated by a “dreamer,” somebody forcing their version of reality upon others. The different locales are all drawn from various unpublished short stories Lethem had written.
This is a lazy way to write a novel, but I found Amnesia Moon readable enough, and it has a particularly good ending which suggests that one of the more disturbing realities is in fact the truth. It deals quite a lot with dreams and memories and amnesia, which I normally find tedious, but Lethem is a skillful enough writer that Amnesia Moon is rarely tiresome. I didn’t see much point to it, as a novel, but he’s a good writer and I’ll keep reading him. I look forward to when I get to the point in his career when he’s actually writing novels rather than short stories in disguise.
Lethem’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, felt like a neat concept for a short story that had been stretched out into a novel. Amnesia Moon feels more like a collection of short stories patched together to make an extremely surreal novel, and I was unsurprised to learn, after finishing it, that this is precisely the case. Chaos travels across an America devastated by wildly different apocalyptic events – everybody agrees something bad has happened, but it appears to be different everywhere he goes. The only unifying element is that each location is dominated by a “dreamer,” somebody forcing their version of reality upon others. The different locales are all drawn from various unpublished short stories Lethem had written.
This is a lazy way to write a novel, but I found Amnesia Moon readable enough, and it has a particularly good ending which suggests that one of the more disturbing realities is in fact the truth. It deals quite a lot with dreams and memories and amnesia, which I normally find tedious, but Lethem is a skillful enough writer that Amnesia Moon is rarely tiresome. I didn’t see much point to it, as a novel, but he’s a good writer and I’ll keep reading him. I look forward to when I get to the point in his career when he’s actually writing novels rather than short stories in disguise.
shaziareads's review against another edition
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5