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j_e_n_n's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
shayamilner's review against another edition
Many of the passages are repetitive, over explain, and there’s more redundant reflection than actual events that take place.
timinbc's review against another edition
2.0
Meh.
Look for other stories about time travel and read them instead. Your chances of finding one better than this are good.
There are a few good ideas, and some good wordplay. But the characters aren't at all interesting, and not much happens.
That forces us into philosophy, and what we have here is mostly handwaving; worse, it's dull.
Summary: I wish I had used the time to read something else.
You might like it, I dunno, but I suggest you borrow a copy rather than buying it.
Look for other stories about time travel and read them instead. Your chances of finding one better than this are good.
There are a few good ideas, and some good wordplay. But the characters aren't at all interesting, and not much happens.
That forces us into philosophy, and what we have here is mostly handwaving; worse, it's dull.
Summary: I wish I had used the time to read something else.
You might like it, I dunno, but I suggest you borrow a copy rather than buying it.
peebee's review against another edition
3.0
Ok, more of an "I wish my relationship with my daddy was better" book than a scifi book, but he at least used all the math/science words right, and it was funny in parts.
grahamclements's review against another edition
2.0
Tried to be too clever. Fun ideas, but not much of a plot. More extensive review to come.
mitskacir's review against another edition
2.0
A gift from my cousin, read with my partner. Rating wise, I’d call this a 3 for good craft, a 2 for personal enjoyment, and my partner gave it a 4 for his enjoyment. I definitely liked the idea of exploring the past and memory through the conceit of time travel. But I had a hard time with the writing itself - it was long winded and repetitive and I’m not a fan of super meta storytelling. I see how the writing matched the message, so it’s not bad craftsmanship, it was just tiring to read and not to my personal tastes.
Minor spoilers - I was confused at the end how our protagonist got out of the “time loop” and found and forgave his father. Our protagonist went through the same time loop over and over again, examining the same memories every time, nothing changing, never gaining new info. But the last time he is able to get free. Talking with my partner, we decided this is how forgiveness is. Eventually you are the one that changes, even though nothing about the past has and no new revelations occur. I think this is an interesting and poignant arch of the book, and mainly I struggled it with execution.
Minor spoilers - I was confused at the end how our protagonist got out of the “time loop” and found and forgave his father. Our protagonist went through the same time loop over and over again, examining the same memories every time, nothing changing, never gaining new info. But the last time he is able to get free. Talking with my partner, we decided this is how forgiveness is. Eventually you are the one that changes, even though nothing about the past has and no new revelations occur. I think this is an interesting and poignant arch of the book, and mainly I struggled it with execution.
daumari's review against another edition
4.0
i uh, kind of accidentally didn't read books at all in June (will attribute that to doom scrolling mostly), so it took 47 days to finish.
Still thinking about this one- 3.5/5 rounding up to 4. It feels a little like Kazuo Ishiguro's [b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353048590l/6334._SY75_.jpg|1499998] in that the book is technically SF/F genre but is mostly very literary pondering. NLMG at least has the interactions of Kathy and her friends; here, fictionalized Charles Yu mostly lives a solitary life as a time-machine repair technician, with a $3 million dollar AI and a reconned dog as companions. Time travel is a construct for fictional(?) Yu to resolve father-son issues in a meta narrative where the dad might be literally stuck in a minute in the past.
I'm still within the half hour of finishing it so I don't have any elegantly strung-together thoughts on what my overall thoughts are, but as is habit I'm looking at other reviews and I feel like some readers were expecting a more, well, genre action-driven narrative instead of a thoughtful trip through the nature of our narrative reality.
Still thinking about this one- 3.5/5 rounding up to 4. It feels a little like Kazuo Ishiguro's [b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353048590l/6334._SY75_.jpg|1499998] in that the book is technically SF/F genre but is mostly very literary pondering. NLMG at least has the interactions of Kathy and her friends; here, fictionalized Charles Yu mostly lives a solitary life as a time-machine repair technician, with a $3 million dollar AI and a reconned dog as companions. Time travel is a construct for fictional(?) Yu to resolve father-son issues in a meta narrative where the dad might be literally stuck in a minute in the past.
I'm still within the half hour of finishing it so I don't have any elegantly strung-together thoughts on what my overall thoughts are, but as is habit I'm looking at other reviews and I feel like some readers were expecting a more, well, genre action-driven narrative instead of a thoughtful trip through the nature of our narrative reality.
bhnmt61's review against another edition
5.0
I. Well, first of all, it’s a fun read, even though there are lots of words, sometimes piles of them, which is not usually my thing. There is a story running through the piles of words, about a young man whose father was brilliant but not brilliant and successful, and both father and son get a little lost trying to figure this out. There is a time machine. It’s funny, moving, deeply sad, but also hopeful. If it isn’t all the way to mind-blowing, there are at least a couple of wow moments. So, yeah. Read it. That is the tl;dr version.
II. A personally meaningful moment: The main character finds himself in a temple of immense quiet and peace. The scene ends up taking off in a different direction, as scenes in this book often do, but at first, the overwhelming silence of the place calms his mind. “My thoughts, normally insistent, urgent, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency, those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again...”* Which made me think, what is my one thought, the thought that drives all my insecurities and neuroses, my own individual constant state of near-panic?
III. But there is also the fact that this book takes its place in a long line of books with a father-son connection at its heart, and all the love and pride and guilt and disappointment that the father-son axis always involves: Hamlet, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Faulkner, Hemingway, Jesus the only Son of God the Father, even The Corrections if you want to read it that way, and any number of hard-boiled PIs or flinty-eyed loners whose absent father is the key to understanding them.
IV. It’s an entire genre** that makes it sound like the tension and connection between father and son, between men, is the most important, real bond there is. Sure, there are women in these stories, and sometimes they become fully rounded characters (usually they don’t), but they are always off to the side. They provide succor or loyalty or maybe just color in a grim narrative, or they are the distraction, the siren or the mother or needy wife, who holds the man back, keeps him from accomplishing what he was “meant” to do. In this book, the main female character is a sidekick, and she's a computer program. The real story, what’s important in these novels, is the reckoning between the son and the father (or father figure). The legacy of the father, to be taken up or not by the son, the bond between them to be healed or broken—it’s always about the men. When I was in high school we were taught to see these characters as universal, characters women could relate to because there are basic human elements in every story (and it’s true, see #2 above). But somehow the reverse was never true. Men were never supposed to read Jane Eyre to find the universal elements of her story, or for god’s sake not Pride and Prejudice. We were all supposed to understand that men had more important things to do than read so-called women’s fiction. Thank the blessed universe, I read feminist literary criticism in college and had the blinders taken off.
V. Of course any individual father-and-son pair has a story to tell, and it has universal elements. Charles Yu has every right to write a novel that explores this, and we all understand that even though the main character is named Charles Yu, he both is and is not the author himself, standing in for every one of us with brilliant, difficult fathers. But Yu never really gets past the centrality of the father/son story. There is a subtle but important difference between a father/son story told in isolation, and a father/son story told in full awareness that there are other equally important stories going on all around, the stories of wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and even other sons with different stories. How to Live is firmly of the former. Yu even egregiously refers to "man" in the universal sense a couple of times toward the end (in situations where he might have said human or person), an almost astonishing gaffe for a 21st century novel. If you’d asked him at the time, he probably would have protested—but this is my story, and I am inescapably male. I am not apologetic. But I think I finally get why KIDS TODAY are not just trying to make the world safe for trans and queer people (which most of us have been on board with all along), but to actually, fundamentally dismantle the whole gender binary. Because how else are we going to undo this patriarchal knot of our own making?
VI. If I could have read this book on its own, without knowing anything about feminism or the long line of male-centric novels in the western canon, I would have been able to love it on its own for what it accomplishes—which is, honestly, a lot. But I do know about feminism, and I have read those books, so I have to enjoy How to Live Safely in spite of that. Do better, Charles Yu. (And maybe he has, this is the only book of his I’ve read and it was published in 2010.) Five stars, because it’s startlingly smart, but if I were a vindictive giver-of-ratings, it would be three.
* Edited for length
** the term “genre” is used with all the intentional irony I can muster
II. A personally meaningful moment: The main character finds himself in a temple of immense quiet and peace. The scene ends up taking off in a different direction, as scenes in this book often do, but at first, the overwhelming silence of the place calms his mind. “My thoughts, normally insistent, urgent, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency, those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again...”* Which made me think, what is my one thought, the thought that drives all my insecurities and neuroses, my own individual constant state of near-panic?
III. But there is also the fact that this book takes its place in a long line of books with a father-son connection at its heart, and all the love and pride and guilt and disappointment that the father-son axis always involves: Hamlet, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Faulkner, Hemingway, Jesus the only Son of God the Father, even The Corrections if you want to read it that way, and any number of hard-boiled PIs or flinty-eyed loners whose absent father is the key to understanding them.
IV. It’s an entire genre** that makes it sound like the tension and connection between father and son, between men, is the most important, real bond there is. Sure, there are women in these stories, and sometimes they become fully rounded characters (usually they don’t), but they are always off to the side. They provide succor or loyalty or maybe just color in a grim narrative, or they are the distraction, the siren or the mother or needy wife, who holds the man back, keeps him from accomplishing what he was “meant” to do. In this book, the main female character is a sidekick, and she's a computer program. The real story, what’s important in these novels, is the reckoning between the son and the father (or father figure). The legacy of the father, to be taken up or not by the son, the bond between them to be healed or broken—it’s always about the men. When I was in high school we were taught to see these characters as universal, characters women could relate to because there are basic human elements in every story (and it’s true, see #2 above). But somehow the reverse was never true. Men were never supposed to read Jane Eyre to find the universal elements of her story, or for god’s sake not Pride and Prejudice. We were all supposed to understand that men had more important things to do than read so-called women’s fiction. Thank the blessed universe, I read feminist literary criticism in college and had the blinders taken off.
V. Of course any individual father-and-son pair has a story to tell, and it has universal elements. Charles Yu has every right to write a novel that explores this, and we all understand that even though the main character is named Charles Yu, he both is and is not the author himself, standing in for every one of us with brilliant, difficult fathers. But Yu never really gets past the centrality of the father/son story. There is a subtle but important difference between a father/son story told in isolation, and a father/son story told in full awareness that there are other equally important stories going on all around, the stories of wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and even other sons with different stories. How to Live is firmly of the former. Yu even egregiously refers to "man" in the universal sense a couple of times toward the end (in situations where he might have said human or person), an almost astonishing gaffe for a 21st century novel. If you’d asked him at the time, he probably would have protested—but this is my story, and I am inescapably male. I am not apologetic. But I think I finally get why KIDS TODAY are not just trying to make the world safe for trans and queer people (which most of us have been on board with all along), but to actually, fundamentally dismantle the whole gender binary. Because how else are we going to undo this patriarchal knot of our own making?
VI. If I could have read this book on its own, without knowing anything about feminism or the long line of male-centric novels in the western canon, I would have been able to love it on its own for what it accomplishes—which is, honestly, a lot. But I do know about feminism, and I have read those books, so I have to enjoy How to Live Safely in spite of that. Do better, Charles Yu. (And maybe he has, this is the only book of his I’ve read and it was published in 2010.) Five stars, because it’s startlingly smart, but if I were a vindictive giver-of-ratings, it would be three.
* Edited for length
** the term “genre” is used with all the intentional irony I can muster
sunwatersalt's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
loganvw's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
[digital] A beautiful and poignant book which took some time getting off the ground but won me over by the end.