I have two words for this book: pretentious and asinine. It is the kind of story that you would assume the characters of this book would write, trying so hard to be educated and intelligent, when it just comes off as arrogant, long winded and boring. It reminds me of high school essays when a student wanted to sound smart and grown up. But to anyone older that was reading it, you came off as petulant and childish. That is the overall feeling from this book.
The narrator of the audio book was extremely off putting. The main character is a college aged guy from California, yet the narrator is a woman with a deep southern accent. This extreme and unnecessary contract was terrible and unneeded. Why not just get a male narrator with a nondescript accent as there are many out there. For this reason I could not listen to the audio book in large chunks, as I got quite annoyed.
I feel that the main male character, Richard, was very unbelievable in the fact that his through processes were so obviously feminine, so much so that at one point when I was listening I found myself thinking, ‘this must be written by a woman as she doesn’t understand that guys don’t think like that’. Then I remembered that is a female author and I was right.
Eight hours into the 25 hour book I realised that nothing much had happened in the book and I couldn’t even see where the story was headed. There were flickers in the narrative of a mystery that I wanted explored more, but it just kept dragging. And drag on it did forever. Over 25 hours of almost pure boredom. The story was not even close enough to being interesting to hold anyone’s attention for so long. I’ve found myself thinking that I could condense the entire book into about eight hours and nothing would be lost apart from the inane wonderings of characters and sections that do not lead anywhere in the story itself. Yes the references are dated, but the book is from the early 90s so that is to be expected. The memories of those long disused things were the sole best part of a book which didn’t really finish. It just gave a quick overview, of which the main character even states that is what he is doing, and then fizzles out.
An utter waste of time.
