Lars Spuybroek

Just Not a Writer

Revisado: 06-30-20

It's really incredibly badly written. Gandalf's and Aragorn's dialogues are stunningly bombastic, and redundant--all the time saying things, then adding they said that before. Any good editor would have crossed out two-thirds of the text--Tolkien might have had imagination, but he did not have a clue of how to leave it to the reader. Writing is actually an art.

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Oh no!

Revisado: 06-30-20

Really. No. This is what you get when an author wants to be a Meaningful Writer. Or when a Brit wants to be French, Modern and Existentialist. The 60s sex, the Telly-Savalas-like Trickster, the un-enchanted island, the cringing references to Jung and Sartre, the ultraboring things-aren't-what-they-seem paradigm of postmodernism, the gods absolutely deprived of any charm, the brutality of the protagonist, the overall adolescence--it makes the whole thing simply unbearable. I guess this was quite the thing in 1966, but in 2020 it has completely faded. Great reading though by the narrator--what a pity.

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A book about books

Revisado: 05-28-20

Sure, it's a book about magic, but above all it's about books, how they are read, kept in libraries, how they're linked to other books (via notes), discussed and fought over in theories, and tested in practices. The fact that the magic does not play out in a world of maidens, knights and dragons, but at the beginning of the 19th century, offers Clarke the perfect constraints to have the magic play the role of twisting realities and identities. To have the last and only copy of the most crucial book exist in tattooed form on the skin of a fake magician is just a stunningly marvelous invention.

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Look, this is Borges

Revisado: 05-27-20

Borges is fantastic, in many ways. Truly superb writing and thinking--but why have it read by a narrator who can't pronounce the words? Narrators should read the book in advance, make notes and find out how to pronounce the foreign names and words, or else it becomes a travesty. Audible should set standards of how to approach such a task, instead of just putting somebody in front of a microphone. I mean, we're speaking of one of the greatest authors ever.

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Great, but ...

Revisado: 05-27-20

Tartt's first book is great; great characters, great plot, very well written, but... when you make use of original German, Latin and Greek you have to be able to pronounce it. Then, her impersonation of Bunny is so ridiculous you can't care less when he's murdered.

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Not as good as it seemed

Revisado: 05-19-20

It starts out alright, mixing figures of the first psychedelic wave with philosophers like William James and Henri Bergson. Then, with Pollan's own experiences described in the fourth chapter the book becomes cheeky: three meager trips, and that compared to the brave work of the towering characters described in the first three chapters--for a real study Pollan should have done dozens. Suddenly, the whole thing turns into a mainstream and suburban exercise, lacking speculation and real curiosity. Things turns for the worse with the chapters on neuroscience. Pollan starts to make all the mistakes that William James warned us for in the early pages of Varieties of Religious Experience: do not reduce these experiences back to "medical materialism". Better read all the classics on psychedelics or read Oliver Sacks's fabulous chapter "Altered States" in his Hallucinations!

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