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Up to part IV, the Slow Mutants. I’m enjoying the foreshadowing and Easter Eggs of various plot devices in upcoming books. The untold backstory of Susan Delgado and Mejis is an obvious necessity for Roland’s character development, but there are subtler details peppered throughout the pages, such as short references to how the Beams distort clouds or the coming loss of Roland’s fingers, that a first-time reader would miss.

Well-written for the most part. Some minor issues in use of tense but I blame the editor. It’s a good inside look at the culture within one of the worlds most influential companies and says a lot about how we measure success as a society. I think the perspective of an outsider from the corporate standpoint (UN background) and cultural standpoint (NZ citizen) is really important for seeing and understanding the harm that Facebook and other growth-at-all-costs enterprises have done to both their employees and customers. I laughed throughout the whole book at the absurdity of it all, then I took away a star because I remembered this is nonfiction and I have to actually do some mental and emotional labor in how I respond to the information within.

A horse stampede and a shark attack. I’m on page 11.

Decennial series re-read. Taking my time with it. Noticing a change in the way I relate to Roland, as less of a role model and more of a peer. I understand his sense of resignation for doing a thing because it needs to be done, and doing it well through habituation and because doing otherwise would mean not doing it at all.

Meh…not sure what the hype is about. A primitive tribal social structure on a future Martian colony? It doesn’t make sense and isn’t made clear in introductory chapters.

The story has a good cadence to it until about 2/3 through where it accelerates to getting its themes across at the expense of coherence. It feels like story was pushed toward publication before it was fully developed. Lots of background questions left unanswered. Poor fictional geography. These would have been permissible but too much psychological complexity is introduced towards the end to ignore them. It’s a decent quick read, but unclear what kind of story this is.

Not sure it meets my interests based on jacket copy, but pretty immediately available from local library so giving it a shot.