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karen's Reviews > Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake
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eh.
bore-x and crake. this is a very all right book. i was just unwowed by it. initially, i liked the pacing of the book, and the way the story was spooling out between the present and past, doling its secrets out in dribs and drabs. but the characters just seemed so flimsy, and i was ultimately left with more questions than explanations. and the cutesy futuristic products and consumer culture bits are best left in the hands of a george saunders, not the queen of the long pen. however - and this maybe counts as a spoiler, but its just a minor plot point that is revealed somewhere in the middle and its not like - "oh - she has a dick!" or "they were dead the whole time", so i say it does not qualify. but riding the train to school today, i understood the potential value for pills given to the public that they would think were to improve their sex lives but were secretly sterilizing them. the thirty or so teenagers that plowed into the train screaming and carousing who then decided that the crowded subway was the best place to get into a full-on hair pulling bitchslap fight cannot be allowed to breed. please give us those pills, geneticists... i will bake you a delicious raspberry pie.
bore-x and crake. this is a very all right book. i was just unwowed by it. initially, i liked the pacing of the book, and the way the story was spooling out between the present and past, doling its secrets out in dribs and drabs. but the characters just seemed so flimsy, and i was ultimately left with more questions than explanations. and the cutesy futuristic products and consumer culture bits are best left in the hands of a george saunders, not the queen of the long pen. however - and this maybe counts as a spoiler, but its just a minor plot point that is revealed somewhere in the middle and its not like - "oh - she has a dick!" or "they were dead the whole time", so i say it does not qualify. but riding the train to school today, i understood the potential value for pills given to the public that they would think were to improve their sex lives but were secretly sterilizing them. the thirty or so teenagers that plowed into the train screaming and carousing who then decided that the crowded subway was the best place to get into a full-on hair pulling bitchslap fight cannot be allowed to breed. please give us those pills, geneticists... i will bake you a delicious raspberry pie.
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Finished Reading
October 19, 2009
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Stephen
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Oct 22, 2009 03:39PM
Eh? That's it? Nothing more?
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that is all i can muster.
I know a couple of geneticists and I know for a fact that they work for delicious raspberry pie.
okay - i will get a list going for you. number one - that pill. number two - red pandas with wings, number three - a tail for me please. number four - some sort of mammal that has cheese already inside of them for fancier parties... let me think a little more on this.
It's too late, many of them have already reproduced!
maybe the pill can go back in time.
I kind of like the phrase "raspberry pie eugenicist". Do you think it's at all like a champagne socialist?
Manny wrote: "I kind of like the phrase "raspberry pie eugenicist". Do you think it's at all like a champagne socialist?"I would imagine that "raspberry pie eugenicists" would adore champagne socialism. What is champagne socialism?
i think the two would definitely mingle at a party.
I would mingle with anyone at a champagne party.
Karen, if we ever happen to meet up, let's throw a champagne and raspberry pie party. Obligatory topics of conversation, socialism and eugenics. No one who comes will ever speak to each other again. It'll be fantastic!
This review was much better than the book.
ha! take that, atwood!
I was on a similar train in Toronto yesterday. 20 guys took to running between cars at each station, piling in, jostling everyone in the unfilled cars yelling and chest-thumping one another for nearly the entire subway line (whatta lameass game!).If Atwood was in another car, she'd approve of these pills. I think I do now.
i'm sure they were american tourists.
Nah, the film festival was last week. These teens were Canadian because they seemed too laidback in their tomfoolery. American teens make a ruckus with purpose.
Or maybe because I'm never around teens anymore, I assume there is a difference. Kids today.
ahhhh - unpurposed ruckus. yes, that is canada all over...
I loved this book but do avaoid its sequel, The Year of the Flood. Boring. Tied for the worst Atwood I've read,with Bodily harm.
yeah, there are definitely other atwoods i would pick up before the sequel to this one, but thanks for the reminder!
i object most strongly to all this canada bashing!!! i thought you liked canada! just kidding...i've read all three of her sf series and they are all relatively boring. have you read The Blind Assassin? it's one of her best books, according to me, and won the booker prize as well. and fuck the long pen!
not yet. but i have read some others, and i liked cat's eye the best.
how did this review resurface, by the way? i obviously missed it first time around.
dunno - i didn't float it or anything
oh well...you got at least one more vote anyway!
that pleases me, thank you!
do you know that, not counting stephen, you are about 50,000 votes ahead of the next in line, and this year you have double the votes of the next person, so you are actually gaining all the time, so your status as queen of goodreads seems pretty safe to me.did you ever have any reviews deleted? i'm personally getting tired of all the sniping about this on here. it's still a great site as far as i'm concerned.
not that i know of, but sometimes they don't tell you, and it's just an oopsie. i know i lost a bunch a few years back, during a different goodreads shuffle when they were re-evaluating what counted as a book, but i don't think i have had any deleted due to content.
I had your exact feeling regarding the plot. I was reading it during a weekend with friends who'd already read it, and midway through, I thought, this is so predictable, it can't be all there is. I had the theory that Jimmy and Crake were actually the same person a la fight club, and he had a psychotic break after killing the human race. I told my friends my theory and they shook their heads sadly. No, nothing that interesting happens, sorry!
hahah that would have been fun!
First time I've disagreed with you! I thought this book was amazing.
i was sad i didn't like it. i would be willing to give it a second shot so i could read the other two books in the cycle. maybe i was just having a bad reading day...
Loved the strawberry pie
karen wrote: "i was sad i didn't like it. i would be willing to give it a second shot so i could read the other two books in the cycle..."Tricky, because I don't think I'm alone in preferring the first two (i.e. including this) to the third, which didn't really add much. However, the second, Year of the Flood, is told in a very different way to Oryx, and because it's a parallel story, I don't think it matters which order you read them. So you could save a reread of Oryx until you've decided whether or not you like Year of the Flood.
I think this is the first time I have disagreed with you on something! I freakin loved this book.
it's a shame. (for me, i mean) by not loving this i feel like it disqualified me from reading the next two in the cycle, although i'm told this isn't necessarily the case, but i read this so long ago i'd have to reread it if i wanted to give the others a shot and what if i didn't like it again? you see the horrible position i am in; being wrong in my opinion on this one has created a slippery slope for myself.
Well honestly I thought the third book was pretty mediocre, a sad ending to what was one of my favorite trilogies...but the 2nd one I thought was just as great as O&C, if not greater! I loved TYOTF, and I thought it was actually really different from O&C...you may have even liked it if you thought O&C was boring. TYOTF was def more...active. More characters, more stuff going on, etc. Atwood may have redeemed herself had you kept reading! But I feel your pain. So much to read, you're probably better off just putting this on the maybe-one-day-if-I-have-nothing-to-read-pile. (Pfff. Yah. Like that'll ever happen;)But
it might have just been a case of too many similarish books read at one time - i was going through a heavy post-apoc phase, so i might have just overdone it. but if there IS a real-life apocalypse, and no more books are being printed because zombies or plague, i will definitely need to start rereading things. or maybe not. i do have quite a lot of books
Haha this review and some of the comments are so spot on. I have come off reading the RedRising series (amazing) and now I am 56% of the way through this and I have to quit now because it is becoming a real chore to read. Lonnnnnng teasers with no reward, the poorly named hybrid animals, and a feeling it is just going no where.... so I'm moving on to a better read.
i'm glad it's not just me. someday i will return to this, and make my way through the series, because i do like atwood normally, but i'm not in any hurry.
I’m 3/4 of the way through this and I totally agree with you. I was just thinking why do so many people love this book. I’m reluctantly plodding through it hoping for something exciting to happen and nothing ever does.
Agreed this was a total bore
glad i quit with this one
very good review, spot on.
