I like this book. I have no idea where I found this book, but I would guess someone recommended it to me via BookRiot on some new release book list, because I've given up reading the classics for the moment, and going with whatever post-apocalyptic universe some author wants to provide.

And I got it.

The crazy part of this book was its setting in Edinburgh. I was in Edinburgh last month! I really like Edinburgh, and I keep hoping to find Troggie, three years later.

Anyway, it's lots of fun to be able to imagine the exact place where parts of the book are happening, even the part where "Yes, there were three strip clubs on the corner" and I stayed in a hotel all of 40 meters from that corner.

The story, oh boy, the story is great. The transformation of Ed, the main character, from the soft, modern man to the self-sufficient one at the end is the epitome of the hero's journey.

I enjoyed the book. I recommend it, it is worth reading if you like post-apocalyptic survival tales.

The line between any two points in your life is liable to be strange and unfathomable, a tangle of chance and tedium. But some points seem to have clearer connections, even ones that are far from each other, as if they have a direct line that bypasses the normal run of time.
Page: 1

I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.
Page: 2

Don’t get me wrong—I loved my wife and I loved my kids, but that doesn’t mean to say I had to be happy about it.
Page: 5

We’re idiots. Creatures of denial who have learned not to be afraid of our closets. We need to see the monster in the room before we scream. The monster
Page: 8

I had made it very clear to Beth, very early in the proceedings, that I was the one who had to get up for work in the morning, that I was the one who needed my sleep, so no, I would most certainly not be helping with night feeds. I don’t think I’m the first man to have ever pulled this one. It’s a common enough shirk, one that conveniently ignores what work actually means for most men—i.e., comfy seats, tea and coffee,
Page: 10

cookies, nice food, adult conversation, the occasional pretty girl to ogle, the Internet, sealed toilet cubicles where you can catch a few winks without anyone noticing. Work. Not like being at home breastfeeding a newborn and entertaining a two-year-old all day.
Page: 10

I made it easy on myself, very easy. And that made it hard on Beth.
Page: 12

I have to keep telling myself not to look back so much. I’ll always regret not being a better father, a better husband, but I have to look forward or else I won’t get to the place I’m going, and I need beyond everything else to get there. The past is a foreign country, someone once said. They do things differently there. My past—everyone’s past—is now a different planet. It’s so different it almost makes no sense to remember it.
Page: 12

You want to know how long it takes for the fabric of society to break down? I’ll tell you. The same time it takes to kick a door down.
Page: 30

Ask anyone who has been in a crowd that becomes too strong, where bodies begin to crush you. Is your first instinct to lift others up, or to trample them down? That beast inside you, the one you think is tethered tightly to the post, the one you’ve tamed with art, love, prayer, meditation: it’s barely muzzled. The knot is weak. The post is brittle. All it takes is two words and a siren to cut it loose.
Page: 30

“Swap,” said Beth. She released Alice from her arms and lay her down against the damp pillow. We both stretched our numb legs as we stood up to change places. I passed Arthur across, and Beth released her right breast for him to suckle.
Page: 47

Doesn’t even know how his own house works… I sat back on the upturned box and switched off the flashlight. I watched the flame of the candle flicker in a breeze that could be either poisoning us or keeping us alive. I stared at a pipe that held either our salvation or our doom.
Page: 55

The world had designed me to be something. I was supposed to be a survival mechanism, a series of devices and instincts built, tested, and improved upon over billions of years. I was a sculpture of hydrogen, evolution’s cutting edge, a vessel of will, a self-adjusting, self-aware machine of infinite resource and potential. That was what the world had designed me to be. A survivor. A human being. A man.
Page: 55

To me, running was just showing off, a way for self-obsessed pricks to show how much more focused, disciplined, and healthy they were than you. How much more average they were than you—the subaverage gibbon who watched from a park bench with its prepacked lunch. Gyms were just as bad, except in gyms you had it coming at you from all angles: weight lifters out-lifting one another, cross-trainers quietly tapping up their speeds to match their neighbor’s, treadmillers pounding their feet to some nauseating soundtrack of their own puffed-up lives. Entire, windowless rooms crammed full of sweaty, unashamed, Lycra-clad peacockery.
Page: 64

Then I filled another, and another, before the flow finally began to stop, and I fell to my knees, sobbing in either relief or grief. I don’t know to this day which. There’s a fair chance I had been hoping for gas.
Page: 70

Behind us were the remains of the city center. Princes Street, Rose Street, George Street, Thistle Street, Queen Street, all now just black stumps and rubble. Cathedrals, churches, tenements, and houses, all gone.
Page: 73

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably in a better time and place than the one I’m in now. You probably didn’t witness the extent of the devastation. You probably don’t know how it feels to see that everything in your world has suddenly stopped, died, or vanished.
Page: 73

My own boundary was the size and shape of a small, stinking cellar for a little over two weeks after the strike.
Page: 74

Bryce laid down his glass. “Oh, I get it. I’m a big man, so I must be unfit?” “No, wait, that’s not what I…” He prodded one of his immense fingers in my direction. “I walk everywhere, sunshine. And I do a lot of shaggin’. What about you?”
Page: 114

“Knew it. Parents, you’re all the same. You’re all ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that’ or ‘I can’t get my arse off the sofa; I’m tired’ or ‘My kids are so fuckin’ demanding, I don’t have time for anything else.’ Fuckin’ pathetic, the lot of youse. You chose to have the wee bastards.” He jabbed another finger at me and sat back in his seat. “You take your medicine!”
Page: 115

This, combined with a road that disappeared into the horizon, always made me think of driving through the midwestern states of America, despite the fact that I had never been.
Page: 156

“What about your wife?” I said.

“Died a few years back,” said Harvey.

“I’m sorry,” I said with that useless spasm we give to another’s grief.
Page: 158

“You don’t know what protection means,” she said. “You don’t know what not having protection means. You don’t know how important that is. That simple thing: to look after someone. To put yourself in front of someone. To say you’ll die for them and mean it. You don’t know what that means because all you do is look after yourself.”
Page: 161

Nothing came close to what Gloria had been through, so why had we found them so hard? Why was the process of bringing life into the world, even in a bubble of middle-class comfort, medicine, and relative safety, so fraught? Why did it take so much emotion? Why did this process keep perpetuating itself, generation after generation going through the same thing, time after time? Why did life bother?
Page: 185

I just felt the same mixture of confusion and inability to cope as always, only this time compressed into microseconds.
Page: 202

But it wasn’t an escape. It wasn’t a return to a simpler life; it was a version of a simpler life. A version that replaced cholera, dysentery, freezing winters, lost harvests, frequent stillbirths, domestic violence, incest with underfloor heating, solar panels, and plump trust funds. It was just another decoration: wallpaper, not a return. Perhaps I’m being unkind or just jealous. But
Page: 207

One day, two other boys and I found a pornographic magazine hidden in the seat. As young boys, there was no other option available to us but to read it.
Page: 217

I remember running, running everywhere without thought. And yet I don’t remember actually running. Not the effort of it. I remember lightness. I remember speed. I remember the earth seeming to bounce beneath me as if it were a giant balloon I could push away with my bare feet. I don’t remember stiff, slow limbs or tight lungs or the feeling of concrete pounding through my bones.
Page: 219

“Striding on,” he said. “You’re trying to pull the road under you, trying to turn the earth with your heels.”
Page: 221

Yeah. This is how I run. Dammit.

“The planet’s much bigger than you, son,” he said. “It’s not going to work.”
Page: 221

“Think of it this way: you’re turning a flat road into an uphill climb. You should be turning it into a descent. Look at my feet. They never go past my waist. They only take little steps. It’s like I’m falling—see, that’s all running is, controlled falling.”
Page: 221

“Losing dogs,” he said. “Hardest fuckin’ thing. My grandad died when I was twelve. I remember Mum telling me when I got in from school, and she might as well have been telling me what was for dinner. I didn’t give a shit, fuckin’ alcoholic old prick. Our dog died a year later, and I cried for a week. It’s hard.” He punched his chest. “Harder than losing a person.”
Page: 227

“We can’t run that far in that time, or I can’t at any rate. I’m just not capable.” He fixed me with his bright blue eyes.

“Ed,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re capable of.”
Page: 232

I felt an odd respite, cocooned from the road ahead, as if there were no more distance to go, that the journey itself was just in this small bubble. There was no longer any great expanse to endure.
Page: 241

I said nothing. Caught my breath. Carried on.
Page: 251

“Nothing. It’s all this nonsense going around your noggin. All the doom and the gloom and the guilt and woe. All the stuff that doesn’t really exist. That’s what brings you down.”
Page: 253

“I know what it’s like to miss someone, mate,” he said. “Burns you up inside. Makes you think bad things, feel bad things—guilt, fear, despair—like you could have done more or shouldn’t have done anything.”
Page: 253

“Keep talking,” he said, winking. “And keep running. Keeps the mind away from the dark places."
Page: 255

I wish.

Sometimes I’d listen to the noise my feet made on the road and the noise my breathing made on top of it, and I’d make a word out of it, sing it all day. Becomes a bit like a mantra, very soothing, hypnotic.
Page: 255

“Clear your mind and things start working out for you,” he said. “You can’t run five hundred miles just by clearing your mind,” I spat. Harvey shrugged. “You can’t do it without it either.”
Page: 256

But don’t get into the habit of letting people tell you what to believe, son. That’ll get you into all sorts of strife. Hey, Ed?”
Page: 257

Harvey told me that the resistance I faced wasn’t something I could ever beat. The best I could hope for was to learn how to fight it daily, to parry and lunge and keep it at bay by learning about how it worked. Some days it would win, others it would lose.
Page: 258

I should learn not just how to fight it, he told me, but, like every enemy, how to love it.
Page: 259

“Entropy,” he said. “Entropy and decay. Everything turns to dust. Everything is constantly trying to return to the dust from which it came.” He frowned and picked up his tumbler. His face twisted into an attempt at a smile. “So why all the struggle?” he said.
Page: 264

I could taste it immediately, as if a door I’d never seen had been flung open onto a long, wide landscape of forest, earth, and ocean, tall stone pillars clawed with brine and weed, cold starry skies, ancient, candlelit rooms, deep eyes, short lives, and whispered promises. I felt as if somebody had filled my head with a thousand years of secret, guarded memories.
Page: 275

We think that language binds us, keeps us close, but sometimes I wonder how far apart we really are. We can make a million assumptions from the movement of an old man’s hand. Most of them are probably incorrect. All we have to go on is our own skewed window on the world. We’re like hermits living in the attics of big houses on lonely hills, watching one another with broken telescopes.
Page: 288

“Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish, and short out of life.”
Page: 292

“I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot.
Page: 292

We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time.
Page: 293

Other people’s problems, even those of your friends, are a great and terrible distraction from your own.
Page: 296

The living would run through the dust of the dead, just as they always had done.
Page: 301

Hope became my drug.
Page: 303

“I heard this story once,” she said, zipping up her jacket and burrowing her hands into her pockets. “About how the future would turn out. The future back then, you know, not the future now. All the people who know how things work, the people with degrees who can make computers and toasters and that, they’d all live on the hills behind electric fences. Everyone else would live and die in shit.” She turned to us. “They wouldn’t need us anymore, you see. Wouldn’t need our money.”
Page: 318

“Didn’t think I was capable of it,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “Turns out you don’t have a clue what you’re capable of. Not a clue.”
Page: 345

I felt all that terrible love flood through me, but it was like an undercurrent to something else. Something…something old. Something that had been around too long. It was like…when those big, wet, unseeing eyes found mine and locked on for a second, it felt like something was saying, Is this it? Again? We’re doing this again, are we? Another child? Another life? Another turn of the wheel? Another struggle?”
Page: 364

Apathy arrives very quickly.
Page: 377

I stared into the fire and out at the others burning around the demolished town and thought about gravity, about how it holds everything, even things with no weight, like thoughts, dreams, love. Even flames struggle to escape it. Everything is weighed down. Everything is pushed down toward the sea. Everything is kept at bay.
Page: 378

Thoughts became intangible and disconnected. They were like explosions of ash. Each one that arrived lasted only moments before it fell away and disintegrated, as if nothing supported it, nothing held it together.
Page: 380

I know now it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.
Page: 389

It’s hard being a human. Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we’re doing, and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we’re just lucky. Our lives are filled with the humdrum: dust and noise with no meaning. And yet they contain moments that seem to mean something, something we can’t describe but want to. Those moments leave holes we want to fill. We want to name them, paint them, teach
Page: 389

We want God. We want this life to end, for the curtain to go up and a kind, loving face to smile down on us, a warm voice to call us through and explain everything to us. The hole is everything we don’t know and everything we suspect, and we need a truth to fill it.
Page: 389

Pain from the present. Pain from the past. Pain in the future. Suffering and regret with little hope to alleviate either of them.
Page: 390

“Do you know why people tell stories, Ed?” he said. He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t. He sniffed and went on. “Because the truth doesn’t really have any words of its own. They’re not enough, see? Stories work—good stories—because they make you feel something like how the truth would make you feel if you could hear it.” I closed my eyes, shivering a little at the
Page: 395

He stretched out his arm and laid a warm hand, full of goodness, onto my shoulder. I felt tears in my sick eyes at his touch. It disarmed me—not because I thought he was real, but because I knew the opposite. I was creating this. I was creating this thing of hope. It was already inside of me; it didn’t come from anywhere else.
Page: 397

How hard did this have to be? How hard to simply exist, to move, to twitch muscles, to think, hope, accept, move, love, and be loved.
Page: 398

“Anyway, just saying: I’ve seen a few things myself. I know how weird it can get. We’re not really supposed to be on our own, Ed, we’re not built for it. Spend too much time running away from reality and that’s exactly where you get.”
Page: 417

“When I was a boy my father told me that life was like being on a boat,” he said. “You can’t control the wind and you sure as hell can’t control the ocean. One day it’s calm and the next it’s a storm, and there’s nothing you can do about that. All you get is a tiller and a sail and the weather you find yourself in.”
Page: 417

“I think we like stories,” he said. “I think we like hearing that we’re just little boats lost at sea, all alone, fragile things at the mercy of some darkness we can’t fathom, but solid nonetheless—enclosed and separate. It makes sense to think of things being out there.”
Page: 418

“And things being in here. But just because it feels right, doesn’t make it true.”
Page: 418

“We’re all born screaming, Ed. The moment we pop out our throats open, and the same scream bursts out that always has. We see all the lights and faces and the shadows and the strange sounds, and we scream. Life screams, and we scream back at it. After a bit of time we learn to be quiet; we learn to muffle it. But life doesn’t stop. It just keeps screaming. All. The. Time.” He tapped his finger on the table three times and sat back. “I reckon it does you good to remind it that you can still scream back once in a while,” he said. “So that’s what I do. I wake up and tell the sun I’m still here. Still screaming.”
Page: 421

You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly.
Page: 434

That other beast inside you, the one you rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes five hundred miles of agony.
Page: 436

We never stay constant, no matter what we promise; the world has its way of pulling you about the way it wants.
Page: 446

What do you love most about writing? I spend a lot of my time thinking and daydreaming, so writing means I get to do this for a living. It’s also a way of exorcising fears and neuroses. If I didn’t write, my head would be full.
Page: 454

Okay, whatever you do, do not read this book. The writing of this book is so verbose, so desperately in need of an editor, so as to be nearly unreadable. Couple that with the location of the book, Silicon Valley, and the somewhat accurate portrayal of the places in Silicon Valley, of the stunningly stupid ideas that get funded, of the pervasive sense of entitlement, and of the vulgar pursuit of winning the IPO jackpot instead of actually building something meaningful, and you have a book that just screams crap.

Did I mention the verbosity?

Yeah, well the editing is worse. If you want to experience this book, listen to it on audiobook. At three times speed. Keep the pain as short as possible.

I was exporting some of the parts I thought might be worth quoting, and gave up. I just don't like this book. Moazam didn't either. I was on a road trip for 40 hours, I was a captive audience. Moazam wasn't. He couldn't finish it. Not recommended.

Upon it, an image of numerous foggy, craggy acres was rendered. “Do you recognize this terrain?” Dr. Phillips inquired. To the untrained eye, it might have been a region of the Scottish Highlands, or the maritime reaches of Oregon, or a temperate sector of Alaska.
Page 19

There, with plenty of smart, attractive women on hand, Mitchell’s like a kid in a candy store. A penniless, ravenous kid. One who can look all he wants, but that’s it. Or maybe “a meat-loving vegan at a cookout” maps better, because his hunger is principled, and self-imposed (and also, more primal than a grumpy sweet tooth). The thing is, Mitchell has essentially opted out of romance. It’s a long story.
Page 21

“Yes, they’ll say that,” Kuba agrees. “And they won’t be entirely wrong. Cynical. But not wrong. Because the tech itself could be used for practically anything, good or bad. It’s as value neutral as a smartphone. Or a computer.”
Page 27

But the biggest-paying advertiser, brand manager, and spin doctor will ultimately be us, the Phluttr user base. There are gold mines to extract from our desperate urge to be heard!
Page 31

You see, Fortune’s a bitch with a great sense of humor...
Page 37

Of course, all companies make hiring boo-boos. But when the true greats make them really early on, some real knuckleheads can get moronically rich. This effect produces plenty of accidental tech millionaires. Some accidental gazillionaires, too—but only a smattering of Pugwashes, and the man is rather famous. Some take his exquisite luck almost personally. Not merely those who worked far harder for far lesser bonanzai (although to be clear, those folks’re plenty pissed). But also those who are even richer still through their own godsends of timing, genetics, or happenstance, and have since fetishized a vision of the industry as an immaculate meritocracy. Those who fancy that they earned every dime of their tech fortunes through talent, toil, and daring (which is almost everyone who has one) regard any whiff of the lottery (Pugwash, for instance) as a PR liability.
Page 37

Because certain problems are completely resistant to increased rumination. But things are different for a diplomat who has spent years engaged in Russian-American relations. Not because he knows more facts and figures, because that stuff’s available to all of us via Google, now. But because his framework includes lots of intuition. Educated guesses. Vague rules of thumb that have just kind of worked over the years—that sort of thing.
Page 40

“Precisely. And by mastering Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology, it will likewise be functionally omnipotent! As such, it could preclude the creation of any subsequent ‘me-too’ Super AI as easily as a Harvard Trained Biochemist could stop a helpless bacterium from reproducing in a petri dish!”
Page 50

Grown-up that he is, Mitchell can get a bit homesick when the chips are down, the weather’s blandly OK-ish for the bazillionth day in a row, and he’s gone yet another month without meeting a single fellow hockey fan. Even a lot homesick.
Page 51

Just as you rarely see something that’s perfectly blue in nature, unadulterated joy seems to be rare in human minds. More likely, we’ll see nine or ten happy motes, with other things mixed in.
Page 55

Fear comes in lots of flavors, but they’re all a mix of sadness and surprise, often with a dash of anger. Another example is indignation. That’s lots of anger, and a bit of surprise, with some sadness mixed in. And also, some happiness. Which makes sense when you consider that some folks really seem
Page 55

to enjoy being offended!
Page 55

And if you tried to heed every photon, sound wave, and nerve ending that you can access at once, you wouldn’t really be aware of any of it.” “You’re saying I’d be functionally unconscious.” “Exactly! Which is why you’re not currently registering the color of the ninth cookbook from the far left of the fourth shelf over my shoulder. You’re perceiving it. But you’re not heeding it.
Page 58

When he wasn’t incredibly bummed (rare, but it also happened)! Or, unbelievably pissed off (rarer still, but also happened)! His psyche was all binge and no purge—hammering either the gas or the brakes at all times!!!
Page 93

Man, talk about how I react.

“Is that Phluttr’s release about… Norway, is it?” Mitchell guesses. He’s been meaning to look it up himself.

“Iceland,” Kuba says, holding out the computer.

“You realize you’re about to physically hand me a digital article,” Mitchell points out, “and how very odd that is. Are you sure you don’t just want to print it and fax it to me?”

“I want to see your reaction to this in person.
Page 114

This cracked me up.

This is book three of the Fionavar Tapestry. You really need to read the first two books in the series for this book to make any sense. That said, the three books are, even two decades after I read them the first time, still amazing.

I lost all my notes I had taken with this reading when my phone died. This loss saddens me a bit, but I'm sure I'll be able to rewrite this review within the next couple years, as I'll read the series again.

That said, this book is about trust. Except, you don't know it's about trust until you sit with the memory of the book, after you're done reading it. Kay's work does that: he doesn't tell you, he shows you. This style is why I love his writing so much.

I strongly recommend this series. I'll buy you a copy if you'd like.

[H]e was acutely aware that she was right—aware of how much his difficulties were caused by his own overdeveloped need for controlling things. Particularly himself.
Location 4910

“Would it have been so terrible,” Kim asked, not wisely, but she couldn’t hold the question back, “if you had just told him you loved him?”

Jennifer didn’t flinch, nor did she flare into anger again. “I did,” she said mildly, a hint of surprise in her voice. “I did let him know. Surely you can see that. I left him free to make his choice. I ... trusted him.”
Location 4979