Gone Before Goodbye by by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I knew it will be a tough book to read because it had bad reviews. It wasn’t easy but wasn’t too bad either.

Alexander Belyaev has a story about a man who is essentially dead but his head is attached to a machine and is still talking. The head is waiting for a compatible headless body so it can be reattached. The story is called Professor Dowell’s Head. You would expect that Gone Before Goodbye is a crime mystery thriller, where we are trying to figure out what happened to the missing person (who’s gone). But it is, in reality, something similar to Belyaev’s stray head.

The book is very well written in most parts, and well translated too. The first 100 pages were excellent; then chaos set in. Maggie, a surgeon who lost her license, is offered redemption if she performs a difficult and illegal surgery. Once she accepts and sells her soul to the devil, people start flying around the globe like there’s no tomorrow and for no clear reason. Perhaps to show off how rich they are.

The resolution is like the head I mentioned. It’s sci-fi and ridiculous. We also have an avatar, living inside a phone, a common trope in present-day sci-fi. These AIs are usually demigods, who can do everything, and so is Maggie’s AI app. Also ridiculous.

Why three stars and not four, for example? Because it is never really clear why anything really happens. The book contains all kinds of cataclysmic and dramatic moments, and not a single one of them is actually necessary for the story. The explanation for everything is that a head is trying to find a body. Characters fly to Russia, billionaire balls are held, some people chase others, while committing grand acts of bravery without any relation to this problem. It’s not exactly a head but you’ll see if you read it. So I felt a disconnect between the great writing style, nice characters, the grandiose scenes, and setup, and the missing link to the actual story.

I could have given it two stars as well because of the publisher’s decision to compact the 350-page book into 300 pages by making the letters tiny and squeezing the letter spacing.

Despite the review, I enjoyed the individual fragments of good writing. 3/5 because of that.

Blue Medusa’s debut single, Checkmate, is out

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I already shared it here but happy to repeat. I think Alissa White-Gluz’s decision to leave Arch Enemy is revitalizing both Arch Enemy and her career. We are finally done with the nagging comparison with Angela Gossow — Japan 2008 was almost 20 years ago, and is not something that will or need to be repeated. Alissa’s new band, Blue Medusa, has a different style, different sound, and can bring us joy, despite having no clue what the lyrics are.

Here it is, for the handful of metalheads who follow my blog.

Stuff you never see if you don’t walk outside

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

It’s been over 3 years since I started doing daily walks. One of the joys of doing them is just spotting ordinary things that just looks nice, and the early spring is probably the most colorful of all seasons for walking.

Here’s for your pleasure, Grape Hyacinth, a mid-80s tabouret, and a scary pirate.

And then two different orange cats. At first, I thought it’s the same cat, because I took these photos maybe 5 meters from one another. After looking at the photos, I noticed one has 2 ears and the other one has 1.75. The two-eared cat is also Pesho, recognized me and meowed.