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comrade1234 • yesterday at 8:12 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.

Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.


Replies

SamBam • yesterday at 9:06 PM

The writing definitely felt try-hard, especially at the start where the first few chapters seem really obscure by design.

Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.

But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.