I liked this book way more than I thought I would. I haven’t laughed out loud so much from a book in awhile, which, ok, might be because I tend to read a lot of dystopian sci fi, but it really was funny.

Fantastic. Excellent pacing - I didn’t want to put it down!

Once I finally got to the meat of the story (about halfway through the book), I liked the story. I hated all the goofy inside-joke words and phrases. I normally like a little of that but this was over the top. I hope I never read "smucked" or "smucking" one more fucking time in my life.

There was so much I hated about this book, but the last third was good. A lot of it just felt like David Mitchell’s wet dream of what it would be like to be in the music scene in the late 1960s, but maybe some ppl have the same dream and it was fun for them instead of sounding incredibly pretentious and name-droppy. I finished it only because of Jasper de Zoet’s storyline and was not disappointed. I might even go back and read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet again.

I’m not normally a fan of alternate histories, but this piqued my interest. It was a bit slow in the first half and the narrator’s ego is annoying, but the last half felt like sliding down a hill into a dystopian creepy forest. In a good way if you’re a fan of that sort of thing. When the title to the book is finally explained… goosebumps. Loved this one.

Good, but annoying

This was a fun and interesting story but 1) I think my excitement for only-I-can-save-the-day gamer stories started and ended with Ready Player One and 2) too. many. details. Stop with all the adjectives and brand names of the cassette tape players everyone has and name dropping. It's just distracting and annoying. Ready Player One suffered from this too but at least when I read that it was a little more novel.

Not sure it was worth powering through

I loved the other Bobiverse books. So fun, so interesting, so goofy. This one bored the crap out me until about three-quarters of the way through. Then it got better but, ultimately, maybe wasn't worth the time it took to read.

Likable at times but, overall, boring. I did appreciate that the realities of academia were portrayed pretty well and the science was interesting (I have no idea how much is real though).

Has some interesting backstory...

...but holy crap was it slow to get going. I almost quit I was so bored, but I'm glad I persevered because I liked the backstory and there was the usual fun back-and-forth dialogue between characters.

This wasn't bad so much as boring.