Book Review: Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
By @edent
· Book Review NaBloPoMo · 2 comments · 200 words
This was a rare DNF for me. I'm sure there's a brilliant story in there somewhere but it became too much of a chore to read.
The prose is excruciatingly complicated. Half a dozen times in one page I had to use my eReader's dictionary to look up an archaic word. Perhaps that's part of the metastory? How much we rely on our external brains.
The book is weirdly formatted. It uses different fonts to tell parts of the story from different perspectives. That's a neat idea - but just didn't work properly on my device. I suspect a lot of people have their preferred reading font set and don't want it changed.
In theory, it ticks all the right boxes for me - sci-fi dystopias and historical fiction. But it was so convoluted I gave up halfway through. Perhaps I'll return to it in a better frame of mind?
| Verdict |
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- Buy the eBook on Amazon Kindle
- Get the paper book from Hive
- Author's homepage
- Publisher's details
- Borrow from your local library
- ISBN: 9781473539549
All the books I read this year
@Edent It takes all kinds of readers to borrow everything from a library. I really enjoyed Gnomon. Big book but I rattled through it. I guess my vocabulary has lots of really old words. Maybe an advantage to learning Latin at secondary school and studying English Literature including Chaucer at university.
@EdentI filed that book under "too challenging for my little brain". But I was thrilled by Gone-Away World, which made me buy Gnomon in the first place.
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