Against my better wishes, I am gonna give this book 5 stars because although I initially gave it 4, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. ( )

I found this to be a disturbing novel. At first the main character seems perfectly normal, but it quickly becomes apparent he's got a few loose screws up there. And as the the novel progress, the character begins to develop a God complex. He wants everything and everyone to behave exactly, exactly, the way he wants them to. And what disturbed me was that by being rich, he was pretty much able to buy anybody or anything he wanted. At the end he was nothing more than a homicidal maniac. Clearly, one of the most self centered and immoral characters I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Watching how earning a huge monetary law suit settlement allowed a normal man to decend into becoming a murder was not a pleasant reading experience. ( )

Throughout this book I kept thinking about unfettered capitalism and the impunity with which the wealthy move through the world, how in a capitalist economy, enough wealth gives a person license to stop thinking of other people as people but rather as objects, or worse than objects because in capitalist societies, objects have value.

Basically, I find this book intriguing and depressing. So, a qualified "Pick," I guess. ( )

This was a very fun read, very consumable but also sort of dazzling in how it makes you inhabit the perspective of the main character, whose view of the world turns out to be pretty interesting and twisted (yet in some ways understandable if misguided). The prose is a cinch, the ideas fun, and the story a train wreck that you initially can't imagine will be the case but then suspect will be the case and can't pry your eyes away from. This was a better (if also probably much easier to write) book than McCarthy's C, and the two together definitely make me want to keep an eye on this author. ( )

Whoa. Not what I expected, and it takes a very dark turn towards the end. But it was an enthralling read. ( )