lindasdarby's review against another edition
1.0
This book was terrible. After 10 pages I thought it might be okay. 50 pages into it I decided the main character was a jerk alcoholic and his girlfriend was selfish and didn't really love him. It was so dark. I skimmed the rest of the book. Why? I'm not sure. I feel like I need to apologize to myself for staying up until midnight reading this garbage. The chapter on computers taking over the world were skimmed over quickly. The chapters about his father dying were sad and the chapter about him, his girlfriend, his fake suicide frustrated me. I feel like you need to like the main character in a book - at the least - to enjoy a book. This book got rave reviews. I am beginning to wonder if I can trust reviews. This book well and truly sucked the life out of me for a few hours don't let it do the same to you.
literatetexan's review against another edition
4.0
Ron Currie Jr. has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut elsewhere, and I suppose that Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is his most Vonnegut-ish book. I didn't enjoy it as much as Everything Matters, but I did like it better than God Is Dead.
The protagonist, who is also named Ron Currie Jr, is in love with a woman named Emma. In fact, that might be understating his feelings for her. He actually seems obsessed with her. They have an on-again, off-again romance over the course of the years.
He also spends a lot of time getting drunk on a Caribbean island and getting into fights. He has affairs with other women to try to forget about Emma. And he spends a considerable amount of the novel contemplating the Singularity and what it's going to mean to his love life and the love lives of everyone around him.
It's beautifully written, and I related to Currie's attitudes and thoughts in more instances than I'm entirely comfortable with. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is one of my favorite books I've read this year, although I read it immediately after re-reading Everything Matters, which affected me more on every level.
The protagonist, who is also named Ron Currie Jr, is in love with a woman named Emma. In fact, that might be understating his feelings for her. He actually seems obsessed with her. They have an on-again, off-again romance over the course of the years.
He also spends a lot of time getting drunk on a Caribbean island and getting into fights. He has affairs with other women to try to forget about Emma. And he spends a considerable amount of the novel contemplating the Singularity and what it's going to mean to his love life and the love lives of everyone around him.
It's beautifully written, and I related to Currie's attitudes and thoughts in more instances than I'm entirely comfortable with. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is one of my favorite books I've read this year, although I read it immediately after re-reading Everything Matters, which affected me more on every level.
brookeworm88's review against another edition
5.0
Love the fragmented form and the way it adds emotion that a linear story wouldn't. Reminiscent of Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried in the way that the narrator deems fiction more representative of truth than factual events sometimes can.
dessa's review against another edition
5.0
Reread March 2017: I originally gave this four stars but I'm bumping it up to five and you can fight me about it. This is one of those books where the synopsis sounds super shady - author writes himself into a novel, fakes his own death, launches his novel onto bestseller lists everywhere - but the honest heart of it just sort of wings you in the head when you try to look away. You know? This is one of maybe five books I regret leaving in storage 5000 kilometers away. Thank god for the library, because I've been trying to ignore the hankering to read this book for probably a year.
lola425's review against another edition
4.0
I loved the way the story was told, the back and forth between memories of his father's lingering death, his exploits on the island, his tumultuous relationship with Emma. Just perfectly told. You could feel even through his alcoholic fog, his lack of affect regarding his (many) poor choices, his obsessive desire for the Singularity, Currie's (the character) desire to live and love, regardless of the Capital T truth he claims he is telling. So if Currie's intent (the character or the author) was to sell us on the inevitability and superiority of the Singularity, he's actually done the opposite. Probably could stand to re-read this and pay more careful attention to the sections on the Singularity, it requires more careful thought than I was able to give it.
beckyblake's review against another edition
4.0
A conversation between author and reader, this book is a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to exist (with suffering and loss) and what our alternatives are (suicide, nameless wandering, or perhaps in the not-so distant future a machine-based existence devoid of error or pain). Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is inventive and moving. Currie uses interwoven vignettes from various aspects of his 'real life' to question readers about the capital T we place on truth, and how we read fiction versus memoir.
laurelinwonder's review against another edition
3.0
This is one of those little postmodern books that get to you at points, but also leave the reader behind while it explores. I enjoyed some moments, but other times, it just was not engaging.
shelfimprovement's review against another edition
4.0
I never know quite how to respond to uber-postmodern novels, with the blurred lines between author and character, the unreliability of the narrators embroiled in identity crises. Despite the fact that I've taken lit theory classes, I never know quite how to describe the stories and structures and whatnot in everyday terms.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is an existential crisis and a troublesome love story wrapped together with musings on truth and Singularity (the concept of machines developing consciousness). The narrator shares the same name as the author and I wonder how much of the story is meant to mirror IRL-Currie's experiences.
The character version of Currie has moved to a Caribbean island while the woman he has loved since childhood sorts out a messy divorce. While he's waiting for Emma to summon him, he reflects on the futility of their relationship and grieves for his recently deceased father. Pushed beyond his cognitive abilities to process anymore bullshit, he decides -- and fails -- to commit suicide. Instead, he allows the outside world to believe he is dead as he disappears to the Middle East, where he roams the desert less in search of redemption or epiphany as numbness.
The characters in this book are largely unsympathetic. They behave selfishly and often impulsively, and it's clear to me that the dysfunctional love story at the center of much of it is less about love than it is about a lack of self-awareness. Given the many musings on consciousness that Currie has folded into the story, I imagine much of that was intentional. It's an interesting contrast, the idea that machines may one day gain consciousness and buck against human conventions such as love and heartbreak set against this narrative of two people who are clearly just not even remotely close to being good for each other not matter how much they want to be together. They are a couple that literally has to engage in violence in order to feel when they are together, and not once throughout this book was I rooting for them.
To pull one sentence out of this book to sum it up:
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is an existential crisis and a troublesome love story wrapped together with musings on truth and Singularity (the concept of machines developing consciousness). The narrator shares the same name as the author and I wonder how much of the story is meant to mirror IRL-Currie's experiences.
The character version of Currie has moved to a Caribbean island while the woman he has loved since childhood sorts out a messy divorce. While he's waiting for Emma to summon him, he reflects on the futility of their relationship and grieves for his recently deceased father. Pushed beyond his cognitive abilities to process anymore bullshit, he decides -- and fails -- to commit suicide. Instead, he allows the outside world to believe he is dead as he disappears to the Middle East, where he roams the desert less in search of redemption or epiphany as numbness.
The characters in this book are largely unsympathetic. They behave selfishly and often impulsively, and it's clear to me that the dysfunctional love story at the center of much of it is less about love than it is about a lack of self-awareness. Given the many musings on consciousness that Currie has folded into the story, I imagine much of that was intentional. It's an interesting contrast, the idea that machines may one day gain consciousness and buck against human conventions such as love and heartbreak set against this narrative of two people who are clearly just not even remotely close to being good for each other not matter how much they want to be together. They are a couple that literally has to engage in violence in order to feel when they are together, and not once throughout this book was I rooting for them.
To pull one sentence out of this book to sum it up:
"A simple equation: time plus grief, multiplied by base human failure."There's a lot of grief and base human failure disguised as self-pity here. And yet, the book is an often lovely musing on many big ideas and I found myself completely engaged by Currie's writing. It reminded me of The Automatic Sweeteheart problem, a paper I had to write in a class I took on the philosophic groundwork of psychology that made me almost violent with frustration (that may have been because Sibicky too much enjoyed playing devil's advocate). If you're the kind of person who doesn't necessarily need a lot of plot movement or likable characters in their novels, if you like thinking about existential questions and deconstructing the lines between reality and fiction, I'm sure this is the book for you.