islandkate763's review against another edition
4.0
Thoughts on finishing:
LOVED IT. This book was awesome. I am not going to lie and say some of it didn't go over my head (a lot of mathematical references) but what I did understand was brilliant. I bet this guy was awesome to play with as a kid, his imagination is limitless. Plus you can tell he really researched a lot of his material. There are parts in the stories when you can hardly tell the fiction from the fact. Can't wait to read something else by him.
Early thoughts while just beginning:
This is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in book form. I kind of love it. Totally tangential and crazy. Also the composition of the book itself is perfect. The size is just right to fit in your purse. The pages are thick and smooth and there are little colored pictures of artifacts related to each chapter. It may just be the best book ever.
LOVED IT. This book was awesome. I am not going to lie and say some of it didn't go over my head (a lot of mathematical references) but what I did understand was brilliant. I bet this guy was awesome to play with as a kid, his imagination is limitless. Plus you can tell he really researched a lot of his material. There are parts in the stories when you can hardly tell the fiction from the fact. Can't wait to read something else by him.
Early thoughts while just beginning:
This is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in book form. I kind of love it. Totally tangential and crazy. Also the composition of the book itself is perfect. The size is just right to fit in your purse. The pages are thick and smooth and there are little colored pictures of artifacts related to each chapter. It may just be the best book ever.
sarahpottenger's review against another edition
4.0
David! You need to read this! I thought of you the whole time I was reading.
Another short book in my quest to read 100 in 2008. Little weird vignettes. Hard to describe, but very good.
Another short book in my quest to read 100 in 2008. Little weird vignettes. Hard to describe, but very good.
mlindner's review against another edition
4.0
Read this at Sara’s. Was pretty good, all in all, but I seriously longed for some sort of pointers (citations/references) to that which was based on fact. I guess there is just too much admixture of reality and make believe in this for me.
tdstorm's review
5.0
Alex Rose’s The Musical Illusionist was remarkably generative for me. It’s set up as a series of exhibits in the “Library of Tangents.” Rose writes what amount to fabulist encyclopedia entries as he describes things like the “book of glass,” a novel that contains within it clever stories in which form imitates content, like the parable of the monk, who in trying to achieve ultimate wisdom, climbs higher and higher up a mountain; as he does so, the text of the book gets smaller and smaller until we are “left as blind as the monk and his ill-fated quest” (66). Or there’s the entry on the Santanzes, a tribe of people cursed with “an incapacitating acuity of memory” (47). Without being didactic, Rose delivers astute conclusions about his imagined realms. In the case of the Santanzes, for instance, he points out that “imagination and the telling of narratives require as much forgetting as remembering, as much dullness as sharpness,” and he goes on to paraphrase Borges, who “reminds us that without the ability to generalize . . . there is no abstraction, and hence no thought” (48-49). In the end, Rose is a fun Borgesian fiction to come back to. It’s like an encyclopedia of wonderful imaginative premises.
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