this was like reading a long recounting of someone's very vivid, incredibly strange dream. it's all very wispy, and dream-like, and weird in a vaguely menacing way, and my god, i hated it. i couldn't wait for it to end, frankly.

it seemed abundantly clear to me early on that i wasn't going to learn anything of substance about the mysterious Area X, (I suspect - i hope - things become more clear in the other two books), nor did i particularly care about any of the characters. now i'm not the kind of reader who has to like her protagonists, but i should at least care how their story will unfold, otherwise why am i here? and i just didn't care, here. in fact, i wanted them all to go away, however vaguely Vandemeer chose to describe their demise.

for such a short book, i found it incredibly oppressive. perhaps that was the point - to give the reader a sense for how it would feel to actually be in Area X. if that's the case, then mission accomplished. i found this book so oppressively boring in the end (really, how interested would you be if someone took days of your life to describe their weird dream to you?), that i have no desire to volunteer for another disastrous expedition to Area X by reading the other two novels. i intend to stay far, far away. 

so. not recommended. but, as i said before, many, many people really liked (alert: spoilers) this book and the trilogy as a whole. so maybe there's something that i'm just not getting. as it stands, i truly don't like books where a lot happens, but nothing really happens at all - which is what happened here. bleh. i'm just happy i can now move on to more enjoyable things...   

i'm trying really hard with this book. really, i am. but this happens to be one of the most soporific books i've read in a really long time. i can't seem to help it. every five pages or so and there I go again, dozing off. . . i can't say it's a bad book, but in the end, i might just say it's boring. which doesn't feel right because so many people seem to have really enjoyed it. i'm hoping things get better, but if it doesn't i'm just thanking my lucky stars that it's a short book and i only have 95 more pages to go.