Took me a while to get over the horrible prose and writing style...it's intentional and after a while you laugh at it and understand why the author uses the language. Really enjoyed reading it, and laughed out loud a lot.

I wish this book had made the ToB shortlist over Black Wave. Not that I think for a second it would have beat Underground Railroad, but this was also an indie novel set in San Francisco and I took more away from it than Black Wave.

This book is not perfect. It's exhausting and obnoxious, and might even call itself that. There are some very astute observations about modern society and the internet, and I really wanted to discuss those observations with people I knew, until I realized that no one I know has read this book. The format of the book is also such that you are bombarded with ideas and quickly forget a great insight because you've covered 8 other topics in the following three pages (which does seem to be a deliberate choice on the writer's part). There were also some opinions in here that felt a little too regurgitated or naive - I would have agreed with them more if I'd read this book when I was 21. Now it seems passé, but again I feel like the narrator would have made the same comment in a patronizing voice and it would have fit right in with the rest of the book.

This is one hell of an angry book. Kobek's diatribes against contemporary culture and particularly Silicon Valley are not especially groundbreaking or original but rarely are they communicated so coherently or wittily. Very little avoids his criticism and it ends just about at the point where you've heard enough ranting, an entertaining albeit depressingly accurate read.

Dosadno

Reading this was like listening to a paranoid and stoned uncle ramble on about conspiracy theories. Crude to the point of hilarity, with a little seed of truth in the middle, raising lots of good points.

I originally thought this was a work of nonfiction, to find out it was in fact a work of nonfiction wrapped in a really bad work of fiction. The actual story itself was not that great, but Kobek even admits it himself within the book. This was also full of typos, which I don’t think were intentional, and were therefore annoying. But this also expanded my understanding of capitalism, culture, and hidden histories. Many of the facts (which I had to keep fact-checking, since this was, after all, a work of fiction) within this book were ones that I had never heard of, inspiring me to really look more into alternative histories and not just believe whatever mass media tells us.

Zo, dit is even een apart boek. Het duurde echt wel even voordat ik gewend was aan de stijl en de opbouw, maar uiteindelijk leest Ik haat het internet erg makkelijk en is het op de een of andere rare manier lastig weg te leggen. Dit vond ik een vreemde ervaring omdat het boek: 1. niet spannend is, 2. niet mooi geschreven is.

Dit is een post-postmoderne roman (zou ik zeggen als er een label op moet) waarbij elke verhaallijn en elk personage in dienst staat van de (vaak toch wel rake) punten die Kobek maakt over internet, vrouwenhaat, kapitalisme en racisme. Dit doet hij middels vervreemdende dialogen, irritante maar effectieve herhalingen, humor, en veel gescheld.

IHHI is een must-read voor elke linkse snob, denk ik zo. Niet alleen omdat het een hypermodern en superweird boek is, maar ook omdat het je inzicht geeft in je eigen stomme linkse gedrag:

'Klootzakken zoals jullie geven commentaar op platforms die het eigendom zijn van jullie vijanden! [...] Het is zo gemakkelijk te laten zien hoe rechtschapen je zelf bent en het is zo gemakkelijk de sociale orde aan de kaak te stellen als je alleen maar afgeeft op idioten die je beter kunt negeren...'

I’ve been trying to read this book for like 2 months. Finally got 50 ish pages in and absolutely could not go on. The only book I can ever remember not finishing, and I hate forming opinions of something if I haven’t seen it through fully, but unfortunately I just couldn’t do it. Insanely pretentious, even for me, and it just doesn’t flow or read like a novel at all. Avoid.