Hands down one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. I wish I could give this 7 out of 5 stars. It’s creative, it’s thrilling, it’s immersive. This will now become one of my most recommended books, I can already tell.

"-his hand races across the page, and his periods that end his sentences sound like raps on a drum"

Sooooo close to being 5 stars with the breathtaking writing, a tragic mystery, and bittersweet love plots, but it got a bit corny at the end and I feel like both me and the characters themselves missed a lot. I'm sure upon inevitably rereading this, I will notice so much more and appreciate it even more deeply, but this was still a great experience.

The concept is brilliant - a mysterious novel about a man on a journey to recover his identity, written by an author with a mysterious identity, read by a pair of young people who communicate through marginalia and ephemera interleaved in a library copy of the book and whose curiosity about the author's identity immerses them in academic intrigue that might just be part of a larger political conspiracy. Garrison Keillor once described the media coverage of the Whitewater affair as a circus where "the American people are sitting on the bleachers waiting for the elephant to come out and all we see are the guys selling cotton candy." J.J. Abrams sells cotton candy and the promise of elephants like no one else, and there's some great cotton candy throughout this book. And he can usually pull out a pretty amazing elephant now and again. Here? Well, for all its cool factor and all the work of following multiple simultaneous trajectories and sorting out the inside baseball minutiae of the "real" world of the readers mirrored in the novel they're reading ... underwhelming. Many amazing moments (and a superior demonstration of the transactional theory of reading), yet the whole felt less than the sum of its parts to me. And I have no idea how the little decoder wheel that comes with it is supposed to work (or whether it's just a red herring).

It was amazing all the way until the last couple of pages. I felt like there was a lot that was not explained as well as it could have been for us but it worked with how the characters were relating to each other at that point.

Reading this book was a major pain in the ass. Allow me to explain...I checked it out of the library and it was a thing of beauty, the Ship of Theseus in the slip cover and all the little bits of ephemera to leaf through. I was so excited! But that excitement quickly dissolved into annoyance. You cannot read this book without all the little bits falling out everywhere. Don't even try to read it in bed. It is impossible. I ended up paper clipping all the little notes to the pages so they wouldn't get lost. I Do Not Want to Do This With a Library Book! So instead of lounging in a chair getting caught up in a story I had to lay the book out on a table as if I was studying - in order to try to enjoy a piece of fiction that confused the hell out of me. Should I read the story first? Should I read the notes first? Should I read the two together? I can see where the authors were trying to go. And J.J. is quite possibly one of my favorite directors ever, but the book was not enjoyable. It was madness and eventually the madness had to stop. I will not find out the answer to the 'mystery' this was supposed to be. Because quite frankly in the end I ended up not caring.

Quintessential JJ Abrams. Four layers of mystery. Meta-mysteries. Puzzles. Each layer of story was fantastic. The most fun I have had reading a book. JJ can do no wrong.

Qué fuerte cuando coges un libro para ver como empieza y ya no puedes parar de leer.

Aunque más que un libro, ¡esto es como un juguete! Me ha encantado como se unen las historias, la relación entre Jen y Eric, el misterio que van desentramando. Es frustrante los momentos en los que no entiendes nada. Y de hecho necesitaría más lecturas de las notas junto a los encartes para profundizar mejor en todo ese entramado, ya que siento que hay cosas que evidentemente se me escapan en una primera lectura.

Aun sigo intentando descifrar el mensaje que se esconde en el capítulo 10 con la rueda de Eötvos.