Just a Couple of Days

Rating:
Summary: subtle, comical, and enlightening
Review: I was sitting at Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon, when a very nice girl overheard my guffaw about reading another one of Bush's intelligent statements, "I didn't know the camera was on me!"
So we began to talk, and after a few minutes, she pulled this book out of her bag, and told me that I should read it.

All weekend long I did read, and I could not put it down. Intense, exciting, exhilerating, comical, a rush of relief in knowing that the end of the world could be an amazing wonderful experience.
This book is everything, philosophical, sociological, psychological, comical, dramatic, and your not-so-common, "it just made me laugh at loud and feel good" type of book.
My advice?
I highly recommend this book, and periodically hanging out in coffee shops to meet really neat people!

Rating:
Summary: pitch a fit for love
Review: Trying to summarize what this book is about is like trying to summarize a person. I could give you a plot skeleton, but then I've never found skeletons to be particularly appealing. Instead, I'll just ramble some random thoughts and hopefully that will flesh it out.

This is an end-of-the-world story, but if you think that sounds depressing, you're absolutely wrong. This is a story about how (paraphrasing Nikola Tesla) enlightenment leads inexorably to peace. This is a story about the pitfalls of language, insofar as language represents maya, or illusion. That said, it is ironic indeed that someone who uses language so well (aside from a couple of stumbles) would use it to highlight its inadequacies, but then that's really part of the larger story. The characters were fun, caricatures at times, as others have said, but then this really wasn't a drama. The writing was intense: humorous, visionary, bizarre, and beautiful. And best of all, this book was written by a real person. I emailed Tony after I read it with a question and he actually wrote back the same day. It was nice to see the wall between writer and reader so easily dissolved.

In closing, elves and faeries will love this book. Ogres and trolls will not.

Rating:
Summary: Not as cool as it thinks it is
Review: Some random graffiti written by a college professor gets him thrown in jail and enlisted as a test subject in top secret, privately-funded biological weapon testing project. The protagonist, who is the professor's best friend and also a successful microbiologist, is forced to help find a cure for the weapon after his friend is infected.

I was very disappointed in this book. Not only did I not care for the main character, who doesn't really seem to mind when something awful happens to his dog, but I also found much of the writing to be unnecessary and boring. ....


Rating:
Summary: funny
Review: i guess i agree that half of what you get out of a story is based on your own perspective. i guess i didn't get what some other folks here got, but i still liked this book. very funny characters. i just skipped the occasional big word.

Rating:
Summary: cool cool cool
Review: First of all, this is one of the coolest books I've ever read. A review on the front cover calls it a "Dr. Strangelove for the biotech century," but I would also compare it to Cat's Cradle, one of my favorite books, although Just a Couple of Days is a good deal more lighthearted.
Second, it was very difficult to put this book down since the chapters are short. I found myself always wanting to read just one more chapter, until the next thing I knew I had read fifty more pages.
Third, the tangents are fascinating and hilarious. The writing got a little voluptuous at times, but that was one of my favorite things. It was clear that he was enjoying himself.
Finally, the philosophy of language and communication implied by this story left me engrossed in thought for hours. This book is a celebration of life. You'd have to be a jaded cynic to not like it.

Rating:
Summary: get on the bus...
Review: This book is great, although i can understand how someone could fail to get it. I'd place it somewhere between "Skinny Legs and All" and "The Matrix." In other words, if you've ever been on the bus, if you've ever had a peak beyond the veil, if you know anything about zen or gnosticism, or if you're truly curious about any of these things, then you're gonna dig this book. On the other hand, if you think this banal, hyperconsumer world is all there is and where it's at, then walk on by. Zion won't find you if you don't want it to.

P.S. For those who know what's going on, I also *highly* recommend Dostoyevsky's short story, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man."

Rating:
Summary: Too hyped
Review: ... Maybe the hype set me up for a letdown, but I don't think the book deserves all the praise it has received. It is not particularly readable. The text is too thick and often superfluous. It is metaphysical, but the metaphysics doesn't lead to any arresting conclusions, or take any unexpected routes. It felt more like random thoughts expressed too wordily. The overall feel is that of a Ecotopia (the couple of are the protagonists friends), plus Brave New World (the power-structures are mildly reminiscent), plus Andromeda Strain (the virus, obviously), plus 12 Monkeys (germs and a bit of horror). Except more turgid and slow-moving than any one of them. I would have given it one-star, but maybe I got set-up by all the praise I read before I bought it, so I'll give it two.

Rating:
Summary: I don't like hippies...
Review: but I loved this book. It's the kind of story and story telling that makes it feel possible to jump out of the rat race of work and mortgages and everything boring.

I found this book through the Amazon "if you like Tom Robbins then..." list, and I highly recommend it. I had trouble putting it down.

Rating:
Summary: genre bender
Review: I'm impressed, but I'm having a hard time describing why. Just a Couple of Days is not easily categorized into a neat little genre. It has elements of sci-fi, but then not really, or perhaps only to the extent that Kurt Vonnegut does. But then it's much more inspiring than Vonnegut's work, and so then it drifts toward Tom Robbins, as I've seen it compared to in other reviews, but then that comparison falters too because the plotline here is much more engaging and suspenseful. There is the wordplay, which I resisted the same way I usually resist the first 50 pages of any Robbins novel before I finally succumb. But here too, the wordplay also serves as a demonstration of the novel's theme, which has mainly to do with the significance of language to the human perception of reality. I was entertained but I was also enlightened, and so there's also some similarities to be drawn to "visionary fiction" such as James Redfield and Daniel Quinn, but then again not really, as those writers tend to be overly ponderous and contrived, with flimsy plotlines and occasional flakiness. There's really none of that here, despite the fact that one of the main characters' names is Flake, which should illustrate the fact that Vigorito takes nothing seriously. It was fun, an absurdist psychedelic satire of the apocalypse, that's my categorization. I've never read anything like it before, and I look forward to his next novel.

Rating:
Summary: This book is where it's at!
Review: This book has it going on in so many ways. What an amazing book! My favorite part was the language used to tell the story. Never before have I read writing with such intricately woven imagery and metaphor. Using language like that, it could have been a biography of Ronald Reagan and still been a joy to read. As it's ultimately a story of transcedence, it's even better. Even more amazing is that I heard it came out right before September 11th. I can't imagine a better story to balance that day.

Tao.