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Rating: 
Summary: Crapitus - Me no Laika
Review: 'This book should not be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force', and there were many times when I felt like doing just that. I don't normally struggle to finish a book, but I did with this one. Apart from the haphazard, disjointed plot, lurching from scene to scene for no apparent reason, the subject matter didn't really appeal, littered as it was with tawdry sexual couplings (and singlings - there was a fair bit of wanking going on, by both the characters and the author). The mystery to me was how Habitus got such uniformly good reviews from likes of New Scientist and Time Out. New Scientist said it was a 'witty often erudite stylish commentary on our pre-millenial condition'. It barely raised a smile with me, and the commentary was more on the state of the author's pot addled grey matter than the human condition, pre-millenial or otherwise. There were some genuinely good passages from time to time, but all too often we would be zooming off somewhere else to ponder some other bodily function, in dispassionate scientific terms of course, but tasteless nonetheless. This was the problem, the science was generally accurate, but seemed to be designed not to inform or educate, but to show off. All in all, a disappointing read which could only be measurably improved by reducing the constituent pages to their original chemical elements, preferably at a temperature of a thousand degrees Centigrade.
Rating:
Summary: Crapitus - Me no Laika
Review: 'This book should not be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force', and there were many times when I felt like doing just that. I don't normally struggle to finish a book, but I did with this one. Apart from the haphazard, disjointed plot, lurching from scene to scene for no apparent reason, the subject matter didn't really appeal, littered as it was with tawdry sexual couplings (and singlings - there was a fair bit of wanking going on, by both the characters and the author). The mystery to me was how Habitus got such uniformly good reviews from likes of New Scientist and Time Out. New Scientist said it was a 'witty often erudite stylish commentary on our pre-millenial condition'. It barely raised a smile with me, and the commentary was more on the state of the author's pot addled grey matter than the human condition, pre-millenial or otherwise. There were some genuinely good passages from time to time, but all too often we would be zooming off somewhere else to ponder some other bodily function, in dispassionate scientific terms of course, but tasteless nonetheless. This was the problem, the science was generally accurate, but seemed to be designed not to inform or educate, but to show off. All in all, a disappointing read which could only be measurably improved by reducing the constituent pages to their original chemical elements, preferably at a temperature of a thousand degrees Centigrade.
Rating:
Summary: Disjointed, poor plot construction and narrative structure
Review: He boasts on his website about not bothering about his studies and being more concerned with "smoking dope" whilst at Oxford. You can see the way it's warped his mind, because 'Habitus' is an incomprehensible read, scripted in a pretentious way which says "hey, look how clever a writer I am".
Rating:
Summary: Disjointed, poor plot construction and narrative structure
Review: He boasts on his website about not bothering about his studies and being more concerned with "smoking dope" whilst at Oxford. You can see the way it's warped his mind, because 'Habitus' is an incomprehensible read, scripted in a pretentious way which says "hey, look how clever a writer I am".
Rating: 
Summary: Go Laika!
Review: I haven't even finished the book and I already feel I have to share with you that I really, really love it! Habitus mixes space travel, genetics and the comming of age of the computer with Hollywood and the Holocaust --- and in doing so, it doesn't even seem farfetched. Some of the sentences are mere jewels, I can hardly put this book down (although it is easy to do so, since the chapters are pretty short). It is right up there with Tim Powers' Expiration Date!
Rating:
Summary: Itt is great!
Review: I like dogs very much, therefore I loved this book. My dog too. He saw the cover and ate it instantly, and personally, I found the pages delicious if cooked right.
Rating:
Summary: For Pynchonomaniacs but not only!
Review: I loved Habitus, for his way of intermixing personnal destinies with the great technological discoveries of the century (satellites, computers, genetics). Beautifully written (it could be american), Habitus is the book to read if you like Pynchon, Gaddis and Richard Powers. Such a promising fist novel is more than precious. The structure is masterly orchestrized and the characters won't leave you for a long time. And despite (or thanks to) the extraordinary architecture of the book, there is real emotion. I look forward to read Mr. Flint next novel.
Rating: 
Summary: a worthy read, but he should have done better research
Review: If you don't mind sifting through all the tedious and pretentious biology and science too much, the little gold nugget passages of wordy ingenuity you will stumble across at one or the other point will make it worth it. What I have to reproach is that, while his science might be flashily correct, the guy knows nothing about shop-lifting or drugs. The ways he depicts department store thieving and amphetamine consumption are the typically quasi realistic ones of someone who has never done any of it!
Rating: 
Summary: Gambling. Television. Genetics. Computers. A dog in space.
Review: In this marvelously inventive, complex, and epic novel, James Flint knits a stunning vision of the intertwining connections between our personal lives, our machines, and our history with a satire on the notions of progress that unpin the digital age. A math prodigy born to a Hasidic baker in Brooklyn, Joel Kluge is invited to study at Cambridge, where he comes to believe that the key to understanding particle physics lies in the mysteries of the Kaballah. Daughter of the inmate of an asylum near Stratford-Upon-Avon, Jennifer Several soon graduates from a TV-saturated childhood to sexual precocity and shoplifting. Judd Axelrod, the youngest of the three, is the mixed-race child of a Hollywood actress and a successful IBM salesman, with a consciousness that has a habit of slipping outside of time. On the run from his analyst, the insidious Dr. Schemata, he discovers a brilliant talent for gambling. Meanwhile, high above their heads, Laika the first dog in space has worked out how to convert information into energy - a trick that enables her to stay alive while observing them all. Driven through their lives by the profoundly linked forces of change and chance, the lives of the three humans briefly intersect - with the result that Jennifer becomes pregnant, her unusual fetus the product of two fathers. As the child grows, the strange synthesis of identities brewing within her points to a new and different future for humankind. JAMES FLINT lives in London, England, where he worked as an editor for Wired UK and mute magazine. Habitus is his first novel. "Information-age fictions are known for birthing life-forms that rewire the world, unwire its inhabitants, and cross-wire its readers. It is into this genre that James Flint's debut novel Habitus has emerged, hatching a form all its own and posing questions about the past, present, and future that are as weighty as its almost 500 pages."--Wired "[Flint's] relentlessly dark humor and startling juxtapositions; the occasional sweeping passages that read more like prose poems than establishing shots or descriptions of the scenery; and the near overabundance of wild, wild ideas--all of these make Habitus a marvelously provocative read."-Salon "Flint's observation is entrancingly spot-on, but it is in his ambitious meld of mathematical philosophy, laid against a backdrop of gambling and the development of the computer (there's enough info here to bore your friends at parties) that Habitus excels. Alongside perhaps only Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2), Flint has managed to find an enthralling fictional world in the contemporary technological maze."--Time Out (London) "This astonishingly inventive first novel is in part a satire on the digital age, in part a surreal comedy with a fantastical cast of absurd characters and some brilliant writing."- The Observer (London) "You probably won't have heard of James Flint, but to judge by his astonishingly accomplished debut you will soon. In Habitus, Flint weaves the lives of his three well-drawn characters--Joel, Jennifer and Judd with telling events in science to build a witty, often erudite, frequently stylish commentary on our pre-millennial condition."-New Scientist "Set against our culture's precarious leap from the space age to the digital age, Habitus is a sweeping epic comedy in which cosmos, characters and molecules are wrought with equal passion, grace and verve. Here comes one astoundingly good storyteller."-Douglas Rushkoff, author of The Ecstasy Club "Vast and vastly ambitious . . . story-telling can't be learnt: you either got it or you haven't. James Flint has it."-Lawrence Norfolk, author of The Pope's Rhinoceros
Rating:
Summary: a review about a book that really messed with my head
Review: James Flints depth of knowledge astounded me in his debut, which upon reading gave me a thorough insight into many different areas of modern humanity, that previously I would have shrugged off as too complicated for my humble brain to comprehend(eg chaos theories,astounding mathematical problems and things which will leave your head in a state of thorough confusion for weeks afterwards). Althougth the tempo is slow to begin with, the pieces of the book slowly start to fall into place but the events in the book are widely open to differing personal interpretation which leaves the reader confused on what the hell the author is trying to get at. This odd factor to the book causes it to rise in my opinions as it fits in nicely with the direction the book as it has information coming from so many differing fields thus bringing no monotony to its content. Flint's fresh angle on modern day society gives the reader a rare yet fresh perspective to consider as it is so varied but the extra thought that is required to comprehend the book might prove to be too much for those not used to this more informative style of book.
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