i finally got the audio book for "this is how you lose the time war" from my library. my review is that this book is really really well written and constructed and i think objectively a very good book. my personal opinion of the book is that i think im sadly far too autistic to be able to appreciate it fully (a little more non spoilery talk below).
im still not gonna talk about the context of the book because despite how annoying it can be and how that viral campaign on twitter was about it, it really is a book better experienced not knowing anything about it going into it.
when i started it, i picked up on the really poetic and lyrical quality to the writing, but if you know me at all you know i don't really like music with lyrics lol. i actually have a really weird relationship to music overall in the sense that i can't really "feel" music. consequently, while i heard the words being spoken and the weaving of the themes and narrative, i couldn't really "feel" it either.
i have that particular brand of autism where i have extremely low empathy and my emotions are not very strong if i do feel them at all. i still do "feel" things but the effort it takes for a work to get a rise out of me requires a very different kind of effort from the media im consuming.
the metaphor i used to talk about it earlier was that i could feel the book trying to hook me in certain places, expecting there to be a loop for it to latch on to, but when it came to me i didn't have that loop and so it couldn't get me. like if you stuck two of the same side of a piece of velcro together, they'd just slide against each other. it couldn't reach the emotional depth it was trying to with me specifically, and it does leave me disappointed in it in the end that it didn't.
much like everything else, i can understand why people can feel so strongly about this book, but i couldn't.
this is how you lose the time war is still a really really good book and i really recommend you read it if you haven't already.