I honestly don’t know what to say or even how to start. I haven’t posted anything or even being active for a very long time.
It’s September of 2019 and the last review I post was my last read in 2018.
And the reason why I haven’t been updated on my blog ’cause it was my senior year of high school and I had to make a decision when it comes to school thing and getting a high scores so I was so busy and yeah I didn’t read that much this year but things will back on track.
So Assalamualaikum.
Welcome to another review with another book.
It’s September of 2019 and the last review I post was my last read in 2018.
And the reason why I haven’t been updated on my blog ’cause it was my senior year of high school and I had to make a decision when it comes to school thing and getting a high scores so I was so busy and yeah I didn’t read that much this year but things will back on track.
So Assalamualaikum.
Author: Matt Haig
Publisher: Canongate Books
Publication date: May 9th, 2013
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Pages: 293
Author: Matt Haig
Summary :
The story starts when Professor Andrew Martin a mathematician discovers the answer to a very complex math problem and it turns out that knowing the answer to this problem will change the meaning of life for human society and this alien society who is much more advanced. It’s kind of monitoring what’s going on and they see that he solved so they neutralized Andrew Martin and they send someone in the disguise of Andrew Martin down to earth to interact with his family and friends and find out who he told about this solution so that they can neutralize them too ’cause they feel that humanity is not ready for this. The alien Andrew Martin doesn’t really know anything about how humans work. So the book is a collection of hilariously awkward and touching moments in which alien Andrew Martin tries to interact engage with real Andrew Martin’s family, friends, and coworkers.
About the author :
Matt Haig is an English novelist and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.
My review :
I started reading this book on November 4th, 2018. I saw a lot of reviews and everyone liked it so I bought it without hesitation but I didn’t read the summary in detail ’cause I won’t spoil it. So when I start to read it I figure out that it’s about an alien who’s trying to describing how it feels to be a human. I said Nah dude that’s too much fantasy ’cause I don’t believe in aliens in the first place! so I put it down and I couldn’t complete it. Until I read a review by a bookworm that really likes and I can’t deny that I trust her taste of books and she highly recommends it so I decided to give it a second chance and I didn’t regret it. I complete it at the beginning of August in the summer vacation. And it was pretty lovely and warm! I like it. It wasn’t like I expected and it wasn’t that philosophical as I thought it would be. It was fun, easy and simple and tiring to introduce some fact in as a story was so smart.
My rating on Goodreads :
My review :
My rating on Goodreads :
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quotes :
“Humans are ruled by their basic desires and this leads to suffering and pain”
‘so love is about finding the right person to hurt you?’ ‘pretty much.’ ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ ‘there’s always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness’
“You see, sometimes to save something you have to kill a little piece of it.”
“humans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical within the same body. They have mental hospitals and body hospitals as if one doesn’t directly affect the other. And so, if they can’t accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person, they are hardly likely to understand how a mind -albeit not a human one- can affect the body of someone else.”
“what I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves.”
“And that is why they invented art: books, music. films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are”
‘I know. But I am learning more about the humans. They are more complicated than we first thought. They are sometimes violent, but more often care about each other. There is more goodness in them than anything else, I am convinced of it’ ‘what are you saying?’ ‘I don’t know what I am saying. I am confused. Some things have stopped making sense.”
“Listen, emotions have a logic. Without emotions, humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you”
“Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.”
“Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations. It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic.”
“I am learning here. Every day is a lesson, and some lessons I fail.”
“it had been difficult because history had always been written by the victors of wars, and the victors of the gender wars had always been male, and so woman had been placed in the margins and in the footnotes, if they had been lucky.”
“shame is a shackle, free yourself,”
“Don’t worry about your abilities. You have the ability to love. That is enough.”
“Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.”
“Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.”
“Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.”
“Irony is fine, but not as fine as feeling.”
“Happiness is not out here. It is in there.”
“If there is a sunset, stop and look at it. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”
“Failure is a trick of the light.”
“You are human. You will care about money. But realize it can’t make you happy because happiness is not for sale.”
“No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.”
“Don’t think you know. Know you think.”
“No one will understand you, It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you”
Raghad Al-Ghamdi
Thanks
‘so love is about finding the right person to hurt you?’ ‘pretty much.’ ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ ‘there’s always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness’
“You see, sometimes to save something you have to kill a little piece of it.”
“humans are still at the point in their development where they see a strong difference between the mental and the physical within the same body. They have mental hospitals and body hospitals as if one doesn’t directly affect the other. And so, if they can’t accept that a mind is directly responsible for the body of the same person, they are hardly likely to understand how a mind -albeit not a human one- can affect the body of someone else.”
“what I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves.”
“And that is why they invented art: books, music. films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are”
‘I know. But I am learning more about the humans. They are more complicated than we first thought. They are sometimes violent, but more often care about each other. There is more goodness in them than anything else, I am convinced of it’ ‘what are you saying?’ ‘I don’t know what I am saying. I am confused. Some things have stopped making sense.”
“Listen, emotions have a logic. Without emotions, humans wouldn’t care for each other, and if they didn’t care for each other the species would have died out. To care for others is self-preservation. You care for someone and they care for you”
“Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.”
“Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations. It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic.”
“I am learning here. Every day is a lesson, and some lessons I fail.”
“it had been difficult because history had always been written by the victors of wars, and the victors of the gender wars had always been male, and so woman had been placed in the margins and in the footnotes, if they had been lucky.”
“shame is a shackle, free yourself,”
“Don’t worry about your abilities. You have the ability to love. That is enough.”
“Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.”
“Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.”
“Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.”
“Irony is fine, but not as fine as feeling.”
“Happiness is not out here. It is in there.”
“If there is a sunset, stop and look at it. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”
“Failure is a trick of the light.”
“You are human. You will care about money. But realize it can’t make you happy because happiness is not for sale.”
“No two moralities match. Accept different shapes, so long as they aren’t sharp enough to hurt.”
“Don’t think you know. Know you think.”
“No one will understand you, It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you”
Raghad Al-Ghamdi
