The first ingredient of a good book: captivate the interest. 5/5. One of the best book I have ever read in my life. How come I haven't been aware of this gem before? ( )

Wow. Even though it was obvious how's the book gonna end, I really enjoyed it. The story, the characters are wonderfully written. I especially liked how the diary/report entries reflect Charlie as a parson and the changes he's going through.

This was a recommendation by Sasha.

Merged review:

Wow. Even though it was obvious how's the book gonna end, I really enjoyed it. The story, the characters are wonderfully written. I especially liked how the diary/report entries reflect Charlie as a parson and the changes he's going through.

This was a recommendation by Sasha. ( )

Didn't quite pack the same emotional punch for me as it seems to have done for a majority of readers. I kept thinking of Ted Chiang's Understand as I was reading this. I guess I like the intellectual denouement of the idea of a super intellect more than the emotional one. ( )

Audio book, 9 hours, perfectly narrated by Jeff Woodman. This was an amazingly captivating story about transformation and self discovery. I cared for the main characters, and the story was neither too short or too long.

Merged review:

Audio book, 9 hours, perfectly narrated by Jeff Woodman. This was an amazingly captivating story about transformation and self discovery. I cared for the main characters, and the story was neither too short or too long. ( )

Read: Flowers for Algernon, Daniel F Keyes

This seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates - although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (the only other example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration). The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent. The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It is clearly set in the 1950s - lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) - and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling. I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile - it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools - but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as not a science fiction novel. ( )