Certainly has respect: Lord of the Flies meets Logan‘s Run with Orwellian splashes and Joseph Conrad detailing. JG writes some very wicked bits.
High-Rise: A Novel | 
pickCertainly has respect: Lord of the Flies meets Logan‘s Run with Orwellian splashes and Joseph Conrad detailing. JG writes some very wicked bits.
#Skyscraper 🏙 #SavvySettings 💚🍀
#BookNerd 💙🤓📚
pick🎧 3 stars for Tom Hiddleston‘s narration … 1/2 a star for the story. OK maybe a little harsh there BUT. This reminded me of a Doctor Who (Sylvester McCoy) story, Paradise Towers.
There‘s a class war going on in this luxury apartment building. The residents start out complaining about kids & escalate to cannibalism. All the while normal life plods along in neighboring buildings.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2 👇🏻 more trigger warnings on the way!
pickI loved this book. The writing is so persuasive that every outlandish thing that ramped up the feeling of society regressing/characters losing all logical sense, felt normal. I‘ve never had a book screw with my willing suspension of disbelief like this.
This feels like Lord of the Flies for adults. It‘s an isolated class system... and everything goes wrong. It‘s a short read, and I would recommend this for lovers of literature and dystopian 🏢
"as if they in some way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system of precedences entirely based on floor-height. Laing had noticed that he and his fellow tenants were far more tolerant of any noise or nuisance from the floors above than they were from those below them."
"Their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor."
"... the residents enjoyed this breakdown of its services, and the growing confrontation between themselves. All this brought them together, and ended the frigid isolation of the previous months."
"What unsettled Wilder, as the women questioned him in pairs from their half-open doors, was their hostility to him, not only because he was a man, but because he was so obviously trying to climb to a level above their own."
"In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement."
pickReally good book, shame the film adaptation didn't do it justice!
so-soPerhaps writing a book about humans based on the behavioural experiment of rats is not the best for a realistic setting or believable characters. The violence escalates with little warning and the book by the end feels gratuitous. While this book is undoubtably well written in its technique it feels limited by its content, with Ballard being obsessed with sexual deviance and violence over plot or character.
pickHoly hell. What a messed up, terrifying book. Lord of the Flies in a modern self-contained apartment complex about sums it up.
Really well written, and the audiobook has excellent narration by Tom Hiddleston. Now I can finally watch the film!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#1001books
Another audiobook with a drop dead sexy narrator.😂
Trying to stay focused on the story (which is fascinating so far) while Mr. Hiddleston is somehow distracting me by reading in that incredible voice. 😛
Bonus: it‘s a #1001book 🙌🏻
Ballard's writing is just awesome. I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to reading him.
As is often the case with Ballard, this book centres around the upper middle class going beserk. The residents of a modern high rise apartment block start shutting out the outside world and degenerate into tribal warfare, accompanied by lots of drugs and booze. #highforthis #aprella
Congrats @GondorGirl! It's easy to fall back to Pride & Prejudice for a best first line ?, but I have to go with J.G. Ballard's "High-Rise":
"Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." #GG10K
'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months'
bailedI hate to bail on this. I really did enjoy the beginning & I think it's a fascinating premise. (The first line will forever remain one of my favorites.) But the content got a little too intense for me. The only reason I was continuing is because I was listening to it read by Tom Hiddleston (who is an amazing narrator). Had I been reading print, I would have bailed earlier. Just not the book for me.
"Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."
Let's take a minute to appreciate the greatness of that first line. The first word is "later"... and you're disoriented for the rest of the book. Brilliant.
#aprilbookshowers #firstlineofcurrentread #day5 @RealLifeReading
Not sure that I would have ever read this if my daughter hadn't recommended that I read it with my ears ... because Tom Hiddleston. 😉 What an amazing narration voice he has. And he can do any accent imaginable, so he changes his voice for characters, which is always a plus for a book with dialogue.
Fun fact about the movie adaptation of High-Rise: all of the signage is in Eurostile Bold Extended, aka the font used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
#readjanuary day 14: for the love of fonts
After spending the early afternoon at a National Theatre encore of No Man's Land, time to kick back with leftover popcorn from the movie and one of my many library DVDs.
High-Rise --> fluffy biscuits. Because biscuits.
so-soThis may be a book that has not stood the test of time.
The dystopian future portrayed in 1975 is not really a possibility and the crystal ball lens appears blurred from the year 2016.
The styling feels like a nostalgic quaint description from 70s icons such as Aaron Spelling, Sidney Sheldon et al.
Clever premise. Just perhaps, for me, not the classic to have endured the test of time. I felt if you want a 1970s tale. Try Valley of the Dolls.
From the opening paragraphs I can already tell this is going to be a memorable book: "...on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of telephone directories, eating the roast hindquarters of the Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school."
Soooo ....the voice was like candy in my ears...because...well..Tom Hiddelston...but...I drifted..many..many...times (sorry for the dots...it's FRIDAY )
pickReread a dear old favourite to get the taste of the film out of my mouth. Not that the film was all that bad, it just wasn't High-Rise. Kinda heartbroken that so many people will come to this with tainted impressions and pre-convcieved ideas.
". . . . [they were the] people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organisations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes."
panClearly a page-turner but with totally forgettable characters and a fairly repetitive (albeit, yes, escalating) conflicts. There is a distinct disconnect between myself and the novel - which may also have been deliberate on the part of the author. While I was mildly unsettled and amused, I did not feel wholly invested in the story. A seething cauldron of raging, uninhibited impulses among supposedly-cultivated people - a total unraveling.
Going to bed with this one as my 14 year old girl types down her notes for an upcoming Geography test on tropical rainforest and deforestation. I see a connection there somewhere.
pickIt's amazing what the trappings of modernity really hide. These buildings are essentially a reflection of the best and worst of humanity. A quick, short, gruesome read. The parallels to "The Lord of the Flies" were very appropriate. Despite the fact that it was bright and sunny, and I had the obligatory frozen coffee in hand, I couldn't help feeling both morbidly fascinated, horrified, stifled. I am now desperate for a lighter, airier read.
Perhaps my obsession knows no bounds, but this is going to make my fricking week.
pickFINALLY finished this one. I picked it up after I saw the movie in April (the movie's pretty good btw); don't know why I stalled so hard. Very unsettling and gross at times, but well worth a read--the writing is so good. Sort of like grown-ups doing Lord of the Flies.
