Not for me, I'm afraid. This was too fragmented and incoherent as far as I was concerned.Sorry that I don't enjoy it as the blurb did promise much, but it really failed to deliver in my opinion.

"Kairos - the right moment."

Thank you NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for providing me with a temporary e-arc.

The Thing Is contains prose, poems, prose-poetry, micro-fiction, quotes and scientific/poetical/philosophical insights about the universe and life.

I am not going to lie. I am disappointed. I knew this was going to bring something different to the table and it totally did, except for the fact that this is totally not a book that can be read at one go. I am halfway through the book and the thoughts or whatever the pieces are supposed to be, they all blended in together and had nothing to separate a piece from another. If it did, maybe that would have helped me to know that this is where a certain piece stops. I would be halfway through the next entirely different, yet, similar piece and then, I would realise that and I would end up feeling disoriented and/or disconnected because it just wasn't a good, fluid transition. And to think it all came down to separators. Something to mark it as a different piece or instance.

This book had every potential to be a delightful experience and a thought-provoking one at that but it just failed to deliver what it was meant to. I have never DNFed reading a book but I couldn't bear it anymore with this so DNFed at 52%. It just became too much when some pieces affected me and I needed to process them but the entire thing, it just ruined my experience with this book.

Such a pity. This was one of my anticipated arc reads. Such a pity. I can only hope for that one day when I could be able to go through with this book but today is not that day. Nor is any day, anytime soon.

Apart from that, I really ADORED the general idea behind this book and man, it's either 2020 or it's just me, but this is tearing me up for not being able to finish this book.
Whatever pieces I connected with and didn't feel disconnected from when it suddenly broke off, they were just so thoughtfully and poetically put. As I said earlier, such a pity.

Potter seems to a gifted writer and I would totally listen to him talk for hours. Days, even. Because some are just so brilliantly written and captured that it is normal for one to want to consume whatever brews inside that mind. I will absolutely be revisiting this work, but for now, I just have to let this go.
At this moment, this was not for me. I am pretty sure if you are someone who likes consuming books in bits and pieces, you would totally like this. It's not like, "I don't recommend this book, at all" or "I'll leave you to decide" because this is really a nice book but yes, I think, I'll just leave you to decide for this one.

Rating: 1.25/5

I can see why people would enjoy this, but it wasn't for me at all. The netgalley description made me think it would be amazing, and I wasn't expecting what it actually was - a hodge podge of sentences and quotes from other works. Most of the time I wasn't really following what was supposed to be going on, if anything. It was a quick read, otherwise I'm not sure I would have finished it.

Hmm, I don't know about this... in some ways it's the quintessential postmodern 'novel' made up as it is of fragments gleaned from other sources: most appositely Eliot's The Wasteland, a poem which is itself constructed from mosaics of cultures... but the narrative seems to be circling the usual existentialist questions trying to capture a sense of life lived always in the shadow of death. There were moment where I thought this might go down a Sebaldian route but it ended up feeling less composed - This made me curious but if it had been longer than it is I might well have DNFed.

this was such a strange book! It read more like a rant than an actual story but the more you read the more sense it makes? It is such a weird concoction of facts and existential questions that I strangely enjoyed very much