I spent roughly six hours (not to brag) reading An Absolutely Remarkable Thing today. I have been listening to the audiobook occasionally for about two weeks and have been halfway through before I picked it up again today. I wasn’t planning on finishing it today. It was just that I was gripped by the book and really wanted to find out what happened in the end. I used to watch or read book reviews before or while reading a book. And this was very upsetting because no books are perfect and every time, I would find some negative reviews which made me doubt the worthiness of investing so much time in a book and made the reading experience (if I did continue to read the book) less enjoyable. But this time, I learnt the better way and restrained myself from doing so until I finished the book.
*mild spoiler alert*
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is about a girl name April May who stumbled upon a peculiar sculpture which she and her friend Andy made a video about and turned out to be one of the many identical ones sent by aliens to various locations in major cities on earth. The fact that she made first contact with it and her involvement in subsequent events turned her from an ordinary 23-year-old who hates her job to a top-tier celebrity with huge following on social media. The novel is kind of a genre bender. It’s not a typical sci-fi story like 2001: A Space Odyssey nor a typical young adult love story.? ?
I think the biggest theme of the novel is what fame can do to a person. There are of course lots of benefits. Fame netted April lots of money: she paid off her student loans and got new fancy apartments. It also gave her a voice: she became a regular guest in many cable news and had millions of followers on social media. But on her ascent to fame, she also kind of lost her self-identity and became a tool and a vehicle for promoting an ideology. She was dehumanized and became a symbol. Fame is also addictive. She was afraid of losing the spotlight and did terrible things to keep herself at the center of attention. Getting famous also means that inevitably someone will hate you and the knowledge that a sizeable number of people are hating you right now is not easy to deal with.
The book also shed some light on polarization of opinions. There was a line that I can only vaguely remember: it is difficult to define what we believe but it is easy to spot what we hate and scold people with opposing views. In the novel, this became clear when April became obsessed with vehemently defending herself against a group of people who believed aliens were here to invade. A clear line was drawn between the two groups of people and cool-headed conversations were nowhere to be found.
The book was about relationships, too. The book was narrated from April’s perspective and her relationships with Andy, Robin, Maya, and Maranda were all very interesting (even twisted too some extent) and convincing. Andy, Maya and April had been a trio since college and April’s overnight fame put a strain on their relationships. Robin and Maranda met her after she became famous and literally at the center of history, so they were kind of deferential to her and obeyed basically her every request.
My last thought is not about the book. While writing this article, I thought about the balance of making writing relatively smooth and quick by paying minimal attention to accuracy and thinking really hard about every word. I was more inclined to the latter and sometimes spent hours writing a 300-word essay. This gave me the privilege to think about things like structuring and logic. But sometimes I felt that sentences I wrote this way were a bit rigid. And it also made me afraid to talk or write in English when given a limited time. I was quite relaxed when writing this article and I felt that it gave me the freedom to focus more on what I want to say instead of how to say it, which surprisingly gave my writing a better flow.
Back to the book. It isn’t a hard read and since the plot is quite intriguing, it’s easy to be seized by the plot before realizing having read several chapters. Highly recommended for those looking for something not so serious but also thought-provoking. Or if you happen to like aliens or social media, you should also give it a shot.?
