Reviews for Easy travel to other planets

The average rating for Easy travel to other planets based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-28 00:00:00 Robert Keene The language in this book flows, cool and clear and liquid; it's full of knowledge that, like water, we always carry inside our bodies but which becomes utterly alien, even dangerous, when we submerge ourselves in it too deeply. From the opening page on, this book made me think of the Neutral Milk Hotel song: "How strange it is to be anything at all." Mooney never lets us forget how strange it is to have a body, to copulate, to form a new life within oneself, to suffer an illness, to break a bone, and to die at the end of it all without ever knowing quite what it means. This book is an exercise in defamiliarization. It proves that the human brain can be as sensitive as dolphin skin to the touch of an idea. I hate the star system on Goodreads, because it is meant to evaluate the products of a consumer culture, not the products of the human mind and heart. This book is certainly not for everyone, and it's not even as good as it could possibly be. I sometimes felt Mooney held back from the emotions his characters would necessarily feel -- that the same restraint that makes his prose so limpid sometimes makes his characters seem vague and distant in their grief... I'm thinking especially of how Melissa reacts to a major loss in the last 50 or so pages. I also wish there had been more momentum leading up to the violent, shocking events of the final chapters; I actually set the book aside for awhile in the middle because I didn't feel a sense of urgency to see what happened, since I didn't think much was going to (how wrong I was). But the book was gorgeous and unforgettable, and most of all, it was as persistant as a recurring dream. For that, I'll give it all five of my imaginary stars, here in this information-sick virtual zone.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-22 00:00:00 Stephen Bagby Well, it opens with a graphic scene of hot girl-dolphin sex. You don't get that in a lot of National Book Award winners. But it goes on to discuss love, the way information swamps and shapes us, and what the core elements of human-ness are. A strange and sad and lovely book.