Alone With You in the Ether

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Their personalities had two or three distinct traits and little to nothing else to cling onto, as a reader, as we meander throughout their relationship that seems all consuming to them, but, as an outsider, deeply confused me because they speak for hours on hand but manage to say nothing in the process. Their connection is superficial and deeply obsessive (they both don’t have a single friend and barely reach out to their family because they are all consumed by each other), and it concerns me that their ending connection feels like a triumph when they are not in a good place to be in a relationship. SCENE: The air that afternoon has the crisp, weatherless quality that only happens in Chicago for about a week in mid-September. The sun is bright overhead, and the leaves on the tree above him are mostly undisturbed. this is a character driven book and the plot is the characters lives so don’t go into it saying “omg it’s so pretentious” like that’s the point. it’s a book that you have to go into wanting to put some thoughts into. it’s a book that could be dissected for ages. aldo and regan are so made for each other. their conversations, their humour, their minds fit perfectly together like a puzzle piece.

Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake | Goodreads Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake | Goodreads

People who are difficult to love still deserve to be loved, and that is captured so elegantly in Alone With You in the Ether. I really loved this book and had goosebumps at multiple moments, it is very moving and searingly gorgeous at times. I’m not one usually for a romance novel, but this feels rather different than what one would expect. It is certainly a literary work, and all the heady topics of time theory and reflections and analysis of art are handled in accessible yet ponderous ways that are folded productively into the larger themes of the book. This was my first Olivie Blake and I will certainly read others, it is a book without any fantastical elements though still is undeniably magical. Hexagons. Quantum groups. Symmetry. Nature loved balance, especially symmetry, but rarely managed it. How often did nature create perfection? Almost never. Math was different. Math had rules, finite and concrete, but then it just kept going. The problem and the thrill of abstract algebra was that Aldo had been studying it in depth for over seven years, and he could study it for seven million more and still understand almost nothing. He could spend infinite lifetimes studying the mathematical basis of the universe and the universe would still not make sense. In two weeks it might snow, might rain sideways, and then this park would not be available to him. He could get arrested for not-smoking or die at any moment, and then he’d have to do his thinking in jail or not at all, and the universe would remain unsolved. His work would never be done, and that alone was tragic, exhilarating, perfect. This is a love story, but not a love story, because it's complex, it shatters, it sometimes has jagged edges, which gives everything life. Which gives life to love. The day before was nothing special. It was special only because of how unspecial it was, or perhaps by how unspecial it would very soon become. Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was a funny little consequence of time. I will not understand how this book is classified as a romance when it felt like a horror story in my eyes. Following two vulnerable and flawed characters who come together to form a deeply unhealthy, sex-addicted, codependent relationship, this book left me baffled that people can romanticize and idealize the relationship between Aldo and Regan when I was actively rooting for them to separate and seek help.Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” —Chloe Gong, author of NYT Bestselling These Violent Delights

Alone With You in the Ether Paperback – 20 June 2020 Alone With You in the Ether Paperback – 20 June 2020

She doesn’t know what to deal with first, the use of ‘love’ or the fact that it isn’t what she was expecting, or the idea that anyone can possibly think fondly of her brain when she has put almost no effort into molding it. Was it hard to get into it? Absolutely. I wasn't able to connect at all for the better part of the first two chapters and then they went to the church and to say I ascended during that scene would be an understatement.The beginning might confuse you and might leave you scratching your head but godddd, this story was so beautiful. Push through and you're going to fall in love with them. Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.’ To all the other reviewers of this book....did we...did we read the same thing? I've missed something major here. The prose is pretty but tangential, half the time it feels like it leaves off in the middle of a thought and while I'm mentally trying to fill in the blanks, I've lost all feeling for the story and characters. Its outer shell was pretty but otherwise it was empty on the inside. The adorableness of the first half of the novel begins to give way to doubts and fears, and this makes a good case for how someone cannot be “fixed” by inserting another person into their lives and that emotional high and romantic monomania will eventually return to the difficulties of love. But in the blazing glory of their initial infatuations we see clear into them and the very essence of their beings, with Regan representative of art and Aldo representative of science. It is why they continuously say they love each other’s brains more than any other aspect of one another, they are trying to love the pure consciousness and essence of the other. Their looks, fears and flaws become just as ornamental as the time and art theories of their conversations that point like maps to their underlying feelings, and I find it a rather beautifully bittersweet theme to place art and science together as a romantic couple hoping their union is an eternal, cosmic force that can even bend time to its will. Aldo’s mind approaches life and love like a math problem, and with his bee obsession I just assume glimpsing in his mind is like looking at this book:

Alone with You in the Ether - Macmillan

i know it says a love story on the front, but this book is very much about mental health + choosing to not be medicated for mental health conditions. it was a hard read for me, but a very impactful one. and olivie blake just is just such a talented author and the sentences she is able to string together, about really dark and hard to talk about things, really resonated with me in a way other words just never have before. The mechanics of his ritual were simple: Raise the joint to his lips, breathe in, breathe out, let his hand fall. This was the formula. Formulas he understood. He brought the joint to his lips, inhaled, and exhaled into nothing. Two unusual people find intellectual and emotional stimulation with each other, shaking up their stagnant lives. Aldo’s right thumb beat against his thigh, percussive to the rhythm of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” The last third of the book illustrated love in the form of sex. Therapy in the form of sex. Transcendence in the form of sex. Apology in the form of sex. This normally would not bother me, but between Regan and Aldo, there was sex, obsession, co-dependence and very little else. Do they really love each other? I honestly cannot tell.Blake delivers seemingly effortless storytelling that loops through exciting metafiction techniques, such as a whole host of narrators intruding in on the story in part 1, including an “overzealous Cubs fan,” or “an aging, arthritic man in possession of many books” as well as stage direction details. It ushers us into the narrative with a fun and frenetic cinematic energy. I would have enjoyed it if Blake continued this style more through the book as I missed it, but once the characters are established it instead turns more inward as they attempt to have more of a harness on their own narratives. The perspective rotates between Regan and Aldo, offering both internal and external perspectives on each other creating more dynamic characters but also allowing us to detect inconsistencies that show how a self-image is often a slight fiction. This is particularly true for Regan who ‘ was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty, she hated it, was repulsed by it and by her own truths especially,’ and the way the readers perceptions on Regan morph over the course of the book—and with new revelations on her life—emphasizes the way a person seems always in flux. But most notably, this sashaying of perspectives is like a needle threading the two together until, at the end, we witness them as a seamless whole viewed from the outside with a conversation entirely narrated of he said and she said instead of a duality of perspective. if art is supposed to make you feel something, then this book is art in its purest form, for there is no emotion this book hasn’t made me feel. For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision. I’m sorry I keep changing my rating, I just genuinely can’t decide what to rate this. I like it more than my other 2 star reads though) This is our love, do you see it? This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn’t, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.

Alone With You in the Ether - AbeBooks Alone With You in the Ether - AbeBooks

struggling with mental health issues myself i really related to some of the aspects that regan dealt with in this book, it really felt like i was understood. i really liked the sciencey part of the book too, made me feel super smart even though i know nothing about quantum physics or the concept of time travelling. For both of them, life is a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability, until six conversations with a stranger form the variable that glitches the entire simulation. This book was an incoherent mess (intentional I know) that deserves an incoherent mess of a review. Here we go.Mm.” Masso already knew that, but the asking was another ritual. “What are you thinking about today?” Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” — Chloe Gong, author of New York Times bestselling These Violent Delights The author went overboard trying to make the story and the characters seem deep and complex, and it turned out unbearably pretentious, tedious, overwritten, and straight-out boring instead. I couldn’t bring myself to care even a little bit no matter how hard I tried. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes Masters of Death, a story about vampires, ghosts, and death itself. cried, sobbed, threw up, cut off all my hair, threw myself down the stairs, crash my car into a grocery store, drank bleach straight from the bottle, lit a cigarette next to my dads oxygen tank, and entered a lions den. this is the best written book i’ve come across.