The Humans

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You shouldn’t have been born. Your existence is as close to impossible as can be. To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.

This was an interesting list, I thought. It seems that the use would mostly be solving/proving other problems, and possibly help in computing. A brilliant exploration of what it is to love, and to be human, The Humans is both heartwarming and hilarious, weird, and utterly wonderful. One of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. S J Watson a b "Matt Haig: "We live in a world designed to make us feel we're constantly missing out" ". Cambridge News. 2 April 2015 . Retrieved 2 October 2016. I wasn’t that interested in the mathematics aspect, but I did enjoy most of the various observations about humanity. I just had trouble buying into some of those observations coming the way they did from the character they did at the time they did. The long list of “Advice for a Human” did get tedious for me though. I liked it better mixed in with the story rather than in one concentrated dose.

As I read this, at first, I thought it was about mental health, but by the end I felt it was about morality, ethics and just plain being decent. It could have been about mental health, but my takeaway was that it was not. A Boy Called Christmas (Canongate Books, 2015) illustrated by Chris Mould LCCN 2015-43442 ISBN 9780399552656

Tales of Connection (Van Ditmar, 2021), a selection of stories from Notes on a nervous planet, The comfort book and Reasons to stay alive.You know how you think your family is pretty normal until you bring someone over to meet them and you see everything and everyone anew through his eyes? And suddenly you realize not only is your family not normal but in fact populated by circus monkeys? But they’re YOUR circus monkeys, so even if that outsider has a point or two about thei The alien confusion and observations are amusing but could get repetitive so I hope that will develop a little more.

In August 2012 my brother died by suicide. In the dark days and weeks immediately after his death I read almost incessantly. I couldn't sleep because when I closed my eyes all I could see was his body (I had to go to the mortuary with my father to formally identify his body.) When I was awake I read so I could bear the raw grief ripping at my heart. I believe that it's thanks to books I survived those days, I'm not sure how I'd have coped without books giving me a respite from my at times overwhelming reality. I viewed this book as a short, light-hearted, derivative story (I'd forgotten all about the film Dave until Alison referred to it) but none the worse for that (what isn't derivative nowadays?). While not hysterically amusing it did keep me entertained. A quark is not the smallest thing. The wish you have on your death-bed – to have worked harder – that is the smallest thing. Because it won’t be there. Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom's best tales" Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. From the alien’s naked (but unembarrassed) entry to our planet right through to the end, where he understands us better than we understand ourselves, this warm-hearted novel never misses a beat. Scotland on Sunday

Let this book help you rethink about life and see its beauty. Give it a moment and you would not regret it! Haig displays a wise understanding of the human condition and exploits to the hilt the vantage point that he has given his narrator. Many anthropological, sociological and evolutionary texts often invite the reader to view the world as if it is being viewed from an alien sociologist/scientist’s perspective. Haig converts that into a novel length observation about the humans, and adds a twist: instead of observing only from a constant alien perspective, he makes the vantage point an ever shifting one - that of a continually evolving perspective that is moving closer and closer to that of the human. Haig once said he didn’t want to be seen as “Mr Depression”, but is that now inevitable? “I can’t control how other people see me,” he says. “I’m just grateful that I’ve got the freedom, thanks to my publisher, to write about what I want to write about. If I suddenly want to write a fairytale, or about Father Christmas or vampires or aliens, I can do it.” He enjoys the genre-busting variety, although he jokes about having a less “messy” writing career. “I dream about getting a detective – obviously, a detective with mental health problems – and following him through [all my books], but I haven’t found my magic detective yet.”Except for the fact that people just talked about his experience in sly references not head on. Even his family didn't deal with it well. I thought what was more impressive was the kid's reaction to the father's issue. His brush with suicide was moving - I felt his dispair with life. Writer: Matt Haig; Reader: Bryony Hannah; Abridger & Producer: Jeremy Osborne (7 December 2020). "The Midnight Library by Matt Haig". The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. BBC. BBC Radio 4 . Retrieved 11 December 2020. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.” This book kind of reminds me of We Are the Ants in that way. It's a coming of age story that involves aliens... and it has an extremely negative and pessimistic view of the world and humanity, until the main character slowly reaches an arc when they realize how beautiful and wonderful and meaningful life on Earth can be. It has the same overall message, which is probably why I loved this book so much. On the note of the plot point where the aliens kill a mathematician to slow down advancement I found it chilling to see the IRL headline from a week or so ago that a nuclear scientist was killed in Iran (presumably to slow down their program). Fact meets fiction, etc.