Goodness me this was a “hard” read. I really struggled with it. I’m a space opera fan but this was far too wordy, poetic and wordy! Good effort but sadly not for me.

I tried to read this arc. I really did but I couldn't get in to it for the life of me. Something about that writing was so off for myself even though the premise was really interesting. I'm really sad about it but oh well, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy it far better than I did.

Reading this book felt like trying to get my (undergraduate) university degree in Philosophy all over again. I dropped out of uni, but I did finish this book, because it was a buddy read on Goodreads.

You see, I had a very specific problem with my university: the arrogance. The professors were all standoff-ish with the students, were frequently rude to us for asking the simplest questions, and they ALL had the mentality "I won't spoon-feed you ANYTHING! You'll have to WORK FOR IT!"... and that was the exact attitude that this book had.

I read two interviews with the author in which he mentions that all of the writing in the book is deliberate, because the role that language plays in our lives is a theme in the book (one of many; no one needed the interview to clarify that, it's pretty obvious). All the flowery, complicated, at times even manic language, is all "part of the big plan" and the author himself says that people should be "patient" with his novel (exact quote: "The reader should approach The Measurements of Decay with a degree of patience. I have written the novel in an ornate style that bucks the minimalist trend." Is he trying to go against the current or something?). I guess that's why he felt comfortable including huge philosophical lectures in every chapter? Every character ends up sounding the same when they spout the same ~deep~ lectures all the time. Maybe that was to show that "philosophy is a timeless thing!!", since the characters are all quite a few decades apart, but that doesn't mean that I enjoyed it.

It's true, the book DOES make you think, and it is very interesting and accomplishing to untangle the lectures and find connections between characters/ plots and meaning in them. But, at least to me, it all stank of "You need to WORK FOR IT! This isn't an easy book like all those best seller titles that people read on the beach!" elitism. Is the book supposed to educate people on philosophy, or even to get them interested in it? Perhaps it has worked or will work on some, but I think it will be alienating to many.

That was a big problem, and also the extremely slow pacing. It moves at glacier speed and takes quite a while to pick up some speed, far beyond the point at which I would have DNFed the book. It is also pretty big at 500+ pages, so you can see that it's not only the language that makes this a challenging read.

However, it would be completely hypocritical to pretend that the book didn't have positive attributes. The writing is beautiful at times (I really liked the quote "film reels all tattered and disused in the shadowy backstage of my mind" What a beautiful analogy), and K. K. Edin is incredibly creative, both at conjuring new worlds for us to see, and combining so many elements seamlessly (sci fi; horror; philosophy; history; even an action/ heist (sort of) part when the Narrator, whom I nicknamed Dick Philosopher, joins a gang)

As I mentioned before, the book also DOES make the reader think, and it earned my respect for that (thus the 3 stars instead of a lower rating). I enjoyed working for answers and connections, but after 400 pages, it got to be a little (a lot) tiring, and reading the book ended up feeling like a chore for me.

Oh, and the ending was spectacular. I think it really tied everything together, and it did feel like it was worth it, a great climax for a pretty lukewarm story.

TL;DR: I'm tired of philosophy being treated like an exclusive club that "only the few, hardworking people!" are let in because "only the things you work hard for are worthwhile! I ain't gonna spoonfeed you anything!", alienating people and making them feel inadequate just for the sake of making a statement.

The prologue was extremely confusing for me. I rarely leave books unfinished but unfortunately had to for this one.

Humans are a fractious species. I know that chimpanzees occasionally go to war with one another and that domesticated dogs can suffer from separation anxiety and that dolphins sometimes get high. But none of the other species on this planet seem so determined to confuse and make themselves miserable. In The Measurements of Decay by K.K. Edin, one of the most overblown books I’ve ever read, the problem with humans is our lack of empathy for each other—at least according to its insane philosopher antagonist. If only we could fully understand one another, he posits (over and over, in increasingly hysterical language), we would stop fighting, feuding, and fretting all the time.

The Measurements of Decay follow three characters across centuries to explore the idea of what might happen if people really could completely empathize with each other—and what it might take to transform a species to make that possible. Sometime in the present or near future, an unnamed would-be philosopher constantly restarts his treatise to solve the ultimate question of why humans cannot really understand one another. In the far future, Tikan Solafstir attempts to disrupt the system of procrustiis and metempsies that allow people to drift into memories and dreams at the price of being constantly surveilled and manipulated. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman named Sielle travels through space and time for her own purposes.

I’m not entirely sure why I finished reading this book. I was interested enough in the summary on the NetGalley site to ask to read it. Who wouldn’t want to read about a woman who could do what Sielle does or what might happen if people were networked together? But the author’s prose is so deliberately purple and pretentiously erudite that I found myself skimming through bad dialogue and exposition more often than not. This style made sense for the philosopher who descends rapidly into insanity. I could probably have handled those sections if the others had been written in a less showy manner. Unfortunately, the bizarre prose runs throughout the novel no matter who the narrator is at the moment.

There are interesting ideas in The Measurements of Decay; I won’t say this book was a completely miserable experience. I appreciated that it offered such a dark vision of forced empathy. On the surface, requiring humans to actually understand what people mean and what their experience is sounds like a good idea. How many problems could we solve if people were no longer allowed to isolate themselves from other people? The issue with this “solution” is that it takes away choice. Who has the right to assume that kind of authority? As I read the chapters from the philosopher’s perspective, all I could think was, “who died and made you god?” Sielle actually sees this perfectly peaceful society on one of her sojourns to the future and is horrified at the blandness and lack of independent thought among those future humans.

The Measurements of Decay is an interesting blend of science fiction and philosophy that some readers might enjoy pondering over. Speaking for myself, I had issues with the way that characters made what I thought were out-of-character decisions, the way questions of free will and choice were glossed over in just one short conversation, and the thesaurus-emptying logorrhea used by so many of the male characters. I finished this book, sure, but I didn’t like it.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.