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Overall Opinion of Final Notice by Van Fleisher

Posted: March 1st, 2019, 12:34 pm
by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
This is a discussion topic for the March 2019 Philosophy Book of the Month, Final Notice by Van Fleisher. Please do not post in this topic until you have read the book.
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What is your overall opinion of the book? Did you enjoy reading it? Do you recommend the book to others? Why or why not?

What do you like most about the book? What did you dislike about it if anything?



Overall, I enjoyed reading the book.

I really liked the premise of a watch that can predict when the user dies. I liked the parts where the book focused on that theme and theme of treating of the elderly. However, I think the heavy political advocacy of gun control took away from the more interesting elements.

It has nothing to do with whether I agree or disagree with gun control or the author's arguments for gun control. Rather, I simply feel it took away from the enjoyment of the other much more enjoyable and interesting elements. When it comes to fiction, I prefer fiction that doesn't take strong sides on potentially controversial or disagreeable debates but instead presents thought provoking ideas, possibly presenting both sides of a potential debate. I've read books where even though the author feels one way or the other in real life, the fictional world presented isn't as one-sided and argumentative. In other words, I like fiction that asks tough thought-provoking questions, not that takes very strong sides and simply embeds a very one-sided or partisan partisan argument for that side of an issue. I feel the author failed to achieve that goal when it comes to the issue gun control in the novel, but achieves it when it comes to the idea of wearing a watch that tells you when you die. So I would loved if the author wrote a novel even more about latter and less about former. What do you think?

By all means, I wouldn't mind reading non-fiction arguments for gun control. But I think embedding those one-sided arguments into an otherwise very interesting non-one-sided fictional story simply took away from the otherwise great fiction book. Due to the one major criticism, I would give the book a rating of 9/10.