Josh Riedel

Fast-paced, engaging, and at times a little disjointed, it's clear that the author knows the world of start-ups and tech inside and out. There were a few spots where I felt the language got a little techy and over my head, but this was infrequent and generally did not detract from the story. There seemed to be veiled warnings within the narrative about how much we, the users of apps/social media, are giving up in terms of personal information, and how the tech moves faster than the legal show more process. Overall, entertaining. show less

Ethan works for a dating app startup that's doing very well... except that it's plagued by a weird bug where users' uploaded pictures sometimes show up as black boxes. But when he stares long enough into one of these boxes, he finds himself briefly transported somewhere else, into some elusive other world.

It's an intriguing premise, and some of what it's trying to do is interesting, but sadly this one just didn't quite work for me. It pretty much lost me early on, because the way that both show more the characters and the author approached the investigation of this "bug" was completely underwhelming. I was expecting something exciting and weird, an appreciation for a mysterious and unexpected thing happening in the world, and instead got something low-key, low-energy, almost blasé. Which would have been fine in its own way, if I felt instead like I was being drawn into this compellingly absurd world where people almost take things like this in stride. Based on what happens in the rest of the novel, I do think that was, in fact, the idea. This is clearly intended as a work of high-tech magic realism with a satirical edge, an approach that can certainly work well for me. Most recently, Calvin Kasulke pulled it off brilliantly (and hilariously) with Several People are Typing. This novel seems to be taking its inspiration more from Robin Sloane, though, who I've had somewhat more mixed reactions to, but who's mostly entertaining enough to carry me through despite my reservations. This one, not so much. I never fully entered and accepted its world and the impossible weirdnesses in it, nor felt like I was vibing with the author as we both looked at things with a shared satirical wink. Mostly I just sat there thinking that this was all a load of nonsense, and that nothing else -- the characters, the parody of Silicon Valley culture, the attempts at philosophical moments -- was interesting enough to make up for that.

Mind you, maybe a lot of this is just me. Very possibly readers who don't catastrophically trip and fall over their own suspension of disbelief early on may find more to like about it. show less

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Please Report Your Bug Here is about a tech worker at a dating app who discovers a bug that transports him to another world very unlike his own. The book is set in and around San Francisco, and pretty much every tech personality makes an appearance, from tech bros to continually entrepreneurial founders to devs in hoodies working for days on end.

I’m a software engineer so the premise was intriguing to me. We encounter show more bugs all the time that do unexpected things and I loved the idea of a bug doing the impossible. It was easy to feel connected to the characters because they all felt so real, and the tech scene in the Valley was described perfectly. I had several LOL moments because some of the scenes were just so relatable to my everyday life.

I ended up really liking the book even though I didn’t trust some of the characters. And the narrator, Ethan, would sometimes annoy me with how naïve he was, but I suspect that was the point. At times I did find the story hard to follow and felt it jumped around a bit, especially in the beginning, but again, that could be by design of Ethan’s character and an illustration of how he grows in his thinking throughout the book.

I’ve read The Circle and The Every, both about big tech companies that become all-consuming, and they both felt like you only got the surface of the company, just enough to make it plausible but not quite believable. The Corporation in PRYBH is very believable and feels like an actual monopolistic company I could be reading about in the news tomorrow. Having that kind of reality in the book made the mystery of the bug even more intriguing and a bit scary, because I can see the plausibility of big tech taking some of the measures the Corporation did.

Overall, I really liked it. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. show less

The summary had me excited for this one. A scifi thriller involving the discovery of parallel worlds set in a rising corporate dystopia had potential. Unfortunately, the advertising is way off. This really can't be called a 'thriller', it's not 'adventurous' or 'adrenaline-packed', it's a slog. The plot is meandering and the scifi and mystery elements take a backseat to a fairly repetitive exploration of the main character's dissatisfaction with his career and relationships. While I didn't show more necessarily dislike the main character, I wish that he'd been more than incidentally involved with the plot or that he'd gotten some growth as a person. The stakes for him were always relatively low and it felt like he was just drifting through the whole book.

I think if the summary had been more realistic about it being a slow, introspective literary work with a smattering of magical/scifi elements I might have been better able to engage with it as it is and enjoy it more, but even still I don't think it would be more than a 3 star read. show less