The Instructions

Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.

The truth is that I’ll never reclaim the time that I wasted reading The Instructions. I chose not to stop; that’s on me. Perhaps I put too much stock in the 4.1 rating on goodreads. Why do I put so much credence into the opinions of strangers? Why should I care whether someone I don’t know and will never meet likes a book? My tendency to care about what people think of me worries me more. Maybe there’s a larger issue at play…

The Instructions follows Gurion Maccabee across 1,030 pages as he grapples with a messiah complex and fights as frequently as possible. The book would have been much better at half its current length. Instead, we waste time wading through Gurion’s thought process in passages like this:

If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't.

And this:

Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.

And then there are bizarre passages like this, which make more sense in context but still don’t make the book any more enjoyable:

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.

Look, you can’t publish a 1,000+ page book unless people see something in it. I’m sure The Instructions has its merits, but they were lost on me. My experience put me off reading any of Adam Levin’s other work.