I’m having a hard time reviewing Material because, while I can safely say I didn’t like it, it’s hardly egregious. I could talk about the sloppy artwork, the mediocre writing, the disjointed narrative threads. I could talk about the footnotes urging me to read this philosopher’s work or that Wikipedia article, shoehorned into the book instead of being organically incorporated into the fiction. I could talk about the unshakable feeling that I’m supposed to think this book is important because it gestures at heavy subject matter, even though it has nothing insightful to contribute. But these things don’t make the book worth hating. Did it irritate me? Absolutely. But I can’t hate it. I just don’t like it.