Reviews and Comments

I've enjoyed his music, but would never say I was an Eric Clapton fan. His autobiography popped up as Goodreads deal of the day and I picked it up. I didn't realize how interesting Clapton's life has been, I was most familiar with him from Unplugged forward, so he always seemed like a fairly mellow guitarist.

But his early days were far from mellow, his autobiography goes into plenty of the details of his days as a rock and roll star during the 60's, 70's and 80's and all the drugs, alcohol, girls, addictions, and eventual recovery that entailed. I also never realized how much, and how many people his life cross passed with. A real fascinating and interesting life and glad he shared and I read it.

The book itself goes a bit too much into the details of recordings, producers, managers, and lots of extra details which had me skimming in various parts, but makes a historic record of events.

I've enjoyed other Cory Doctorow books, Little Brother and Homeland both were good, the snippets for Walkaway had me hoping it would improve upon the area I didn't like in his previous books, which are the long explaining dialogues. Unfortunately Walkway doubles down on this format making it really difficult I abandoned all hope and stopped reading about 30% in.

The initial chapter was ok, but the main characters name "Hubert, Etc" is a bit awkward to read, and is so overused it's in practically every sentence. I almost stopped then it was quite annoying, but I was able to train myself to just start skipping over it.

There is a definite odd things going on with names, probably intentional, but makes it hard to read. There is a running "gag" with one character using the wrong name, ever single time, and it got called out and corrected every single time. It felt quite unnatural. A later chapter would be all pronouns and hard to figure out who's talking to who, especially with 4 people in the scene (2 men, 2 woman).

I feel that is the issue with the book, it just doesn't feel natural, the premise and world seem interesting but I couldn't continue with the writing. Such long sermons explaining everything, a simple question like why should I put this there, turns into 10 pages diving deep into social theories. Doctorow's other books had some of the same explaining, but the characters were developed a bit more and there was more story and plot.

I'm glad I bought it to support the author, his other two books I downloaded via open source, but the others I've read of his our much better.