'This book should not be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force', and there were many times when I felt like doing just that. I don't normally struggle to finish a book, but I did with this one. Apart from the haphazard, disjointed plot, lurching from scene to scene for no apparent reason, the subject matter didn't really appeal, littered as it was with tawdry sexual couplings (and singlings - there was a fair bit of wanking going on, by both the characters and the author). The mystery to me was how Habitus got such uniformly good reviews from likes of New Scientist and Time Out. New Scientist said it was a 'witty often erudite stylish commentary on our pre-millenial condition'. It barely raised a smile with me, and the commentary was more on the state of the author's pot addled grey matter than the human condition, pre-millenial or otherwise.
There were some genuinely good passages from time to time, but all too often we would be zooming off somewhere else to ponder some other bodily function, in dispassionate scientific terms of course, but tasteless nonetheless. This was the problem, the science was generally accurate, but seemed to be designed not to inform or educate, but to show off. All in all, a disappointing read which could only be measurably improved by reducing the constituent pages to their original chemical elements, preferably at a temperature of a thousand degrees Centigrade.
