Bingo: I think I’m too late for this to count, but just in case I’m not, I’m counting this for the rec’d square, because my sister recommended it to me. And that makes this my 3rd bingo!
“The Humans” is about a body-snatching alien who has to pretend to be human, and in the process, falls in love with humanity and life itself. This extraterrestrial visitor is impersonating Andrew Martin, a Cambridge professor who has just proved the Riemann hypothesis. After killing Martin, the bodysnatcher’s mission is to destroy any evidence of the proof and eliminate anyone else who might now about it, because that mathematical knowledge would make humanity too dangerous. However, instead of quickly finishing the mission and heading back to his homeworld, the bodysnatcher finds himself procrastinating his murders and becoming fascinated with the strange, illogical, complex humans he is getting to know.
This book had some beautiful prose and fun observational humor. I enjoyed our alien protagonists musing on mental illness, (“Humans, as a rule, don’t like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead,”) music, (“Listening to music, I realized, was simply the pleasure of counting without realizing you were counting,”) and journalism (“War and money seemed so popular on the news, it should have more accurately been titled The War and Money Show.”) Haig has a real knack for creating pithy, quotable statements that stick with you after reading. Ultimately though, this book worked better as a collection of pithy statements than it did as a story. The ending was quite predictable, and the writing got too schmaltzy and self-helpy for me. Overall, I thought it had an interesting premise and some great writing, but failed to really come together as a story.