More to the point, the writing here is so vertiginous, impenetrable, and idiosyncratic that I kept hearing a (non-existent) Smiths song in my ear as I read: "You can't tell me what to do, oh no, but I know you'd love to".
So vertiginous was the ascent from earth to the heavens that everyone assumed the road of scientific progress would continue ever upwards.
It's a vertiginous experience that grows increasingly hilarious, and the joke is on us.
They're all-or-nothing affairs, demanding full immersion in vertiginous whimsies that often have childlike tunes at their core.
The action sequences in which Tris has to prove herself, even against her will, have a pure vertiginous vigor that feels like a dramatized funhouse ride.
First thing, I stepped outside my bedroom on to a vertiginous balcony that is embedded in architectural history, before descending four storeys to the canteen.
American author Francine Prose, in her contribution, explains how "since this movement started, I've been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I've woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we're all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it".
One of the most vertiginous drops in child mortality has occurred here, in a country so poor that half the children are stunted by malnutrition, so bereft of doctors and nurses that workers with 10th-grade educations dispense antibiotics.
Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict — and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege.
