A good writer--a dreary journey
341979
Books that come into my house  end up donated to the 2nd-hand store, shredded in the compost heap or
given safe haven in my library.  This will make it to the library. but not  to the breadbaker shelf.  It's a
good enough read, though dry-as-dust.  It loses stars because  it is neither informative nor inspirational.
His search takes him mainly to French bakeries-- the trouble with  French bakeries is that they  use French-type flour.
You can get pricey french-style flours here but, oddly, he gives  standard american recipes using american flours.
Then, for flatbread, he picks the very french  socca. although he westernizes it with cornmeal.
Okay,. so it's his journey and he chose to mainly ignore the exciting stuff coming out of the
U.S. but I fault the book  for not giving  a hint of its eurocentric viewpoint in the cover and first pages.
As for inspiration,  how can one get inspired by  a writer who seems  slightly bored with
it all.  Here is how he reacts when the revered Alice Waters  compliments his bread--
  "It was a nice moment and quite telling."
Telling of what he doesn't say  and, given his low-key response to Water's kudo,, do I really want to
to know.
He is so passionless, so flat and grey, that he manages to get through the whole book without  ever
letting  us know if he found a perfect loaf or even one he really. really enjoyed.
1596615
This is a five-star book if you just want to know about the writing, and the ability of the author to tell a great story.  I read it over the course of two days, and eagerly turned page after page.

But at the end of it, I am not uplifted in any way by the stories of any of the characters.  There was a bit of redemption for the main character, but overall, the characters are incredibly flawed humans who are not looking to change. Indeed, that's likely what makes this such a good tale... but it left me thinking less of the human spirit--and fervently hopeful that I never meet any people like this group.
2547863
This book does have some lovely writing in it. There are moments when I thought, "ah, at last, this is going to get good" and then two pages later I was back to feeling bored and antsy. The writing is clever in some spots and very funny but overall, those bright spots just aren't enough.
There are interesting moments such as the lessons given about art history but Frayn goes into them in far too much detail such that they become boring and tedious. The characters tend to do things which are unbelievable several times over and in the end, I only finished it because it was for my bookclub and I was the one who made the recommendation to begin with.
3987515
I wanted to like this book. At first, the writing was superb. The images were soft and crisp, like newly fallen snow swirling in a snow globe. The two novellas focused on loss and its impact on everyday living -- the heartbreaking feeling of trying to put one foot in front of the other while it feels like you are wearing heavy boots filled with rocks when climbing up a steep hill.

I wanted to like this book. The characters were compelling and likable. The emotions expressed were described accurately and poignantly.

I wanted to like this book, but alas, I grew weary and it felt like the newly fallen snow became gray and slushy.
82238
I gave this three stars because the writing is good, but it took me weeks to read it.  I know people deal with grief in different ways, but this read more like a novel than a memoir.  My sympathy ended when she sought out sexual encounters (one with a young man hardly grown) to counter her loneliness.  It seems like a shoddy way to honor the husband she claims to cherish so much.  Others may like it, but I wish I had my money back.
731224
She is an excellent writer but I'm a little perplexed about why she began with the death of her grandmother's mother; then the suicide of her mother; then the aunt's death;then with her own role as a mother; then the grandmother's death; then with her daughter's beginning role as a mother....then failed to connect them.  Once her grandmother mused, "I wonder what would have happened if I'd gone to live with my grandparents."  Why was the aunt Rue mentioned so prominently if we were not going to learn what estranged her from her mother?  There was no mention of her son as a child but he reappears by sending a box of gifts from South America; how and why was he there?  I can understand the need to explore our own "worlds below," but this one seemed boring to the author.  Therefore the issues that she raised were treated as page fillers, rather than roads on the path to the past.
  Was she making a statment about the mental illness of her mother and the hatred harboured by her aunt?  How did the exhaustive look into the lives of her grandparents impact on the lives of her aunt and her mother?
  Any of these characters and their milieus could have been interesting, but after Miller mentioned them she just left them there.  That's how I felt when I finished this book: abandoned.
220273
My title sums it up: While this is not a long book, it feels almost interminable; like eating a healthful meal which has the taste and consistancy of sand. This impression may be caused by the fact that it was written in a different era, or in a genre (the personal essay) in which the twists and turns of the author's thought become as important as his conclusions. I personally find this tedious.

Wilson's book is a good introduction to a large number of authors and their postitions; but it is uninspiringly written, and he is left with conclusions that are unhelpful for daily life.
3395038
Ms. Lahiri is great at describing a room, food, and one's inner chatter.  Very nice narrative.  You can picture her sitting in a room and typing a detailed description of the couch, the drapes, the walls -- but this is not very good writing if that's all there is and pretty much that is as good as it gets.  She does a nice job of capturing immigrant and first-generation American angst and how Americans can be culturally insensitive, but it seems tired and whiny rather than engaging.

There's nothing much going on in this novel.  Even when the reader approaches the upcoming climax of the story and she teases the reader into thinking finally there will be some conflict, some emotion, some drama, some dialogue... the author just drops it, moves on to a sort of epilogue and backstories and narrates the would-be climax which diminishes it further. It's as if she's afraid to have her characters really face each other.  The important scenes seem hidden.

Which is not surprising, given the protagonist, Gogol Ganguli. He is a passive, bored and boring person who never grows, never learns anything about life, always sees the cloud in every silver lining.  He is ashamed of his Indian background, takes no joy in things American or anything else in his upscale yuppie life.  He never leads life, he lets life lead him.  So others are always calling the shots.  This might work if he finally took charge of his life in the end, but even that doesn't change. Why should we care much about this man?

The author milks the title, regarding how Gogol got his name, for all its worth and much too much more, which further drags the story.  Like the climax, this sub-plot gives the reader anticipation of bigger things, but there's no there there.  It just peters out into descriptive depression like most of the setups in the book.
2124419
Elizabeth McCracken is certainly a writer with potential. This slim novel kept me turning the pages yet somehow, disappointingly, left me slightly empty at the end.
This novel does put up some difficult questions.  Constantly we are faced with the bitter taste of the unusual situation  developing. Instead of being enchanted by Peggy's love for this Giant, we  question the practability of it.
With a disappointing sense of  inevitability, we read on until the Giant passes away. It has been  foreshadowed throughout, though any emotional impact it could have created  is deadened by the heavy, fragile nature of McCracken's prose. This is a  novel, not a poem. That is not to say prose shouldn't be beautiful. If it  is the author's inclination, then fine, but in reading the 'Giant's House',  I felt rather like a midget wading through the Amazon rainforest.
Interesting, but could have been better.
874074
I will start this by saying I am a huge fan of this author, and feel terrible being the lowest review.

It's a good read, if you are a fan of the more melancholy, it's a great read, but as a long time fan of this person, she's out of her element. This writer excels at humor, and timing, and a dry, surreal wit, which was not to be had here. These stories are dark, thoughtful, but not always coherent and loosely strung. They lack the T. Kingfisher cleverness in a haze of "realistic" browns and greys, and barely seem to be of the same writer who conjured up salmon trees, questing shrews and many a whimsical beast. It was not quite the same darkness that their comic project could be, but the sort that felt much too much like every other darker and grittier side of fantasy.

The boars story is charming, the book is honestly worth that alone, and the price is right. So please, do not take this as being a poor choice, but rather a very average one, from a far above average author.
1922292
This book was a little bit hard to get into because of the writing style. As many can agree, the main character is irritating most of the time. If he was supposed to be an admired and heroic character it would have made for bad writing, but to me it was clear that she was purposely portraying him in an unflattering light.

While he is on his adventures with his friend, he only appears to be naive and foolish, prone to flights of fancy, mood swings, and quick changes in philosophy (as one reviewer suggested, "bipolar"). This section of the book had a lot of long-winded descriptions that I skimmed past.

When he ends up in Paris and meets a girl, he goes from being a foolish youth to being a self-important, pretentious chauvinist. When he espouses ideas, it doesn't seem that any of them are originally or genuinely believed by him; it seems he just says a lot of psuedo-intellectual things to make himself feel brilliant. He falls in love with a girl, pressures her for sex and cohabitation when he wants it, and when he gets over his infatuation, he only thinks of her in terms of meeting his needs. There are several instances when he is directly hypocritical ("it's one thing for me to say or do such a thing, but for a woman, it's unacceptable") which are a bit over the top. It would have been more realistic either for him to not realize his hypocrisy or to come up with rationalizations for it.

During this time he is preoccupied with writing a book. Based on his lack of introspection and empathy for others, I didn't think he would be a good writer. Let's just say with both the book and the girl, he gets what he deserves.

Throughout all phases of the book, I lacked sympathy for him most of the time, because he was still a rich kid. His outdoorsy adventures were a break from living like a rich kid, but in Paris he still seemed to live a mostly decadent lifestyle.

The ending of the book was realistic in that all his issues were not magically solved. In the end, he comes to terms with being an average person--not a wild adventurer, and not a brilliant poet. There is endless advice about following your dreams and seizing the day--but the downside of that is that people can't just enjoy the little things because they feel they need to constantly chase grandiose opportunities. He follows (what he thought were) his dreams, but he also learns to deal with reality. It is rare to hear the message that not everyone can be a star and that it's good to be an ordinary person, but I felt that it was in a way the moral of the story.
1651445
I was interested in reading Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," his record of the "Beat Generation," after seeing it at #55 on the Modern Library's Best 100 English Language novels of the Twentieth Century.  After finishing the book, I'm left scratching my head in dissatisfied wonder.
Kerouac narrates under the pseudonym of Sal Paradise, as a writer whose career is underway.  He meets a character named Dean Moriarty, a bad seed who aspires to be a writer and admires Paradise's work.  The two of them crisscross the country with various friends and girlfriends looking for life experiences which turn out to be pretty mundane after all.  That's it.  That's all the book is about.
What frustrated me about the book is not that Paradise and Moriarty are unappealing characters (they think it's okay to cheat on girlfriends, abandon wives and children, and pilfer food and gas from modest small-town storekeepers), but rather that Kerouac is such a bland writer with little to no penchant for description.  The people and places he writes about are potentially fascinating, but Kerouac attacks his material with all the insight and depth of a fourth grader writing his "What I Did During My Summer Vacation" report.  His descriptions of Hollywood, San Francisco, Mexico, the jazz clubs, etc., etc., places of intrigue and passion, are so stoic they defy belief.
"Beat" seems to be an adjective Kerouac used as a synonym for tired or worn-down, which I suppose he meant to refer to his generation.  His generation surely deserves a better representation than this.
2974101
Not a bad book, but not quite good, either.

I gave it four stars because the writing is really spectacular, the character development is just amazing and it's just a well-written story all around.  Unfortunately, the plot is neither that interesting or exciting.  The suspense is lethargic, and the climax felt almost like an afterthought.
4910167
There is a lot to take in with this story. There is much that is dirty, ugly and even evil but it is told in a way that makes it all come to life in an attitude of acceptance.  The depths of the characters make them familiar and enigmatic at the same time. Theroux is a master of description; I could see, feel and even smell the scenes in this book.  At one point in the book, he even adds himself as a character -- truly a fascinating turn of the pen.  This book is well written but in the end, I didn't like the story itself.  Jerry, the writer with the dead hand (in more ways than one) begins the story by admitting that his lifestyle is also his biggest failing.  He keeps himself unavailable and his relationships superficial.  Now he looks at the twilight of his life faced with no real family, friends or companions to speak of.  And then something changes (that is for the story to tell, not me) and he is immersed in obsession and passion and acts in a way completely foreign to him.  Unfortunately, when the story resolves, Jerry doesn't seem to be that far off from where he started and neither was I. That disappointed me, so 3 stars it is. I would recommend this book to aspiring writers. To anyone who wants to tour India, it could be a great balance to the usual fairytale travelogues.
4289147
This reads like an imitation of the late Umberto Eco, who taught the (fictional) narrator of this rambling quest. I'll call him Adrian. He's told by a secretive (naturally) cabal nicknamed the Nomo that he's the descendant of the last Byzantine ruler, who fell at Constantinople's conquest by the Ottomans in 1453. This results in a scavenger hunt of sorts that leads him to not only the highlights of Byzantium in Turkey and Greece today but to Western Europe, the Americas, over and over. Those more patient with this set-up may be dazzled by the intricacy of the path, but I was weary.

Annoyingly to me, the mystery writer Selcuk Altun himself appears as a minor character a few times. This self-referential tale telling can seem adept when told by a master, but clumsy when told by an acolyte. Adrian is smug and snobbish. He relates in unnecessary detail the universities, divorces, and careers his interlocutors have tallied up, the hotels he frequents, the meals he eats, the pairs of international prostitutes summoned up. Those he meets rarely gain three-dimensional status, outside of the object of his desire, and even she comes and goes, flickering in and out. Oddly, whatever he does with the prostitutes is never detailed, resulting in an airless, hermetic rendering of luxury. He castigates the lesser tourists (it never occurs that he too is one at a more privileged level) who clog the likes of L.A., Venice, and his native Istanbul. We can't all be him

This noblesse-oblige attitude sours the tale. The author tosses in musings about Beckett, say, out of nowhere, and this novel reads more like a travel diary of an unpleasant, if erudite, aesthete. While his native Galata district in Istanbul in the novel's start and the wonders of Hagia Sophia near its conclusion make for memorable glimpses of the Byzantine resonance, too much of the novel fails to convince. For instance, in one of his many jet-set itineraries, he stays in Lausanne. He says he reads all six volumes of Gibbon's history. Why and how long--six days, weeks, or months, is not indicated, and the reader is left with no clear idea of why this stop happened or the significance of one of the thousands of such factoids that fill these hermetic, self-congratulatory pages. Adrian remains a cipher, a figurehead to channel the past through a dreary narration.
3022668
First, the book showed up quickly and in good condition. As for the writing and the stories themselves, I am trying to catch up on reading the great authors. My sister-in-law suggested Dubliners, and everyone speaks so reverently about James Joyce, so when it arrived I read it pretty quickly. I thought the subject matter was dull and the prose were vague and self-indulgent. Several of the tales were confusing to the point I sought the meaning through literary experts on-line. "The Gallants" is one example. The reverence which Joyce is given is confusing to me. Perhaps I am not sufficiently erudite to appreciate his style, and I have just ordered "Finnegan's Wake" to make one more attempt, but it seems to me that a great writer's stories should actually tell a story - Dubliners really left me wanting.
3620661
Personally, I found this book to be of uneven quality. It has flashes where it is very good indeed, and then there are sections where I thought that he was meandering.

It is not an easy book, and I did read it slowly. I may well read it again. The overall tone is sombre, and the parts that I like are when he discusses a photograph, because this made me a lot more sensitive to what is in the photo, and what the story could possibly be. This is the singular most achievement of this set of writings.

I am not sure about that section on his mother, but the pain of her loss, and his love for her shine through. This part is deeply personal, and I must admire him for being able to share this.