Josh Krysak
*4.5 stars. What to say, Ann Patchett is a master and this is an excellent book about what makes a life and the stories we remember and the ones we forget and how the moments that truly shape and make our lives are often captured in the stories that just become a part of the act of living - not the big moments that take on a life of their own.
When I began reading Gus Moreno's This Thing Between Us, I had moved toward it intentionally as the fall days darkened earlier, wanting to gravitate to books and stories that unsettle and then settle cozy in their unsettled-ness around you and won't let go.
I had moderate expectations, with no foreknowledge of the author, but a few glowing recommendations from some trusted book podcasters. I'm glad I got their message.
I had to slow my reading down to make the book last a few days and not spend a night devouring it whole.
This slim existential crisis in written form is woven with heart and life and even humor while brimming with fear, sadness, death and horror. What a feat and what an incredible testament to the power of grief. Moreno uses it to elevate horror to reveal the terrible questioning and cavernous emptiness that we all must endure for seasons of our lives, but wraps it in incredible storytelling, sitting on any ham fists, and letting his prose do the talking. I loved this book.
*I must include a spoiler alert because as I read it, and even as the deaths of humans were shared in bloody visceral details, I thought of my wife and her aversion to a certain kind of cruelty, albeit, a ghostly one that is short-lived in this case. So, trigger warnings for animal harm and death.
I can do nothing but gush about this love letter to stories and books. I have read reviews picking apart the ambition and the cost of the ambition with supposed lost tension. I have read the reviews that there is too much ham-fisted foisting of the underlying message of the importance of stories, and libraries and reading, etc. I have read the detractors who have determined Cloud Cuckoo Land too sweeping and too self-involved and therefore, too dismissive of the narratives that should have greater impact, like the breadth of the historically significant battle rattling the days of Omeir and Anna. I disagree.
Doerr's characters are vivid and their realities shape the story and isn't that the whole point in the first place?
All of the stories and timelines worked for me and I wasn't frustrated to leave one over another and came to be invested in them all, in nearly equal parts - which is truly saying something.
In my mind, it is a greater work than his Pulitzer-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, because it treads previously untended ground and uses imagination to reveal all the greater good of humanity, or the greater good that could be, even through the sadness and tumult and struggle that plagues all life. I loved it.
With The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has accomplished quite the magic trick. He has written an action-packed, character-driven gem filled with unique and relatable characters much like he did with Deacon King Kong. And, much like Deacon King Kong, while the narrative drives hard at all that divides us around race and class, the trick comes when he ultimately circles all that unites us and makes us human. The insights around Jewish life and customs and black life and customs at the time this story takes place are vivid and incredible. I want to know Chona. I want to go to Moshe's theater. I want to visit Fatty's jook joint. I want to walk up Chicken Hill and see it all for myself and thanks to McBride, I almost can.
I led a book club at my workplace reading this book. We had 30 leaders commit to reading and had three discussions throughout the summer that proved insightful and acted as great team-building and trust-creating exercises. The general concepts of psychological safety are ones that successful organizations and leaders must foster and cascade if they are to reach their full potential. Be curious, not judgmental. Reframe failure. Eliminate fear as a rate-limiting or mitigating factor. Definitely good and thoughtful concepts. If I am able to take one or two nuggets from this book and apply them practically to my team, I believe this concept will begin to form a foundation for our communication and ultimately lead to greater success.
*4.5 stars. The primary reason I can't give it five full-fledged and gleaming stars is that I wanted more. I loved the storytelling and the simplicity of all that is Bob Comet. I wanted more in the senior home and from delightful cast of characters there. I wanted to stay by the sea with 11-year-old Bob and see how his sojourn would have continued with his unique companions. I wanted to understand the tragedy of early 20s Bob. And, I wanted to know what he was reading. All along, his books meant so much, but we weren't offered that glimpse. I loved this book but can't help but finish it feeling a bit melancholic and a tad disappointed, but perhaps that is the point entirely.
*2.5 stars. There are some brief passages of exceptional writing. There are ideas here that have so much promise and are pretty interesting and unique concepts. There are slight flickers of James Hilton and H.P. Lovecraft. But there is also a lack of cohesion. There is poorly executed epistolary style. There is B movie drama blanketing poorly developed characters, despite what seems like great pains to give them depth but ultimately makes them hollow. I was intrigued, then disappointed.
