Amanda

This book was an exhausting read, in a way that reading William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor is exhausting. The book starts, and it never stops. It never lets up. It's like chasing the wind. I absolutely loved this quality of the book and enjoyed reading it – I read half of it in one evening and had it finished by the following afternoon. That part is no surprise to me; I love Taffy's writing in general.

The story itself? I'm a little torn. Like I said, I enjoyed reading the book. I wouldn't have kept reading it if the story were bad. I think what tears me up is, I do not see a lot of the things I heard from other reviewers, professional reviewers. Smart? That one I can't deny. But sexy? This did nothing for me there – and there's a lot of it, so believe me when I tell you I had plenty of opportunities to find out. Funny? I honestly didn't find a damn thing in this book funny. Not in a way where it's loaded with horrible jokes, not at all; it's more like, if I was supposed to find Toby's dating life funny, or any of the characters' contempt for one another funny, I didn't. I found it sad, pathetic at times. But again, not in a bad way. Maybe that wasn't the intention but it didn't make the story less readable.

I'm actually currently on vacation in a large city where I've had time to wrest with some problems I'm going through, and I think for me this was the exact right time to read it, because any other time and place I may not have found it relatable. But maybe that's the surprise. Maybe there's something in here for you that you weren't expecting, either. I didn't even expect to like it based on how it started, and I didn't read the book I feel I was told I was getting. But it didn't matter in the end. I liked the book I got.

Pettinger gave it the old college try and came up just a bit short. The early part of the book gets two stars thanks to prose so saccharine as to cause dental rot in the reader; “tinsel-bedecked arpeggios”? Really? REALLY? Then the prose gets less drippy and easier to read. The real problem is one that plagues the whole book, i.e., if you are going to write a biography, maybe devote the greater number of pages of said “-ography” to a “bio-“ and not a “disc-“ style. Even when Pettinger is doing that, he misses the mark more often than not. All of this complaining aside, it is the best thing we have, and it is a worthwhile read for the overall picture. But a guy like Evans, with so much influence and such a story to tell, deserves a better book than this.

Stellar book. Well-written and fascinating. Weber attended the Jim Evans umpiring school in Florida and did extensive interviewing and research in an effort to bring fans inside the life and mind of a Major League umpire. I don't think reading this book will get anyone to go easier on umpires in the heat of the moment, but it will certainly help you after the fact when you think about what it is they do, exactly, without help from slo-mo television cameras and countless replays of every moment of the game, and what they have to go through to get this far. Great book.

“For a time the earth held him in a smoldering hiatus that might have been called contentment.” But only for a time, as no man called Sartoris is ever truly content until he's dead.

Is there a family more depressing than the clan of Sartoris? Even Faulkner's other unbelievably depressing families, even the Compsons, can't match the misery that Old Bayard and Young Bayard drag around behind them their entire lives. One can't even be led to feel sorrow when Young Bayard finally dies. He's better off. So is Narcissa. So is the baby.

Faulkner's prose is, as always, sparkling – this to me is the chief reason to press on through a Faulkner tome. He is also a deft world-builder, and a character seemingly useless here will be the root of one more useful later (in this case, weird Byron Snopes) in a Yoknapatawpha book. So while one might wish, perhaps beg, to read the cut-up edition entitled Sartoris, the additional pages reward you with the deft style and the promise of more to come.

An easy, breezy read, this is a book in which a detective-turned-chef helps people discover the foods of their pasts with the help of his adult daughter. It's pretty light on basically everything but the descriptions of food, but despite that, so much comes through about the people that drift through the little restaurant. I think it could have used more narration to go with the dialogue, but that's my only real knock on it. I loved it and am excited to read the sequel, and looking forward to the third book later this year.