Todd Tyrtle
Great read as a travel book and a delicious read as a cookbook. I would be driven insane if I had to read this anywhere further than 10 kilometres from a decent Asian market.
What an interesting experience to meet unlikeable characters and yet still care what happens to them. Really enjoyed this book and am sad it is over.
Fascinated to see the changes made for the Netflix series. Some huge differences that make me wonder who made the decisions and why.
Overall a good book but the author comes across to be a bit of an evangelical fundamentalist with his anti-technology views. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to that, though, having had similar feelings and broadcast them on my blog back when we lived in a yurt with no electricity or running water for 2 years. Ten years after that, living then in a highrise in Canada's biggest city I realized that it was pretty narrow-minded of me to be so sure that living that simply was not only right for me but the way everyone should be living. It was right for our family then, and a different way of life is right for us now.
The author seems to fall into the same trap I did - feeling that the fact that the life change he made then and that worked so well for him then was the life change that everyone else needs to make, and that many of society's ills are caused by the failure of everyone to do so.
What a fantastic roller coaster ride of a book. It kept me off balance wondering what would happen next but not giving me much idea of what that would be. I can't even give the slightest detail to friends who may want to read it someday as I feel almost anything beyond what happens in the first 5 pages or so is on some level, a spoiler. Fantastic!
Wow. What a read. Like reading a story about someone who could be my aunt. Or my own mother - had I been able to bear sticking around... Exhausting and beautiful
Another beautiful, absorbing, and moving tale from Patrick Ness - rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors ever. You know it's good if it makes this otherwise reserved New Englander tear up in public.
I really enjoyed this book. A quick read, I read it all in one sitting, which is unusual for me.
The author really captures what bicycle touring feels like. Everything from the good parts, to the bad parts, the insecurities and the joys felt, to me, just like being there. Wonderful, and inspiring.
Pretty disappointing. I feel like it was a series of complaints about the weather, the scariness of border towns, and suspicions about sketchy people who looked like they might want to rob them. (But never actually did anything). Humourless with little of the sense of either overcoming challenge and obstacles or change in the author's point of view or life (aside from the obvious change in lifestyle.) So, with the lack of that and any tension, pressure, or dynamic, it left me cold.
The usual delightful richness from Rushdie. His books always make me think of the little threads that connect us to one another - reminding me of the size of the world.
It was both a terrifying and hopeful book to read in the age of Trump - though it was obviously written before this year it resonates well.
Except in this case we have 1,404 days to go. Three years, 10 months and three days by my reckoning. Watch for flying urns until then...
Really fun read. I have memories of hanging out with friends for a season, summer, or grade in school and everything is amazing. You all have so much fun together doing ridiculous things and living like siblings. Reading this felt like being a fly on the wall for a lifetime spent like this among three friends. Yes, they were famous and that informed some of the stories - but the interesting part wasn't that they were famous - it was capturing that friend-meets-family dynamic.
One of those books you're sad is over because now you can't experience it again.
Every once in a while I find a book that is so good, so compelling that I find myself reading it in every free minute. While I'm waiting for my eggs to be ready to flip, read a few pages, while I'm in the elevator to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer, read a few more, while eating dinner, read more, read and read before bed until you are so tired you read the same paragraph six times before finally having to admit, one hour after you normally are asleep, you really can't possibly read any more. A book of this length often takes a week or more for me and this was done in two days. And now I'm sad because it's over and I'll never read it for the first time again and these characters I love will be gone. I'll miss them.
I've been to this part of Scarborough several times, sometimes going to visit the library in the area on a project to visit all of Toronto's libraries. Other times I cycled through the Rouge valley myself. So of course I had a lot of mental images as I read. And now when I ride through there on my bike again part of me will be looking for folks, wondering how they're all doing.
This one's going to be a hard one to follow.
Not a book that would have caught my attention were it on the shelves - I read this one entirely at a friend's suggestion. And even if I had picked it up on my own, I'm pretty sure that I would've given up in the first fifty or so pages, her relationship with ‘S' seeming to dominate the story and truth be told, generating more than a few eye rolls on my part. However, that aspect of the book made what came that much more powerful. To see so much love, kindness, and strength in someone whom I judged at first to be tremendously boring and shallow really made me question my judgments of people in my own life. Very thought provoking. Thanks to my friend, Melissa for suggesting it.
Food, history, culture all wrapped up into one book. Took a while to finish this one as I didn't finish it in time and it had to go back to the library and spend some time with other readers before I could get it back and finish. Glad I persisted.
Nicely illustrated and interesting but I feel as if I would have enjoyed it much more had I been a fan of WWF back in the day.
Enjoyable, though less so than, say, Riding the Iron Rooster.
I must say, though, after reading a few of his books, Theroux seems obsessed with prostitutes. I may know a little more about the countries he passes through, but I am guaranteed to know what the prostitutes were like. Though he says he doesn't partake. That said, I wonder if he doth protest too much...
Beautiful writing, but a bit of a slog. Every story was so bleak and without humour or hope. One could say the writing quality was completely my style but the content was not. In most cases I had no sympathy for any of the characters and many of them I actively disliked. I actually cheered when I finished it because now I get to read something happier.
IMO, it wasn't up to Doctorow's usual standards. The story didn't hold me, and his portrayal of overweight folks really rubbed me the wrong way. (Oh yes, they're all waiting for a cure that lets them eat 10,000 calories per day - and when they finally get thin they do nothing but worry about their wardrobe when they're not sleeping with each other).
Particularly disappointing because I know he can do far better. Gave up about half way through...
Interesting book with a number of inspiring ideas. The only downside is I get inspired for a bit then forget to apply them. Going to try a few of them again...
Reasonably good for most of it then dissolved into a pseudoscience non-proof of the existence of God and support of so-called intelligent design. Without that I'd say the book was a solid 4 but that last but alone would've been a 1.
I really wanted to like this because it's such a great idea but I feel like something was missing. Maybe it was the lack of any sort of stakes for the author. To me it read like an expanded to-do list, ticking off people to thank.
But I love the idea and I'm glad it's done - I just feel like something got lost in the translation because I just couldn't get invested in it. I suspect he had some trouble at times as well - especially toward the end where he didn't even know how many people he had thanked. 957? 1015? Oh I don't know, I'll call it 1000. Good enough. That feels like a metaphor for what I saw as the biggest shortcoming of the book.
Very entertaining. I didn't really like the characters but the world was so compelling I could barely put this down. I want to know more about what's happening in the world the author has created.