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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
cgbeck's review against another edition
5.0
An excellent collection of short stories and poetry; I couldn't put this down. It's the perfect sort of book that removes you from your own, seemingly banal life and throws you headfirst into someone else's. My favorite piece was "Black and Blue" by Garnette Cadogan, in which the mundane act of walking becomes a provocative story telling mechanism, waking us up to a reality many of us don't often experience.
This review is more of a 4.5, rather than a 5, but only because of the last essay, "On Learning Norwegian" by Lydia Davis. While this piece of nonfiction is a heady, interesting intellectual exercise, it lacks a simplicity and pungent story telling that the other works delivered so well. Certainly not enough to derail the entire book, however. A must read.
This review is more of a 4.5, rather than a 5, but only because of the last essay, "On Learning Norwegian" by Lydia Davis. While this piece of nonfiction is a heady, interesting intellectual exercise, it lacks a simplicity and pungent story telling that the other works delivered so well. Certainly not enough to derail the entire book, however. A must read.
aprilmei's review against another edition
4.0
Nicely produced book with an interesting set of glossy color photo pages popped in the middle, in the middle of a story. This is one of the required reading materials that my Creative Writing teacher assigned to our class this spring. I'm not sure that I would have read it otherwise, but I'm glad I did. I had only read a few of the contributing authors here before: Davis, Eggers, and Murakami, so most of the authors here are new to me. I enjoyed the pieces by the authors I've already read and I especially liked one piece by Garnette Cadogan called "Black and Blue." I loved his writing and storytelling and can relate to his topic of race and walking, as my ex-bf was African American and would tell me similar things about walking around NYC. The Lydia Davis piece was very long and almost a bit tedious, but I actually ended up being amused by her meditation on learning Norwegian and all the mini lessons and realizations she shared. I'm going to need to read more poetry because I wasn't a huge fan of the pieces included here, but I'm not usually a big fan of poetry in general. Our class will be taking on poetry after prose this semester, so I'm sure I'll have a better appreciation for poetry after that.