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slichto3's review against another edition
5.0
Wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful. It's just so warm and lovely and funny and smart and relatable. I really loved this book - I just wish it hadn't ended. This is one of the few books where I wasn't at all aware of the page number I was on. I just enjoyed the experience of reading it.
The Brothers K is about the Chance family. The father is an ex-baseball player. He had a shot at the majors, faced, but seemed to overcome, a lot of adversity, then had it all go to hell when he ruined his pitching thumb in a mill accident. His wife, Laura, is an Adventist religious fanatic. Together, they have four sons and two daughters. The story is mostly told through the eyes of Kincaid, the fourth son of the family. He goes through the extensive travails of the Chance kids and parents as they live before, during, and after the Vietnam era. There is so much sadness in their lives that comes from being young, making mistakes, and going through the bad luck in life. But there's also this pervading warm joy that comes from having a family filled with love. Real love, where relationships are sometimes frayed but never completely unjoined.
It's all just so evocative. The writing is beautiful but not dull. It grabs your attention with wit and heart. The characters are so deep and relatable. They come across as the realest of people - they are amazing but also amazingly flawed. The one downside for me, personally, is that it made me feel what more and more books make me feel: that I haven't really lived life. The characters in The Brothers K just live these full and realized lives, while I feel like my own life is one long bore brought about by my own cowardice. But I'll stop there before I make anyone reading this more uncomfortable.
A lovely book that I would recommend to absolutely everyone. It may have overtaken Infinite Jest as my new favorite book. Read it and talk about it with me!
The Brothers K is about the Chance family. The father is an ex-baseball player. He had a shot at the majors, faced, but seemed to overcome, a lot of adversity, then had it all go to hell when he ruined his pitching thumb in a mill accident. His wife, Laura, is an Adventist religious fanatic. Together, they have four sons and two daughters. The story is mostly told through the eyes of Kincaid, the fourth son of the family. He goes through the extensive travails of the Chance kids and parents as they live before, during, and after the Vietnam era. There is so much sadness in their lives that comes from being young, making mistakes, and going through the bad luck in life. But there's also this pervading warm joy that comes from having a family filled with love. Real love, where relationships are sometimes frayed but never completely unjoined.
It's all just so evocative. The writing is beautiful but not dull. It grabs your attention with wit and heart. The characters are so deep and relatable. They come across as the realest of people - they are amazing but also amazingly flawed. The one downside for me, personally, is that it made me feel what more and more books make me feel: that I haven't really lived life. The characters in The Brothers K just live these full and realized lives, while I feel like my own life is one long bore brought about by my own cowardice. But I'll stop there before I make anyone reading this more uncomfortable.
A lovely book that I would recommend to absolutely everyone. It may have overtaken Infinite Jest as my new favorite book. Read it and talk about it with me!
ginny17's review against another edition
5.0
Wow. Phenomenal book. Definitely in my top 10 of all time.
davidrallenjr's review against another edition
“I simply knew, via song, sunlight, redwings and cottonwoods, that there was a world I was born to live in, that the men I was standing beside lived in another, and that as long as I remembered this their words would never hurt me again.”
thukpa's review against another edition
5.0
This is my all time favorite book! Its setting is local and I laughed and cried throughout my first reading. I planned to spend the last couple weeks of my first pregnancy re-reading it to pass the time, but my son came early and I didn't get to. I had a copy of my own and loaned it. In 2004 I took a copy to Tibet, and cherish the memory of reading bits of it aloud at nomad camp, and stumbling across a mention of Tibet. The parts that were appropriate had my 7 and 9 year old sons laughing. We spent 4 weeks with family, and lots of hours stretched by with a satisfying reread!
katieproctorbooks's review against another edition
5.0
I loved it. It was very long, but the end was absolutely worth it all. What an epic family saga.
nmillerlibrarian's review against another edition
5.0
This book will make you cry, laugh, and rethink the world.
abarkmeier's review against another edition
2.0
I hated this book. It was boring and long and, like Middlesex, was caught up in the typicality of trying to be utterly American. It was not the great American novel. The characters were largely flat, the plot largely boring and predictable, and the pages heavier with each chapter.
uscrx's review against another edition
5.0
This has got to be one of my favorite books, EVER! It's filled with everything - great story, characters, real-life applications, and baseball! Highly recommended!