Scan barcode
meghan111's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 A really strong beginning that falters through a haphazard second half. Adam, currently in his mid-twenties and aimlessly working as a tutor, is receiving emails from his old friend Thomas's mom, urging him to get in touch with Thomas. In flashbacks to their middle school best friendship, we learn that Thomas was super intelligent and analytical, if perhaps socially stunted. As the two adolescent boys grew apart, a prank turned wrong binds them together in a horrible secret.
If Adam's current life is a disappointment, Thomas has suffered from much deeper and more serious problems since the two boys lost touch. The second half of the book involves Adam going to find Thomas in India. It involves a cave and spiritual seeking. The second half of the book seems so separate from the first part, and I didn't grasp what point the author was trying to make.
I liked the writing style throughout, and I would suggest this writer to fans of Dave Eggers.
If Adam's current life is a disappointment, Thomas has suffered from much deeper and more serious problems since the two boys lost touch. The second half of the book involves Adam going to find Thomas in India. It involves a cave and spiritual seeking. The second half of the book seems so separate from the first part, and I didn't grasp what point the author was trying to make.
I liked the writing style throughout, and I would suggest this writer to fans of Dave Eggers.
spinstah's review against another edition
I came to a couple of points where I found myself skimming ahead to see if it ended as badly as I feared, and realized that I wasn't particularly enjoy this. So I stopped.
avluka's review against another edition
4.0
The book started off a little slow; but the grand takeaway is what I really got out of it. It's a story or two friends who experience a life altering event together. The book is about how they chose to live their lives after. It makes you reflect on your own life and how little events can trigger greater feelings.
karieh13's review against another edition
4.0
The strongest aspects of this book were the observations the main character made, not on his life or his friend Thomas’s life, but on life in general. Despite his young(ish) age – an ageless wisdom shines through at times that really caught my attention.
“There are certain places, certain objects, that seem in some hard-to-explain way alive, and that gives a weird charmed quality to everything you do in them or with them. When I was little I seemed to get this feeling more regularly; it would come over me when I was holding a glass, or wearing a particular sweater, or sitting in the unpainted corner of the kitchen in one of the first apartments I remember. Warmth? Happiness? Home? What comes to mind is the way wood sometimes looks in sunlight; there’s a Vermeer-ish quality to what I’m talking about.”
Some of the feelings in this story are so universal – and the author does a simply amazing job encapsulating these shared human experiences. This book hinges on one shattering moment – an event that ends the relatively normal and pleasant lives that Adam and Thomas have been living. This moment is described in a snapshot that just haunted me.
“There’s a moment just after breaking something (the glass slips from your fingertips, your elbow catches the vase) in which it feels like if you stand there, absolutely still, baring your teeth, you should be able to suck time backward like an indrawn breath. Your hand hangs there in the air, your eyes fall shut, you’re like someone playing a children’s game with a whistle and a voice that shouts, “Freeze!”
Adam and Thomas go their separate ways, only to come together again in nearly unrecognizable circumstances. Thomas, who has been searching for answers, is then sought out by Adam – who had been trying to deny the past. Only when pushed far past his emotional and physical limits does he realize the impact of their childhood actions.
“I was, of course, incredibly tired, but past a certain point tiredness stops registering primarily as a desire to be asleep. It was as if my body or brain had at some point in the past few days accepted that I was never again going to get adequate sleep, so it had constructed a jittery, pain-spiked simulation of wakefulness.”
Even then, Adam is able to recover some sense of a normal life – but not one that is unaffected by all he has experienced.
“There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think, It wasn’t as bad as all that. We let our present relief retouch our past terror.”
One brief moment, one action followed by inaction changed everything. Changed the lives of so many people – and effectively ended the lives of others.
This was a powerful story, but in different ways than I had expected.
“There are certain places, certain objects, that seem in some hard-to-explain way alive, and that gives a weird charmed quality to everything you do in them or with them. When I was little I seemed to get this feeling more regularly; it would come over me when I was holding a glass, or wearing a particular sweater, or sitting in the unpainted corner of the kitchen in one of the first apartments I remember. Warmth? Happiness? Home? What comes to mind is the way wood sometimes looks in sunlight; there’s a Vermeer-ish quality to what I’m talking about.”
Some of the feelings in this story are so universal – and the author does a simply amazing job encapsulating these shared human experiences. This book hinges on one shattering moment – an event that ends the relatively normal and pleasant lives that Adam and Thomas have been living. This moment is described in a snapshot that just haunted me.
“There’s a moment just after breaking something (the glass slips from your fingertips, your elbow catches the vase) in which it feels like if you stand there, absolutely still, baring your teeth, you should be able to suck time backward like an indrawn breath. Your hand hangs there in the air, your eyes fall shut, you’re like someone playing a children’s game with a whistle and a voice that shouts, “Freeze!”
Adam and Thomas go their separate ways, only to come together again in nearly unrecognizable circumstances. Thomas, who has been searching for answers, is then sought out by Adam – who had been trying to deny the past. Only when pushed far past his emotional and physical limits does he realize the impact of their childhood actions.
“I was, of course, incredibly tired, but past a certain point tiredness stops registering primarily as a desire to be asleep. It was as if my body or brain had at some point in the past few days accepted that I was never again going to get adequate sleep, so it had constructed a jittery, pain-spiked simulation of wakefulness.”
Even then, Adam is able to recover some sense of a normal life – but not one that is unaffected by all he has experienced.
“There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think, It wasn’t as bad as all that. We let our present relief retouch our past terror.”
One brief moment, one action followed by inaction changed everything. Changed the lives of so many people – and effectively ended the lives of others.
This was a powerful story, but in different ways than I had expected.
readingwithhippos's review against another edition
3.0
Maybe it's only because I haven't left the house since a library run on Monday night, but I am having a terrible time articulating why I liked this book. I mean, I'm pretty sure I liked it. When I'm not enthralled with what I'm reading, I tend to find my life suddenly super-busy, with many interesting television shows to watch and decoupage crafts to make. If a book is really bad, that's when you'll find me wet-mopping floors and cleaning the bathroom. I hate giving up on a book, to the point that I will do chores to avoid having that awkward imagined conversation with an author in which I try to break the news as gently as possible that we're going to have to put this one down.
I didn't have to use any of those avoidance tactics with this book. I believe the ring in the bathtub and spit-propelled toothpaste spots on the mirror speak for themselves. Still, I haven't successfully identified the exact cause of my enjoyment. There are a fair number of lukewarm-to-scathing reviews on Goodreads, and I found myself nodding at the complaints being voiced. The ending was unsatisfying (yep). The narrator is a navel-gazer (yep). There's not much actual plot (yep). So why, if I agreed with all the criticism, was I still debating between a 3- and 4-star rating?
Do I like bad books? Am I a book recommender with bad taste? Should I focus my efforts on home décor, maybe learn to braid rugs?
Maybe the light reflecting off the piles of snow outside has addled my brain. Anything is possible. Here's what I've come up with, though: I really liked Ben Dolnick's voice. I liked his enthusiastic flinging-about of odd metaphors, even as I recognized that he was overdoing it. I liked seeing elements of my own childhood in the interactions between Adam, the narrator, and his strange, hapless friend Thomas. Reading about the two boys playing video games and making up code words for things made for some fun reminiscing. (Not that my friends and I were ever dorky enough to give our crushes glaringly obvious nicknames and use them in said crushes' presence.) Adam and Thomas seemed familiar to me, like they could have been boys I remember from elementary school. It felt like I was reading a book about someone I already knew well.
I understand, of course, that not everyone will have the same connection I did. However, you might still find yourself interested in the setup: Adam and Thomas, once close childhood friends, have grown apart over the years. The wedge between them is a single tragic moment that Adam has spent years avoiding and Thomas has spent years agonizing over. In their mid-twenties, Thomas's mother contacts Adam to ask if he will help track Thomas down in India, where he has gone to try to atone for what happened when they were kids. Adam's life isn't going too swimmingly at the moment either, so he agrees to go, leading to a long-awaited meeting and an opportunity for both to wrestle with their consciences.
Ultimately, I'll admit there are a few problems with Dolnick's book, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it, and perhaps you will too.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
I didn't have to use any of those avoidance tactics with this book. I believe the ring in the bathtub and spit-propelled toothpaste spots on the mirror speak for themselves. Still, I haven't successfully identified the exact cause of my enjoyment. There are a fair number of lukewarm-to-scathing reviews on Goodreads, and I found myself nodding at the complaints being voiced. The ending was unsatisfying (yep). The narrator is a navel-gazer (yep). There's not much actual plot (yep). So why, if I agreed with all the criticism, was I still debating between a 3- and 4-star rating?
Do I like bad books? Am I a book recommender with bad taste? Should I focus my efforts on home décor, maybe learn to braid rugs?
Maybe the light reflecting off the piles of snow outside has addled my brain. Anything is possible. Here's what I've come up with, though: I really liked Ben Dolnick's voice. I liked his enthusiastic flinging-about of odd metaphors, even as I recognized that he was overdoing it. I liked seeing elements of my own childhood in the interactions between Adam, the narrator, and his strange, hapless friend Thomas. Reading about the two boys playing video games and making up code words for things made for some fun reminiscing. (Not that my friends and I were ever dorky enough to give our crushes glaringly obvious nicknames and use them in said crushes' presence.) Adam and Thomas seemed familiar to me, like they could have been boys I remember from elementary school. It felt like I was reading a book about someone I already knew well.
I understand, of course, that not everyone will have the same connection I did. However, you might still find yourself interested in the setup: Adam and Thomas, once close childhood friends, have grown apart over the years. The wedge between them is a single tragic moment that Adam has spent years avoiding and Thomas has spent years agonizing over. In their mid-twenties, Thomas's mother contacts Adam to ask if he will help track Thomas down in India, where he has gone to try to atone for what happened when they were kids. Adam's life isn't going too swimmingly at the moment either, so he agrees to go, leading to a long-awaited meeting and an opportunity for both to wrestle with their consciences.
Ultimately, I'll admit there are a few problems with Dolnick's book, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it, and perhaps you will too.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
carstensena's review against another edition
4.0
Two friends goofing around as teenagers cause a terrible accident that pretty much ruins their lives. Very sad story told in such a way that it is enjoyable to read. The narrator's inner dialogue is wonderful. The way he thinks is totally real and sometimes very funny. Great turns of phrase. This writer has come a long way.
lisa_mc's review against another edition
2.0
Best friends in childhood share plenty of secrets, but most of the time it’s the mundane variety: who has a crush on whom, who stole some trifling thing, bits of gossip and petty crimes that seem deep or dark at the time. That’s not always the stuff of interesting fiction, though, so author Ben Dolnick has given his two main characters a far deeper and darker secret: shared responsibility for a tragic accident.
The book starts off with Adam Sanecki pining over his ex-girlfriend, and starting an affair with the mother of two young boys he tutors. Twentysomething and aimless, Adam thinks often of his friend Thomas Pell. Thomas was an odd child in school, brainy and intense, sickly and awkward, but with complex depths and surprise moments of rebelliousness that weren’t readily apparent to his peers, Adam included. But Adam notices that Thomas “was set apart from the rest of us by a sense that what happened in school wasn’t nearly so serious as we thought.” The two were inseparable for a while, but after the accident slowly drifted apart, much to the dismay of Thomas’s parents, who liked Adam and liked the fact that he was a good, “normal” friend to Thomas.
Adam and Thomas lose touch, but one day Adam gets the first of many concerned-turning-frantic emails from Thomas’s parents. He’s not well. Something’s wrong. He’s “drowning.” He’s disappeared. Next thing, Adam is on a plane to India to try to track down Thomas, who has been associating with a guru and apparently trying to atone.
This is a sharp turn from the beginning of the story, and it pushes the boundaries of belief, because nothing in the first third of the book leads us to believe that Thomas would seek out a guru or that Adam would travel halfway around the world looking for him. That makes the story different from a typical coming-of-age/coming-to-terms-with-guilt narrative, which is good, but the story isn’t too interesting, even when it turns into man-vs.-nature narrative, which is not good.
Dolnick’s writing is sometimes languid, sometimes breathless, and the pace mostly fits the mood and plot of a given section. His similes go over the top at times, for example: “There were clouds moving over me like a slow-motion comb-over.” But they work well other places, as in: “What we were doing felt, in terms of efficiency, like going from one room to the next by eating through a wall.”
Overall, however, neither main character is particularly sympathetic – Thomas, on his quest for redemption, comes off as selfish; Adam, while realizing his own selfishness, is shallow and a bit whiny – and The Deep Revelation at the end of the book seems forced rather than inspiring. “At the Bottom of Everything” is not a horrible book, but, at the bottom of it, just disappointing.
The book starts off with Adam Sanecki pining over his ex-girlfriend, and starting an affair with the mother of two young boys he tutors. Twentysomething and aimless, Adam thinks often of his friend Thomas Pell. Thomas was an odd child in school, brainy and intense, sickly and awkward, but with complex depths and surprise moments of rebelliousness that weren’t readily apparent to his peers, Adam included. But Adam notices that Thomas “was set apart from the rest of us by a sense that what happened in school wasn’t nearly so serious as we thought.” The two were inseparable for a while, but after the accident slowly drifted apart, much to the dismay of Thomas’s parents, who liked Adam and liked the fact that he was a good, “normal” friend to Thomas.
Adam and Thomas lose touch, but one day Adam gets the first of many concerned-turning-frantic emails from Thomas’s parents. He’s not well. Something’s wrong. He’s “drowning.” He’s disappeared. Next thing, Adam is on a plane to India to try to track down Thomas, who has been associating with a guru and apparently trying to atone.
This is a sharp turn from the beginning of the story, and it pushes the boundaries of belief, because nothing in the first third of the book leads us to believe that Thomas would seek out a guru or that Adam would travel halfway around the world looking for him. That makes the story different from a typical coming-of-age/coming-to-terms-with-guilt narrative, which is good, but the story isn’t too interesting, even when it turns into man-vs.-nature narrative, which is not good.
Dolnick’s writing is sometimes languid, sometimes breathless, and the pace mostly fits the mood and plot of a given section. His similes go over the top at times, for example: “There were clouds moving over me like a slow-motion comb-over.” But they work well other places, as in: “What we were doing felt, in terms of efficiency, like going from one room to the next by eating through a wall.”
Overall, however, neither main character is particularly sympathetic – Thomas, on his quest for redemption, comes off as selfish; Adam, while realizing his own selfishness, is shallow and a bit whiny – and The Deep Revelation at the end of the book seems forced rather than inspiring. “At the Bottom of Everything” is not a horrible book, but, at the bottom of it, just disappointing.
ktpalazzi's review against another edition
1.0
I wanted to like this. And I did in the beginning. But as soon as our hapless narrator hightails it to India, I completely checked out and couldn't finish it. It's generally a bad thing when you're halfway through a book and you wonder, "Why do I even care about these characters?".
cheryl1213's review against another edition
2.0
The early chapters of this novel alternate between protagonist Adam's childhood and his mid-20s. In his youth, he became close friends with Thomas, a bit of an outcast and a strange kid. Adam also becomes close to Thomas's very academic parents. As they get older, however, Adam drifts into new circles and begins to leave Thomas and their friendship behind. He just outgrows it and yearns for girls, sports, and popularity. This process speeds up after the boys are involved in a frightening and guilt-provoking act.
In Adam's twenties, he's working as a tutor and, having recently been dumped after a long relationship, begins an affair with a client's mother. He and Thomas haven't talked in years when he hears from Thomas's parents that Thomas has gone missing in India. This followed a mental and emotional breakdown that caused Thomas's parents to bring him home from college and generally pushed him off his expected-success trajectory. Eventually, after a few emails pass between the old friends, Adam agrees to go find Thomas, leading to a large portion of the book dealing with his trip, a cult-like philosophic movement, and the search to find Thomas and save him, mostly from himself.
I enjoyed the early portions of the book. I liked watching the friendship between the boys develop and I liked "meeting" Thomas's family. There were definitely moments i could relate to as a child who felt lonely and different. I even enjoyed the present-day scenes in the early chapters...not as much as the childhood ones, but it still held me. However, I could barely get myself through the India chapters. The prose was readable but I just didn't care and didn't find much of it believable...I do understand the power of the childhood friendship, but I just don't see Adam taking the steps he does and I don't buy the happenings in the India chapters. When I don't care, it is almost always a death knell for a book in my mind and that applies here. I will say I did like the very ending.
Overall: Good portrait of a childhood friendship and its evolution, but lost me when the setting shifted. The search for his friend and for redemption from a youthful tragedy was slow-going since I wasn't invested in the characters or their outcome. Two stars. Review copy provided by Pantheon (publisher).
In Adam's twenties, he's working as a tutor and, having recently been dumped after a long relationship, begins an affair with a client's mother. He and Thomas haven't talked in years when he hears from Thomas's parents that Thomas has gone missing in India. This followed a mental and emotional breakdown that caused Thomas's parents to bring him home from college and generally pushed him off his expected-success trajectory. Eventually, after a few emails pass between the old friends, Adam agrees to go find Thomas, leading to a large portion of the book dealing with his trip, a cult-like philosophic movement, and the search to find Thomas and save him, mostly from himself.
I enjoyed the early portions of the book. I liked watching the friendship between the boys develop and I liked "meeting" Thomas's family. There were definitely moments i could relate to as a child who felt lonely and different. I even enjoyed the present-day scenes in the early chapters...not as much as the childhood ones, but it still held me. However, I could barely get myself through the India chapters. The prose was readable but I just didn't care and didn't find much of it believable...I do understand the power of the childhood friendship, but I just don't see Adam taking the steps he does and I don't buy the happenings in the India chapters. When I don't care, it is almost always a death knell for a book in my mind and that applies here. I will say I did like the very ending.
Overall: Good portrait of a childhood friendship and its evolution, but lost me when the setting shifted. The search for his friend and for redemption from a youthful tragedy was slow-going since I wasn't invested in the characters or their outcome. Two stars. Review copy provided by Pantheon (publisher).