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A review by bibliophagic
One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir by Paul Guest
2.0
Despite my intentions to produce a speedy review, I put this book aside for a couple of months, and didn't read it until a weeks ago.
As another reader wrote, this isn't so much a story as it is a list of events. Guest goes into excruciating details at some points and then jumps years without warning at others.
I hate to be a jerk, but Guest is clearly a poet (if that - I haven't read his poetry) rather than a writer of prose. He's fond of run-on sentences and his thesaurus. I could see how his writing style might work to create a clear distillation of imagery and experience when used in poems, but in this book it does nearly the opposite, lending it a distanced, near-robotic feel.
[Disclosure: I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.]
As another reader wrote, this isn't so much a story as it is a list of events. Guest goes into excruciating details at some points and then jumps years without warning at others.
I hate to be a jerk, but Guest is clearly a poet (if that - I haven't read his poetry) rather than a writer of prose. He's fond of run-on sentences and his thesaurus. I could see how his writing style might work to create a clear distillation of imagery and experience when used in poems, but in this book it does nearly the opposite, lending it a distanced, near-robotic feel.
[Disclosure: I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.]