Loved this book. Listened to the audiobook, which was narrated so well by Steven Crossley. I loved Allan’s droll stroll through history and enjoyed the blend of Allan’s 100 year old history with his present day escape from the retirement home. As an example, as he’s trying to get home from China he remarks that he should leave by boat or airplane, “but poor placement of the world’s oceans had ruled out catching a boat from the middle of China.” Crossley delivers the lines perfectly. Sure, it’s a little Forrest Gump, as Allan, with his knowledge of making explosions and thirst for vodka is borne aloft from prison to prison, world leader to world leader, but I enjoyed the quick trip through many major events of the last century. The present day caper, in which Allan steals a young man’s suitcase as he waits at the bus station and then really goes on the run, is delightfully absurd (I thought Benny, the guy who is nearly everything from a veterinarian to a taxi driver to a doctor was a fantastic character).
I don’t know why I finished this. Perhaps it was the 1.5x speed setting on the audiobook that helped. Barely. The one kick I got out of it was that the reader was Dick Hill, the same guy who reads Lee Child’s Reacher books so well. This book is just a series of one character after another giving speeches, which are received with thunderous applause by an unthinking, lobotomized audience. Every single character seems to be missing some core piece that would make them three dimensional and the narrative assumes its readers have very little knowledge or imagination (or perhaps is assuming that maybe they stopped paying attention to the story?) by hammering very banal facts about this future that’s really not so far removed from our own present into our eyeballs. I liked the cover.
So this was meant to be a little post about voting for my sister-in-law’s start-up in Richard Branson’s #VOOM2016 competition, but then Carol messaged the extended family on Facebook that she was locked inside the hospital… what follows is a mostly true account:
This was another audiobook from the library through Overdrive, and it’s a short and sweet romp through the transformations in physics in the last little while or so. I loved the enthusiasm that Carlo Rovelli showed for his subject: he’s obviously very passionate about what he does and having him narrate his own book was a good choice.
We just listened to this one in the car, myself and the kids, through Overdrive and our local library. We had to renew it a couple times to get through the whole adventure, but the story and characters would stick with the kids throughout the day and they’d be begging to play it on rides around town. But man oh man, that ending. It’s a gut punch of a beautiful way to end a book.
This book was a ton of fun. You have a protagonist who surely shares DNA with Candide in Lucy Minor, who strikes out, oblivious to his own place in the world and in the hearts of even his family (his mother has his room rented before he finishes walking down the garden path). And Patrick de Witt is very good at setting up those little surreal scenes where Lucy will blunder in headlong. The book has a lighter undercurrent and seems (just slightly) less tightly wound than his earlier book, The Sisters Brothers, but with very similar humor. As the book went on it grew deeper than simply a series of pratfalls for our hapless hero and, for me, it rates only just behind The Sisters Brothers.
I listened to the audiobook through OneDigital, an iPhone app with a partnership with the library. The app itself was a little buggy — it would forget where I had left off frequently, so frequently that I began saving bookmarks every single time I knew I was about to stop listening so that I could find my place again; it also needed me to sign in every few launches, so it wasn’t the smoothest of listening experiences. But the book was fantastic. I enjoyed the personification of Jason’s stammer as Hangman and the travails of being a teenage boy with an older sister in the 80s. I thought he captured that awkward straddling of full teenage-hood and the childhood being left behind, in Jason’s case a little more quickly as his parent’s relationship deteriorates and he deals with the Black Swan Green bullies. As usual, with a David Mitchell book, there are threads in the story that rear their heads and then disappear beneath the surface of the story that hint at a larger, more complex version of reality than meets the eye, but unlike Bone Clocks or Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet they are left buried like the apocryphal children who have fallen through the ice into the pond. Having heard David Mitchell speak about his own troubles overcoming a stammer on his Bone Clocks tour, I can imagine this is an intensely personal novel for him and while it never reaches the incandescent heights of some of his other books, I really enjoyed spending a year with Jason Taylor.
Listened to the audiobook version of this one again (can you tell I’ve just discovered Overdrive and its connection to our local library?). Same narrator as Personal, he does an excellent job with Reacher’s calm, bad ass observations. This one started out a little too observation-y and spent a lot of time and adjectives on the set dressing. The plot is a little thinner than Personal, maybe, but it’s still a good read if you can overlook the shaky premise on which Reacher’s involvement is predicated.
I don’t think I’m the target audience for this book. I really enjoy Aziz Ansari’s stand-up, and I knew, going in to the audiobook, that this wasn’t likely going to be along those lines. And it wasn’t. He has some asides and special berating for the audio crowd, but they weren’t particularly insightful or worth savoring, so I switched to 1.75x speed about a third of the way through the book. Chipmunk Aziz was a little more tolerable, only because I knew I was getting through the book faster. He has a lot to say about dating that isn’t all that revelatory, but, again, I’m not the target audience for this book, so maybe there are folks out there who can use his observations that people spend a lot of time online or on their phone looking for love, not seeing the person behind the technology, and have more options these days than ever for love, but maybe that doesn’t help matters any. At any rate, I liked the bit he did about marrying the Hardee heiress and the ensuing dramatics. But otherwise I don’t feel my life would have been missing anything had I not listened to this book.
This was a good, quick read. I thought the book was peopled with mostly believable characters, and thank god for high-paying lawyering, is all I could help thinking as I read about Charlie’s Manhattan apartment and plans for opening up a daddy-focused kid playspace somewhere in or around New York City.
