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Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel | David Rakoff
From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century Through his books and his radio essays for NPR's This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form. LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old boxan image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse. From the Hardcover edition.
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britt_brooke
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Pickpick

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Overlapping vignettes in rhyming verse; a quite clever and entertaining commentary on 20th century life. This book was posthumously published, but fortunately for us, Rakoff recorded the audio in the This American Life studio - with Ira Glass - prior to his death.

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CherryPie
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Rakoff in verse. In a mood.

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steph_hashes_tags
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Pickpick

I am basically never a fan of audio books, but this one absolutely begs to be heard instead of read - Rakoff‘s voice (both written and spoken) is so distinctive, it feels important to hear the author tell you himself how this book is meant to sound. It‘s especially poignant given his death in 2012 - this was his final work, and I‘m glad I let him read it to me. #24in48

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lauralovesbooks1
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Pickpick

This novel/interconnected story collection is told entirely in rhyming verse. Wordplay at it's finest. I will need to reread again to make sure I didn't miss anything --it was easy to get bewitched by the skill the author showed with the language.

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CarolynOliver
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Last week's reading, January 22-28.

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TheWellAccompaniedBook
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Mehso-so

I loved the rhyming, for which I should give it 4 stars, but I didn't really 'get' the story. It jumped around a bit and the connections weren't clear to me. Not sure what it was trying to say bit the poetry was excellent.

Lindy I love this so much that I've read it twice. I see it as character vignettes used to offer social commentary on the entire 20th century in the USA. 7y
TheWellAccompaniedBook @Lindy i think i will dive into it again with that view. I guess i wasn't really sure what to expect. 7y
Lindy It's such a beautiful book design, also, which adds to the delight of Rakoff's humour. I hope you will find lots of rewards if you revisit this. 😀 7y
13 likes3 comments
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TheWellAccompaniedBook
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Change of pace - a verse novel entirely in rhyming couplets.

Lindy I loved this. 💜 7y
20 likes2 stack adds1 comment