Not fair to compare son to father but this has all the good qualities of classic Stephen King, with little updates for more modern times.

So unexpectedly (for me at least) good. I ran through this in about a week and couldn‘t put it down.
I loved the structure, the epic quality of the plot, I learned things about trees that I didn‘t know had been discovered in the last 30 years, and have this new appreciation for all things green around me. I don‘t think I can say that a novel has changed my views on the natural would in the same this novel has.
#tob2019

Home from work Friday afternoon and find this beautiful looking book on your doorstep, your weekend has started.

Enjoying this greatly but with the audiobook and the author‘s style, it can be hard to follow at times

Tournament of books is in full effect! #tob2019

At least two “instant classic” stories in this collection by an up and coming writer. Is he going to stick with the sort form or go for a novel? One of my biggest questions in the literary world over the next 5 or so years.

How serious was I supposed to take this novel? In all honesty, I did the audio and laughed throughout but wasn‘t sure it was supposed to be a comic novel, at least not as much as I was taking it to be. Would like to hear other reader‘s thoughts...

A real page turner and not usually my thing, but I‘m liking this a great deal. About 50 pages to go and I hope it doesn‘t disappoint in the end.

130 pages in and no cats...what kind of Murakami novel is this? Slow starting (other than prologue) but starting to pick up speed. #catsandbooks

It has the hallmark voice(s) of his early short stories but is not something I could have done if not listening to the audio. Having to read each citation or name of the voice would have slowed things down too much. There were times when I questioned the point of the jump-cut narrators and while I understand the form matched the premise and setting of the Bardo, it‘s when certain characters are able to narrate at length it gets truly good

This book is so good but such a slow burn for such a small book. It‘s never boring but keeps readers wondering where exactly they‘re going. Then the ending is just perfect.

Strange little novel composed 20 years before its time.

#HurricaneIrma read

One of the biggest "gut-punch" scenes in any book I've read...best teen fiction I've read in some time that wasn't John Corey Whaley or John Green.

Artistic as it might have been, it was still repetitious labor done in stifling factories. To break the monotony, workers hit upon the idea of having someone read aloud to them while they worked, known in the trade as la lectura. The reader (of which there were hundreds in the Tampa area alone) usually sat on an elevated platform or podium in the middle of the room and read aloud for four hours, covering newspapers, classics, and even Shakespeare.

After that I couldn‘t bear to look. In the distance I could see the Nueces and the green river flats all around, the sun continuing to rise, catching in the pall of dust, the air around the casa mayor turning a brilliant orange as if some miracle were about to occur, a descent of angels, or perhaps the opposite, a kind of eruption, the ascent of some ancient fire that would wipe us all from the earth.

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.

What threw him was the way that his brother-in-law seemed to consider it perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or household appliance.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

While nothing will probably approach the teen fiction greatness that is Where Things Come Back this came much closer than Noggin. #FLTeenReads

Fun afternoon read...nothing major to consider just a short fun story.

I like rotation narration but the sections are so short that you don't spend enough time in the character's heads to really get a sense of their voice. The story was interesting in two ways: the Russian front and characters from that side of the conflict and the story of the ship is based in historical fact and mostly unknown. The rest was just so-so. I almost quit but once I got half way the story grew on me enough to want to finish #FLTeenReads

The bullfighting and boxing stories were quite boring. The war and Nick stories and Hills Like White Elephants were of course better. But overall, so-so as a collection, and nothing really when compared to The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms.

This is not my typical read but it is on the new Florida Teen Reads list and I teach high school English. There were its "moments" but the strength of the voice and its humor really make it a good story. Throw in a little poetry and a well-handled weighty topic like grief and, well, I really liked it against my initial expectations. #FLTeenReads

I couldn't put this down until about half way (Part III)...I felt it killed the good creepy vibe that had developed and I thought the central metaphor of the book was lost in maybe too sentimental a way (which I get after Wolf In White Van) but just not what I expected after the first half.
I'll read his next book no doubt, just this one didn't read the way I thought and it's surprise didn't feel successful to me.

"When she was born, I had not loved her. She looked peculiar when my wife showed her to me; it was as if a nuisance had settled into my house. I wanted to run away, so I would not have to see the thing that clearly I had made, because life is sad, to be born is sad."

I like how thorough Malone is in this series but his bias is overtly evident. Or maybe it's just an old way of filling in gaps when he lacks direct evidence of Jefferson's thoughts he fills in assumptions and always in positive spin. And this is never more evident in the treatment of the Sally H rumors.

Almost finished part one...so good

Got to nearly the exact halfway point and just couldn't do it anymore. Plot is not important to me and I read many authors who have no use for plot. My reading time is limited and I didn't find anything the narrator was saying "insightful" nor really that interesting. I gave up in "Control Knobs". This book comes highly recommended and reviewed, perhaps by the end I would have seen things differently but I don't have the time to devote to it.

I remember waking up three hundred million times. How I had been some mornings as a blind woman, as an actor, as a masseuse, though even in the knowing of this knowing I can‘t return to any of them, as if my idea of even this is another old disease where I must come to and rub and mutter, be again speaking words that mean nothing to anyone, an image waiting to live the remainder of his or my life out tick by tick unfunny, recorded over.

What a find at the ol' Dollar General!

Just as I could not escape death as an idea by hoping only to live on in my private memory alone, what slaved beyond death remained constant in us all, and could not be granted without the false originalities of massacre and aspiration having been at last truly compressed beyond the idea of any person: image or language, never or now.

I heard Chuck Todd speak about how the media was gaga over this book and how it explains Trump...I don't quite get that out of it, not like George Packer's The Unwinding, but the memoir is good in its own right. #litsyAtoZ @BookishMarginalia

I'm not a Potter obsessive (I live in Orlando and have not been to the Wizarding World at Universal Studios) and I read this a long time ago but am rereading and listening to the podcast "Harry Potter and the Sacred Text" which provides a fun and really interesting deep read of each chapter. At least at one point per episode they close read using a divinity practice. Sounds religious but it's not. It's something anyone who likes Potter can enjoy.

Wonder if reading the text will be way different than listening? Had to bail...with my reading time so limited and having listened to all of these before, time to move on...

Loved the structure and the story. Listened to the audiobook which is read by Darnielle, also great. Should be reread but I need to just move to the next novel. Can't wait for Universal Harvester in Feb '17.

It completely conveyed the idea of a man who had been born, not to say with a silver spoon, but with a scaling-ladder, and had gone on mounting all the heights of life one after another, until now he looked, from the top of the fortifications, with the eye of a philosopher and a patron, on the people down in the trenches.

Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed‘s future. And if you point the people‘s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

It's through the first two published novels of Fitzgerald that The Great Gatsby can most be appreciated for its near perfection. I finished this book because it was Fitzgerald's not because the characters are all that interesting or their situation that meaningful.

Back-stories of Tulip and Jesse's dad's Vietnam experience. Plus we get the Quincannon books which helps explain what the hell is going on with the AMC adaptation (though not really). One more volume to go and really no idea how it's all going to end.

There was humor and general weirdness/quirks to the characters. I liked the first half of the the book (Berne) but once they get to Berlin I thought it got kind of flat. I'll read her other work but it was somewhat reminiscent of Miranda July but without quite the quality I found so enjoyable in July's stories.

"Wasn't it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as to the elect?"