dllh's reviews
701 reviews

The style just didn't really do it for me, and by the time I had begun to feel a little more interested and invested, it was over.

I'm not sure what to say about it. The pacing sometimes felt slow, but it also covered 60+ years in a short 300 pages. The tail end was biting and made me think oddly of Shirley Jackson. It held my interest all the way through, but I wouldn't call it a page-turner. Yet I read it fairly quickly. It almost felt incomplete, or at least not long enough. But that's not quite right, because it was clearly framed by its opening and closing sections and Smiley doled out precisely what she wanted the reader to see. There's a sense of limitation or private-ness in the title itself.

I enjoyed the voices and the stories in this one. The main character and his story and indeed the overall plot weren't nearly as interesting to me as the folksy narratives and memorable people Proulx exposes that character and thus us to. I'm ambivalent about her zany names for nearly every person in the book -- I'm a sucker for zany names but it became absurd almost beyond the fun of it. It's not the deepest or most nuanced book I've ever read, but I really enjoyed it

I liked it well enough but not as much as some of Whitehead's other work. I did feel a great sense of place while reading it. I've never been to Harlem, though have seen portrayals in movies, and I felt like Whitehead gave me a real sense of some elements of the Harlem he describes.

This one dragged a bit for me, though admittedly it was long. I got pretty tired of spending time with

Perrin in the wolf dream

, though it might've been less annoying if I had been reading to myself rather than aloud. The return of

Moiraine

was much anticipated but I thought it was very sudden and in a way unearned that

she and Thom were suddenly an item. Sanderson had given us some small hints of a stronger connection, but it felt tacked on and definitely didn't seem like something Jordan set up. What I'm responding to isn't the relationship but the clumsiness of its introduction.

It was neat to read more work by Cervantes beyond Don Quixote. Some of the stories blurred together for me as they were similar in subject matter and in their telling, but I enjoyed all of them.

Very short. I liked it. A little philosophical, a little religious, pretty humanistic.

It's been sitting on my nightstand for years only partially finished. I liked some of what I read but have been prioritizing other activities and reading. I'm tired of having it in my "currently reading" list. If I resume one day, I'll probably start over.