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Rules for Others to Live By: Comments & Self-Contradictions
David Sedaris meets Garrison Keillor in this hysterically funny and thoughtful collection of original essays by Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg, who shares anecdotes and observations gathered from a lifetime of perfecting "Rules for Others to Live By."
Between worrying about his artist friends and reconciling his complicated feelings about New York City, Pulitzer finalist Richard Greenberg still finds time to be something of a hermit and it seems to be working out for him. As a playwright, he says, the time spent alone making up stories about fictional characters has sharpened his sensitivity to real life and all of the bizarre, unpredictable, and even unimaginable people beyond one s front door. In "Rules for Others to Live By," he shares stories from his life, observations from two decades of residence on a three-block stretch of New York City, and musings from his brilliant, if not a little unusual, mind. Spanning a range of topics from friendship to writing, urban life to visiting parents, health crises to hypochondria and other paranoid tendencies, Greenberg s distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and the idiosyncrasies we can only hope will go unnoticed in a crowd."
Between worrying about his artist friends and reconciling his complicated feelings about New York City, Pulitzer finalist Richard Greenberg still finds time to be something of a hermit and it seems to be working out for him. As a playwright, he says, the time spent alone making up stories about fictional characters has sharpened his sensitivity to real life and all of the bizarre, unpredictable, and even unimaginable people beyond one s front door. In "Rules for Others to Live By," he shares stories from his life, observations from two decades of residence on a three-block stretch of New York City, and musings from his brilliant, if not a little unusual, mind. Spanning a range of topics from friendship to writing, urban life to visiting parents, health crises to hypochondria and other paranoid tendencies, Greenberg s distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and the idiosyncrasies we can only hope will go unnoticed in a crowd."
300 pages, Hardcover
Published October 4, 2016
5 people are currently reading
355 people want to read
About the author
Richard Greenberg
38 books20 followersRichard Greenberg was an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He had more than 25 plays premiere on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last. Greenberg is perhaps best known for his 2002 play Take Me Out.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
March 6, 2018
I enjoyed reading this collection. There were colorful stories about the wonderfully weird empires of New York City. It's big, funny, selfish, and entertaining. If you're a word nerd in search of a collection that adds color to mundane experience, this is the collection for you. I struggled remembering the title, but the gasps, sighs, chuckles, and grins I sustained throughout empowered me. That made this read a blast.
I have never been to New York. But it's a collection that has a learning curve. If you're not terribly invested in expanding your mind, the stories will read like the ramblings of an unhappy old man. If you can appreciate odd gifts in unusual places, the book might get you through a boring patch in your life.
I have never been to New York. But it's a collection that has a learning curve. If you're not terribly invested in expanding your mind, the stories will read like the ramblings of an unhappy old man. If you can appreciate odd gifts in unusual places, the book might get you through a boring patch in your life.
May 12, 2020
I absolutely admire Mr. Greenberg's honest, candid discussions about life.
His vocabulary and use of the English language are just wonderful.
His vocabulary and use of the English language are just wonderful.
June 3, 2017
My original and complete review can be found at my blog, HERE WE ARE, GOING, here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/...
Richard Greenberg is the Tony Award Winning author of Take Me Out and many other perceptive, incisive, savvy, acute stage works. I am happy to say these essays --- or, observations? ---are every bit as sharp and moving and full of laughs, a-ha moments, and tears as are his plays --- most of which straddle the line between comedy and drama, defying categorization.
Mr. Greenberg sculpts so many glorious lines I hesitate to choose among them, but, here goes.
She looked like an untaken photograph. There should have been a saxophone.
Success radiated from her like quills from a porcupine.
And there are many more surgically precise observations about people and places and situations, insights so imaginatively perceptive, one wants to approach Richard Greenberg, waving one's hand like a child wanting the next piggyback ride from the big, strong, fun adult, pleading, "Do me! Me next!" so one might have one's own Greenberg-metaphor to use forever as introduction so that one need never again try to explain one's self. "Oh, lovely to meet you, my name is Charlie and I am like a place you visit infrequently which is never anything at all like you remember it; one of those night terrors where walls and doors and windows have all been rearranged into unfamiliar architecture through which you can't find your way."
Or, something like that only shorter and better. I feel as if Richard Greenberg could write me perfectly, because we are --- save for his genius as a writer --- alike in so many ways that as I read through the book I thought, perhaps, he'd been eavesdropping on my soul, or, he'd gotten the life I was supposed to have had. These:
Even in the thick of situations, and very happy about it, I don't generally feel a part of things. I have a lot of friends who count on me to lend a sympathetic ear and give good counsel, but when I bother having a picture of myself.... As much as I enjoyed the party --- as I enjoy most parties --- in the cab after, I felt, as always, that I was heading back to freedom.
Serious people exist. But they tend to be drowned out by these others whose loudness, speed, shallowness, and ubiquity wear me down and diminish my capacity to go slow and think hard. It' as though at some point it was decided the world was irreparably broken and all that's left for us is to be connoisseurs of the wreckage.
I have a long history with people undergoing epiphanic breakthroughs, and it's been demoralizing when it hasn't been chilling.
When I am very old, I am going to become a walker. I am going to walk up and down the few streets of my neighborhood, taking everything in, and I will be wearing my green coat. Even in early spring, I will be wearing the green coat. It will be patched in places and threadbare in others. Already, my friend Linda has had to sew back on a button that fell off from sheer fatigue. I don't discount the possibility that one day the buttons won't all match. Some of them may not be flush with the buttonholes. This is fine by me. I will walk in my tattered garment, surveilling my immediate surroundings with a captious eye. People will start to notice me. I will become something of a local character.
I will have met my destiny, which is to be a flaneur, a walker in the city, as I would be already, were it not for my tendency to self-quarantine.
Yes. So precisely and decisively me, it is uncanny. Which Pamela saw. Which is why she suggested I read it, because reading it had, in her, done that a-ha thing of a bell ring of, "Oh, this is so much Charlie, he should read this."
Because, you see, another thing I've in common with Richard Greenberg is a life-story where the time is measured not in years, but in the presence of remarkable women I have known, of which Pamela is one. We met on Twitter and then, because she urged me and arranged it we met in Washington, D.C. one day, which, for me, is something of a miracle since it required of me the panic-attack inducing activities of driving forty minutes to a Metro stop, boarding a train and riding 30 more minutes into D.C., and walking the city until the meet-up time --- because so terrified am I of being late, and so every-time-I-do-it certain I will not be able to navigate the Metro and thus head hopelessly in the wrong direction --- I arrived in the city approximately two hours before the appointed hour for the first in person embrace --- of which I was also terrified. (See above faux Greenberg metaphor about me. I'm better long-distance and in writing than I am in person and long-exposure, both of which reveal me to be rather less of the good and more of the bad than I seem to be when able to edit --- not that I manage to shorten anything when I edit --- such as this; MOST of my editing/re-writing is about adding clarifying sentences and clauses and too effing many adjectives to try to explain myself --- my virtual self, and excuse myself -- my IRL self.)
Where was I? Oh, yes, Pamela. I'll return to Richard Greenberg quotes:
I had no idea what she saw in me, but I didn't question it....Some people say the same things in the same way to everyone they know. You think you're conversing with them; you're merely partnering their monologue. Jill had conversations that pertained to the person she was talking to. There was no double-dealing in this. She saw us.
That's dear Pamela. Who has seen me --- and I am not an easy see, and after having been seen require a lot of patience and effort at continuing to see --- still, Pamela manages to find it in her heart to think of me when she reads a book she particularly likes and thinks I would enjoy. Like Rules For Others To Live By.
Richard Greenberg is the Tony Award Winning author of Take Me Out and many other perceptive, incisive, savvy, acute stage works. I am happy to say these essays --- or, observations? ---are every bit as sharp and moving and full of laughs, a-ha moments, and tears as are his plays --- most of which straddle the line between comedy and drama, defying categorization.
Mr. Greenberg sculpts so many glorious lines I hesitate to choose among them, but, here goes.
She looked like an untaken photograph. There should have been a saxophone.
Success radiated from her like quills from a porcupine.
And there are many more surgically precise observations about people and places and situations, insights so imaginatively perceptive, one wants to approach Richard Greenberg, waving one's hand like a child wanting the next piggyback ride from the big, strong, fun adult, pleading, "Do me! Me next!" so one might have one's own Greenberg-metaphor to use forever as introduction so that one need never again try to explain one's self. "Oh, lovely to meet you, my name is Charlie and I am like a place you visit infrequently which is never anything at all like you remember it; one of those night terrors where walls and doors and windows have all been rearranged into unfamiliar architecture through which you can't find your way."
Or, something like that only shorter and better. I feel as if Richard Greenberg could write me perfectly, because we are --- save for his genius as a writer --- alike in so many ways that as I read through the book I thought, perhaps, he'd been eavesdropping on my soul, or, he'd gotten the life I was supposed to have had. These:
Even in the thick of situations, and very happy about it, I don't generally feel a part of things. I have a lot of friends who count on me to lend a sympathetic ear and give good counsel, but when I bother having a picture of myself.... As much as I enjoyed the party --- as I enjoy most parties --- in the cab after, I felt, as always, that I was heading back to freedom.
Serious people exist. But they tend to be drowned out by these others whose loudness, speed, shallowness, and ubiquity wear me down and diminish my capacity to go slow and think hard. It' as though at some point it was decided the world was irreparably broken and all that's left for us is to be connoisseurs of the wreckage.
I have a long history with people undergoing epiphanic breakthroughs, and it's been demoralizing when it hasn't been chilling.
When I am very old, I am going to become a walker. I am going to walk up and down the few streets of my neighborhood, taking everything in, and I will be wearing my green coat. Even in early spring, I will be wearing the green coat. It will be patched in places and threadbare in others. Already, my friend Linda has had to sew back on a button that fell off from sheer fatigue. I don't discount the possibility that one day the buttons won't all match. Some of them may not be flush with the buttonholes. This is fine by me. I will walk in my tattered garment, surveilling my immediate surroundings with a captious eye. People will start to notice me. I will become something of a local character.
I will have met my destiny, which is to be a flaneur, a walker in the city, as I would be already, were it not for my tendency to self-quarantine.
Yes. So precisely and decisively me, it is uncanny. Which Pamela saw. Which is why she suggested I read it, because reading it had, in her, done that a-ha thing of a bell ring of, "Oh, this is so much Charlie, he should read this."
Because, you see, another thing I've in common with Richard Greenberg is a life-story where the time is measured not in years, but in the presence of remarkable women I have known, of which Pamela is one. We met on Twitter and then, because she urged me and arranged it we met in Washington, D.C. one day, which, for me, is something of a miracle since it required of me the panic-attack inducing activities of driving forty minutes to a Metro stop, boarding a train and riding 30 more minutes into D.C., and walking the city until the meet-up time --- because so terrified am I of being late, and so every-time-I-do-it certain I will not be able to navigate the Metro and thus head hopelessly in the wrong direction --- I arrived in the city approximately two hours before the appointed hour for the first in person embrace --- of which I was also terrified. (See above faux Greenberg metaphor about me. I'm better long-distance and in writing than I am in person and long-exposure, both of which reveal me to be rather less of the good and more of the bad than I seem to be when able to edit --- not that I manage to shorten anything when I edit --- such as this; MOST of my editing/re-writing is about adding clarifying sentences and clauses and too effing many adjectives to try to explain myself --- my virtual self, and excuse myself -- my IRL self.)
Where was I? Oh, yes, Pamela. I'll return to Richard Greenberg quotes:
I had no idea what she saw in me, but I didn't question it....Some people say the same things in the same way to everyone they know. You think you're conversing with them; you're merely partnering their monologue. Jill had conversations that pertained to the person she was talking to. There was no double-dealing in this. She saw us.
That's dear Pamela. Who has seen me --- and I am not an easy see, and after having been seen require a lot of patience and effort at continuing to see --- still, Pamela manages to find it in her heart to think of me when she reads a book she particularly likes and thinks I would enjoy. Like Rules For Others To Live By.
December 30, 2019
I thought I like Richard Greenberg after reading his play, Take Me Out...I know I Love Richard Greenberg after reading Rules for Others to Live By! This collection of essays, thoughts, and musings is wryly hysterical, thought provoking, and in some instances a little too close to home! A must read for anyone who has lived!
December 19, 2016
There are sentences in this book that are examples of how elegant and satisfying a language can be. Certainly not all of them but enough. It's somewhat gossipy, witty, self deprecating, very New York City.
The author is a playwright.
The author is a playwright.
August 31, 2016
Reviewed for Library Journal. You really have to read this one to the end and suspend your disbelief for awhile, it comes through.
August 23, 2018
I wanted to like this book, if for no other reason than that my best friend from college was in one of the author’s Pulitzer nominated plays, as well as its follow-up on Broadway (which was apparently so dreadful it doesn’t even get a mention in the “Also By” page) and there’s even a short anecdote about him and his wife in the book. But, alas, I can’t say that I did.
Greenberg clearly loves language - the amount of 20 cent words in the book would add up to the cost of a ticket to one of his plays - but I couldn’t figure out what he wants to elicit for the reader. The GoodReads summary starts off by saying this book is “David Sedaris meets Garrison Keillor”....ummm....NO. This isn’t really a book of comic essays - I think I chuckled a half a dozen times throughout the book - nor is it really a paean to New York City (where I lived for 6 years...Greenberg’s New York, while intermittently fascinating, is not my New York) nor a collection of Highly Relatable anecdotes about life. At times it approaches being an engaging character study (my favorite chapter is the one where he writes about his neighbor Adele; coincidentally this is also the chapter where my friend makes an appearance) but it’s never quite that either. Instead, the main idea that comes through is an expectation that the reader will have the thought “Oh, this guy and his life are interesting!”
And based on what Greenberg writes about himself in the book, I think he would be a bit horrified by that.
Greenberg clearly loves language - the amount of 20 cent words in the book would add up to the cost of a ticket to one of his plays - but I couldn’t figure out what he wants to elicit for the reader. The GoodReads summary starts off by saying this book is “David Sedaris meets Garrison Keillor”....ummm....NO. This isn’t really a book of comic essays - I think I chuckled a half a dozen times throughout the book - nor is it really a paean to New York City (where I lived for 6 years...Greenberg’s New York, while intermittently fascinating, is not my New York) nor a collection of Highly Relatable anecdotes about life. At times it approaches being an engaging character study (my favorite chapter is the one where he writes about his neighbor Adele; coincidentally this is also the chapter where my friend makes an appearance) but it’s never quite that either. Instead, the main idea that comes through is an expectation that the reader will have the thought “Oh, this guy and his life are interesting!”
And based on what Greenberg writes about himself in the book, I think he would be a bit horrified by that.
August 19, 2022
2.5/3 stars!
Richard Greenberg can write, his writing is skilled and detailed, often humorous and emotional, effective for any story that he wants to tell. He can tell a concise story, introducing all of the characters, plot, and conflict, and everything that’s going on is relayed pretty decently, and his writing can often be beautiful and poetic but there was something about Rules for Others to Live By that I just couldn’t get into, the stories he told were underwhelming and left more to be desired.
This collection wasn’t horrible where I felt a dislike towards it, it just wasn’t my cup of tea and I wasn’t interested in it. I misunderstood what this collection was about, and not being aware of who Richard Greenberg is enough to want to read about him and his life, it wasn’t the book for me but there are stories and moments in here that are worth thinking about, some stuff that also was a bit off-putting, but overall if you’re a fan or familiar with Richard Greenberg and want to know more about his life and his thoughts on life, this might be the collection for you!
Richard Greenberg can write, his writing is skilled and detailed, often humorous and emotional, effective for any story that he wants to tell. He can tell a concise story, introducing all of the characters, plot, and conflict, and everything that’s going on is relayed pretty decently, and his writing can often be beautiful and poetic but there was something about Rules for Others to Live By that I just couldn’t get into, the stories he told were underwhelming and left more to be desired.
This collection wasn’t horrible where I felt a dislike towards it, it just wasn’t my cup of tea and I wasn’t interested in it. I misunderstood what this collection was about, and not being aware of who Richard Greenberg is enough to want to read about him and his life, it wasn’t the book for me but there are stories and moments in here that are worth thinking about, some stuff that also was a bit off-putting, but overall if you’re a fan or familiar with Richard Greenberg and want to know more about his life and his thoughts on life, this might be the collection for you!
February 2, 2017
* I received a free copy through Goodreads.
While the stories get a bit sad with a few friends' deaths, it doesn't leave you feeling that way. It's a look at New York life, even though many parts of it are in other places it's a New York book.
While the stories get a bit sad with a few friends' deaths, it doesn't leave you feeling that way. It's a look at New York life, even though many parts of it are in other places it's a New York book.
March 31, 2020
Witty. Insightful. Vocabulary Nerd's Delight. It felt as if I was spending time with a hilarious, gossipy, erudite friend who both loves and loves to hate New York & New Yorkers. Thoroughly enjoyable, cover to cover.
March 4, 2018
I did like the picture on the cover.
May 24, 2020
Fun. He reminds me a little of David Sedaris.
June 26, 2023
This was very entertaining, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wonderful writing voice, authentic, light-hearted, enjoyable from cover to cover. I would read anything he would publish.
November 22, 2016
Fun little read about New York and its characters. Good read-a-loud and discussion.
March 31, 2025
It was weird but not good weird.
June 26, 2017
These loosely connected (very loosely) essays and comments require a certain dry, dark, cynical sense of humor to really enjoy them. I did enjoy them though, for the most part. The audiences is definitely New Yorkers, and I can imagine these might not find broad appeal outside of a certain set of wry, snarky, mildly condescending New Yorky types. I am that, so especially the first part of the book with lots of inside jokes about various NYC types, situations, and neighborhoods was so funny to me. I marked so many lines that I couldn't stop laughing over. For example: I find myself in Midtown occasionally and never am out of it before I've resolved to retire to the foothills of Vermont and open a store that sells dry goods and tea. My husband said this nearly verbatim on his first visit to Manhattan.
Some essays didn't hit the right notes with me. I'm not a theater person and Greenberg is a Tony-award winning playwright, so he often tells stories from his career, or that are theater gossipy, and I couldn't really get into or care about those. The same for some pieces that tell specific, fairly uninteresting stories about his friends in great detail. Or topics that veered into the rich person dinner party philosophical vein. Just not for me. The second half of the book felt like it had way too many of those.
But it was worth the read for some of his general observational gems, that's when I think his storytelling talent is at its strongest. To name a few:
Acknowledge that you're the center of the universe, then radiate.
I manufacture guilt with such efficiency you'd think I had a loom.
However grisly the present may get, I'm never tempted to revel in the past because the past sent me explicit instructions not to. (This poignant remark after he remembers an unhappy moment when he told himself not to look back on this time in life with undeserved fondness when it really wasn't all that great. I loved this, I've absolutely done the same!)
It's also skewed towards a somewhat older audience, but to be fair, I'm not very old and I still enjoyed it. He admits this himself: Even in my youth, I didn't have appeal to the youth market. He says he's always been more of a middle-aged person even when he wasn't that old. I empathize, so maybe that's why some of the anecdotes and attitude appealed to me!
You might like it if you like Seinfeld, it's kind of Seinfeldian in its humor.
I received an advance copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for review.
Some essays didn't hit the right notes with me. I'm not a theater person and Greenberg is a Tony-award winning playwright, so he often tells stories from his career, or that are theater gossipy, and I couldn't really get into or care about those. The same for some pieces that tell specific, fairly uninteresting stories about his friends in great detail. Or topics that veered into the rich person dinner party philosophical vein. Just not for me. The second half of the book felt like it had way too many of those.
But it was worth the read for some of his general observational gems, that's when I think his storytelling talent is at its strongest. To name a few:
Acknowledge that you're the center of the universe, then radiate.
I manufacture guilt with such efficiency you'd think I had a loom.
However grisly the present may get, I'm never tempted to revel in the past because the past sent me explicit instructions not to. (This poignant remark after he remembers an unhappy moment when he told himself not to look back on this time in life with undeserved fondness when it really wasn't all that great. I loved this, I've absolutely done the same!)
It's also skewed towards a somewhat older audience, but to be fair, I'm not very old and I still enjoyed it. He admits this himself: Even in my youth, I didn't have appeal to the youth market. He says he's always been more of a middle-aged person even when he wasn't that old. I empathize, so maybe that's why some of the anecdotes and attitude appealed to me!
You might like it if you like Seinfeld, it's kind of Seinfeldian in its humor.
I received an advance copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for review.
January 28, 2017
Thoughts for which Robert Greenberg earns gratitude and admiration:
The concept of “cadential wisdom”: Sentences with the shape and rhythm of truth, but actually rather vapid. He shows courage in identifying PC icon Maya Angelou as a virtuosa of cadential wisdom. His diagnosis of the cultural disease of political correctness: “… traced back to the sixties, when traditional authority having been laid siege, people were freed up to submit to whatever bogus mumbo-jumbo they found sexy. It made no difference that the things … never tallied with what was going on, because so many people had stopped thinking. They had simply stopped thinking.”
A word to be killed is “narrative”, as in journalists comparing narratives. Never accounts of the actual. Stories are treacherous things.
Mediocrity, at its best, is competent and shy. It is a neighbor who will call 911 at need, and otherwise stay quiet.
Writers imitating Jacqueline Susann failed. Jacqueline meant it. You can’t fake that.
After triumph, everything does come to a dead halt.
Not all stories need relate closely to our own. Our culture has no shortage of mirrors.
The Golden Girls was the most racist show in TV history. Only Minnesotans were disparaged, so no blowback.
He uses words with precision: “The old saw about doing and teaching, a truism. In addition, true.”
I never thought to look up the meaning of “meaning”.
Things looked up in the course of reading:
meaning – 1) intended sense, 2) purpose
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a graffiti artist ( my note: who likely served as the inspiration for the hairstyle of Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons).
sprung rhythm – poetic foot with stressed 1st syllable, variable number of following unstressed syllables.
A soubrette is a coquettish young woman in a comedy.
sodality – society or association
maculate – spotted, stained, sullied
causeries – short informal light essays
pastiche – a work which imitates
invidious – causing discontent, animosity, envy
pentimento – changes in a painting – shown by traces of previous work
donnee – set of artistic assumptions
ne plus ultra – highest attainable degree
captious – ill-natured, raising objections and finding fault
The concept of “cadential wisdom”: Sentences with the shape and rhythm of truth, but actually rather vapid. He shows courage in identifying PC icon Maya Angelou as a virtuosa of cadential wisdom. His diagnosis of the cultural disease of political correctness: “… traced back to the sixties, when traditional authority having been laid siege, people were freed up to submit to whatever bogus mumbo-jumbo they found sexy. It made no difference that the things … never tallied with what was going on, because so many people had stopped thinking. They had simply stopped thinking.”
A word to be killed is “narrative”, as in journalists comparing narratives. Never accounts of the actual. Stories are treacherous things.
Mediocrity, at its best, is competent and shy. It is a neighbor who will call 911 at need, and otherwise stay quiet.
Writers imitating Jacqueline Susann failed. Jacqueline meant it. You can’t fake that.
After triumph, everything does come to a dead halt.
Not all stories need relate closely to our own. Our culture has no shortage of mirrors.
The Golden Girls was the most racist show in TV history. Only Minnesotans were disparaged, so no blowback.
He uses words with precision: “The old saw about doing and teaching, a truism. In addition, true.”
I never thought to look up the meaning of “meaning”.
Things looked up in the course of reading:
meaning – 1) intended sense, 2) purpose
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a graffiti artist ( my note: who likely served as the inspiration for the hairstyle of Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons).
sprung rhythm – poetic foot with stressed 1st syllable, variable number of following unstressed syllables.
A soubrette is a coquettish young woman in a comedy.
sodality – society or association
maculate – spotted, stained, sullied
causeries – short informal light essays
pastiche – a work which imitates
invidious – causing discontent, animosity, envy
pentimento – changes in a painting – shown by traces of previous work
donnee – set of artistic assumptions
ne plus ultra – highest attainable degree
captious – ill-natured, raising objections and finding fault
October 10, 2016
Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions by Tony award winning playwright Richard Greenberg is a collection of his rumination on incidents from his life and observations on the New York lifestyle. I leave the book with the idea that either it is trying too hard to be clever or I am not clever enough to get it. Either way, this one is not the reading experience for me.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016....
Reviewed for the Penguin First to Read program.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016....
Reviewed for the Penguin First to Read program.
September 6, 2016
* I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review *
I read 1/3 of this book and was no longer able to continue. Maybe it is to smart for me, or maybe I have to be from NYC to understand it, but it just seemed like disjointed, somewhat boring stories and musings. I didn't find any of it funny or even witty. I tried to trudge through it, but I admit defeat. I really did not enjoy this book at all.
I read 1/3 of this book and was no longer able to continue. Maybe it is to smart for me, or maybe I have to be from NYC to understand it, but it just seemed like disjointed, somewhat boring stories and musings. I didn't find any of it funny or even witty. I tried to trudge through it, but I admit defeat. I really did not enjoy this book at all.
December 8, 2016
I found these short stories entertaining for the most part but about nothing or about everyday life. Some seemed to have a point it was trying to make but sometimes I could not figure out what it was. Most of these stories were based in New York City but looking back I cannot tell you what any of them were about.
I received an advanced copy of this book from Penguin's First to Read Program with no requirement to review book.
I received an advanced copy of this book from Penguin's First to Read Program with no requirement to review book.
November 10, 2016
Penguin First ARC.
Very strange book, not really a story or even a series of short stories but more of an existential rant.
Very strange book, not really a story or even a series of short stories but more of an existential rant.
April 11, 2017
meh. short, though... (not what the title implied, but ok all the same).
no errors.
no errors.
January 3, 2023
bizarre and hard to connect with the writer but absolutely captivating and somewhat inspiring to read. Would recommend it to certain people only. Makes me want to write my own thoughts down
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews