I'm Just Talking discussion

The Rosie Project

Geez, I just finished reviewing this book (I hope) and it's stuck in some obscure corner somewhere and then it had the wrong cover and wrong edition or something. Everything here is awkward. I read the latest Kindle Edition, I think which I bought on Amazon but the Amazon purchase feature doesn't seem to work here. But anyway:
    "Go girl: you love him, the quirky-jerk-nerdy Professor and he wears his jeans and genes well. He wants to help you and he's losing his mind trying to swipe DNA samples for you and getting in trouble with the Dean; isn't that a sign of love, a love you thought he was incapable of.
    I love wild Rosie and well-planning Don, genetics Professor who gets mice drunk for a living. She teaches him how to have fun for fun's sake. But they are complementing screw-ups with chaotic grace in the dance of love lost and profoundly found. Social graces are not his strong suit, but loyalty and friendship are, and they both learn to cook gourmet emotions together for a meal of pot luck and wine and longing songs that end with a kiss.

Great review! :)

Ginny Potter wrote: "Great review! :)"
    Ginny,
Thanks very much. That was hard to try to get an essence of how I felt. I was looking at book reviews in the Times and I couldn't figure out how they do it. But it is somewhat easier on Amazon because they already have a lot of reviews and so the plot summary is already taken care of.
    It's going to be agony to do more reviews unless I can get into the spirit of it and then I can't always remember important details and themes. And the standard themes are not always my themes. What inspires me is usually not what other people see...

Yeah. I totally get that it's hard to express in words how you feel about the book. I'm always struggling with that but somehow manage to do it.

If that review was built from your "I don't write that well" scrap notes, shoo, I'll take your scrap notes over mine any day. I found myself smiling at your review, even if I didn't feel the same about the book myself (I just about lost it when they revealed that the father was SPOILER- Phil all along, which you would think that Don, being the meticulous person that he is, would've tested him first, instead of taking Rosie's word for "Nah, he can't be my dad").

I wouldn't fret in not being as eloquent as the reviewers of Times, heaven knows they've had their share of practice. Out of curiosity, are you considering reviewing books as a job? I think with a little more practice, you'd be stellar.

[SPOILER]
Mary,
Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed the review despite our differences of opinion. Yeah, I was shocked at the ending and the necessity of the serendipitous fight with Phil and his bloody nose. I guess in some contexts they'd call it fate. But I think if I told you that my Mother fooled around a lot and died and I was raised by my Step-Dad and was joining a group of people searching for their biological parent, you might focus on the search and forget to challenge the basic premise. But Don's subconscious found her attractive and it wanted her badly enough to make him ensure an entanglement. (But I did do a double-take and think "this is the end? Where's the rest of the book." I went through all the end notes to make sure I didn't accidentally skip something. For awhile I was puzzled --- what? Phil's the Father? How could that be etc.)

P.S. Mary,
No, I'm not considering being a professional reviewer. That would be my worst nightmare. I don't like the process of reading and so I don't like reading except that I want to grab onto the content. I read when I want to know something. Right now I want to write a novel, but everyone says you have to read a lot to learn to write, and you have to review to be reviewed or some variation of that. I guess for me reading is like mountain climbing: it hurts a lot and is arduous but when I get to each niche, I've learned something I wanted to know. And then of course, when you get to the top of the mountain you have to come down. I don't want to climb towards heaven; I want to get there. Somewhere there's a legitimate shortcut.

I agree that it's a great review. Sometimes when I look into your face, I can't read you. If the mountain is not too high I can bring in a helicopter to pick us up. Hmm, I guess I could read you a bedtime story one page at a time, and after a year or so I will have read a book to you.