Marcia Robinson > Recent Status Updates

Mr. Dick is flying his kite, and I'm bawling. I hope the rest of the book is this good. So far I haven't minded the slowish pace.

DNF- It's supposed to be a book about one amazing thing that happened to each person in the group. To me, that means a first person narrative. I tried to get passed the fact that it's not, but I just feel to far removed from the storyteller.

So I'm definitely in the minority with this book, and it just may not be my time to read it, but I don't understand the rave reviews. I'm having a hard time caring about these people at all. I don't know if it's because the author jumps around so much, or that I just find them off-putting in general. Either way, I'm marking this DNF for now and moving on.

I'm seriously struggling to continue reading...I had no idea it was so religion intensive. I'm going to try to get to 400 and if it doesn't get onto another subject, I'm afraid this will be a DNF for me.

This is the first book I've picked up in the 5 yrs I've been at this job that I can't read at work. There is so much here to unpack, I just couldn't give it the concentration it warranted. Will definitely be picking it back up when I get my own copy and not the library's.

I really wanted to love this book. A Gentleman in Moscow was AMAZING! This book not so much. I love road trip books, even ones that aren't really road trip books. I loved Wooley and Billy. I think my biggest problem was that there was no flow, no transitions..one chapter ended and then somebody else is talking. Too many books to read, too little time. Onward.

DNF. I tried to get through this because I really like Irwin Shaw, but after way too many pages of Wesley trying to track down people who knew his father, I realized I just didn't care what happened to any of these people. Onward.

DNF. I'm bored. I skipped the last two short stories and went to Cake and Ale and I'm out. Having read 10 of the 12 short stories, I've got to say that I only liked two or three of them. I'm trying to broaden my reading horizons and have been trying different forms. I don't know if it's the short story form or the author that I'm bored with. I like Maugham, Of Human Bondage is one of the my favorite books.

So the author gets an audience with Ismail Khan after he is deposed and there is not a single paragraph about what transpired? Back to crumbling minarets and the distant past? Really?

I think I made it halfway through this book because I really wanted to like it. I'm all about lyricism and style, but there comes a point where it becomes a hinderance. I think a better editor would have taken out some of the "his father, not my father" etc. and it would have made it much more readable.

Not my usual fare, but a fast read. The characters were fleshed our and the story kept moving, but the writing seemed sloppy at the end.

I'm at that point where I will soon decide whether to continue reading or not. I don't know how many times a person thinks he has to mention that he has no direction in his life and is looking for something to do before he gets sick of saying it, but I'm really sick of reading it. Get on with it already!

A very interesting book about two subjects I knew next to nothing about...coffee and Yemen.