Nicole Manning

The kind of book you miss when it's over

Revisado: 12-23-19

Beautifully written. I just about fell over when the brilliant Tom Hanks read the bit about Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson being a favorite book. The slow, steady pace, the visual descriptions, the poetry in this book very much reminded me of that book (it's my favorite, too). Mr. Hanks voice is warm and funny and perfect as the narrator.

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Meandering and self obsessed

Revisado: 10-26-18

For a self help book to work, you have to believe that the author has any authority and has her shit together. When Miss Wilson says she must sleep with a thick eye mask, industrial ear plugs, and her mouth taped shut with electrical tape...and she's worried how a paramour might take this fact, I stopped listening.

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Slow with grating narrator

Revisado: 02-16-18

Firstly, I couldn't stand the inflections of the narrator! It's like story hour in kiddie section of the library, so irritating, I almost stopped listening 3 times!
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The book itself I feel conflicted about. While the info about life as a Korean family in Japan was interesting, I found the long meandering time line meant characters disappeared with little explanation. Half way through, I just didn't care about any of them because the descriptions were so matter of fact, almost clininical, and they probably would be killed off anyway. One moment, it's all kimchi making, then suddenly the protagonists are great at making candy. So many threads, so many loose ends.
Then there is the author's weird obsession with sex. It's described in such a negative, uncaring way in every case (and there are a lot of them) that it made me squeamish. What's the deal with the sex parties in the park? Was the wife of the gay detective a lesbian? We will never know, as the scene (and the character) disappear after that scene. Just a scene the author wanted to write that had no place in the book. There's lots of instances of this.
Overall, this book was very unsatisfying.

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poorly done soft porn

Revisado: 09-11-17

Packaged as an historical novel, this is a thinly veiled bodice ripper. Sadly, it doesn't even succeed at the sexy bits. Super lame all around. The chirpy narrator is sometimes irritating, to boot. Avoid if you have two brain cells to rub together.

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poorly done soft porn

Revisado: 09-11-17

Packaged as an historical novel, this is a thinly veiled bodice ripper. Sadly, it doesn't even succeed at the sexy bits. Super lame all around. The chirpy narrator is sometimes irritating, to boot. Avoid if you have two brain cells to rub together.

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Advanced Buddhist arcana

Revisado: 09-08-17

I was hoping for a more useful secular teaching. This talk is more about "the 5 miraculous prashnas" and the "12 indemnable bodhichitasanas" and other esoteric religious arcana. There's a few nuggets if wisdom, but it's not for the armchair meditator.

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narrator is terrible with accents

Revisado: 06-22-16

I agree with another reviewer: this is not literature. It's also not an art heist thriller. It's more a character study of 3 very different people who are connected by 1 painting. The descriptions are very detailed, so it feels very "real." Unfortunately, the narrator fancies himself a linguist and tries to do an Australian and a Dutch accent throughout. Excruciating! I probably would have liked this book more if he would have just read it all in his natural speech.

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Old curmudgeon complains

Revisado: 05-03-16

I've loved BB in the past, but this particular book is largely a platform for him to complain about everything that's wrong with the world. There's wit here, but overall it's a drag.

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Not for the squeamish!

Revisado: 03-05-16

This is likely a fascinating book if you are in medicine. If you are not, get ready for long drawn out descriptions of bone saws and blood. The second half was a little better, but it's so medically slanted that a lot of it went right over my head.

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like a root canal

Revisado: 02-25-16

All negative, all the time. Hated this as much as going to the dentist. The actor's caustic didn't help.

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