Mini Driver

Riotously funny for academics

Revisado: 07-20-24

Clever and well-executed concept to write a whole novel as letters of recommendation. The author clearly knows the academic world well and treats it with wry humor.

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Not my favorite Ann Patchett but very good

Revisado: 01-01-24

Some people will think that not enough happens in this novel. It's rather low-key in the way that Ann Patchett's recent work is. Yet the prose moves right along. It's like talking to an intelligent and literate friend. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Excellent narration

Revisado: 01-01-24

My first time reading Lord of the Rings. I'm doing so just so I know what all the fuss is about and so I can catch occasional references to it. I'm not a fan of fantasy. The narrator is excellent at dramatizing the characters and keeping the momentum going. I find some of the adventures a bit tedious, but it's an easy listen while driving or doing something else.

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Not as good as Ware's other mysteries

Revisado: 02-07-23

This book needed a good editor. It's too long and there's too much about Hannah longing for his husband's embrace and feeling the unborn baby. It's not as tight as her earlier books such as In a Dark, Dark Wood and not as literary. The characters are not as crisply drawn. It's still a good read.

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Not my favorite Erdrich

Revisado: 08-25-22

But she is a wonderful writer, and everything she writes is worth reading. This book is timely because part of it takes place during the pandemic.

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Excellent

Revisado: 08-25-22

This is the first audiobook I’ve read that I would urge other readers to listen to—because the author includes audio excerpts from recorded interviews. It’s a highly imaginative book crossing memoir with biography and a pleasure to read. It’s read by the author.

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Overwritten

Revisado: 09-21-21

I expected to like the novel better than I did. The characters are well drawn and imaginative, and the prose is often poetic, but I got impatient with the prose too often.

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Perfect audiobook

Revisado: 07-05-21

Dickens’s novels were meant to be read aloud in the family sitting room. They were to the 19th century what video streaming is today. The story is full of lively, quirky characters brought beautifully to life by Richard Armitage, who makes each one distinctive with his vocal characterizations. Highly recommend.

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More of the same

Revisado: 10-06-20

This is the fourth Kate Morton novel I've read. They are a good escape and are well written, but the ones I've read are all very similar. They move back and forth in time with multiple generations of the same family. There's always a kind of distant, idyllic past set in the English countryside that turns out to be different from what it seems. I admire the way she tells the stories both by narrating what happens and by having the contemporary characters research the past. But this one, at least, could be much shorter than it is. The Clockmaker's Daughter is my favorite--maybe because I read it first.

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Astounding

Revisado: 07-27-20

First, this is an amazing way to tell social history, by telling the personal histories of three ordinary people growing up in the South and moving to New York, Chicago, and LA. I've read first-person accounts of Black life in the South during the 20th century and have been horrified by some of the personal accounts. But this book makes the startling case that the Jim Crow South wasn't a matter of occasional acts of cruelty but of pervasive cruelty and oppression that affected all Black Southerners no matter what their educational level, their behavior, or their class. And it makes the case that Jim Crow did not stop once you crossed the border into the North or West. As a white person growing up in the South during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, I had no idea. Read it.

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