Ew.
WTF?

Drivel.

Having, like David, spent my puberty in Raleigh, I didn’t find his anecdotes about the town terribly amusing. Yes, there is a rivalry between NC State and UNC, yes, North Hills Mall (before they replaced it with a scary “outdoor lifestyle center”) was small and silly… no innovative thoughts or humor in these things, at least not to me. And even past that, yes, the food at fancy restaurants is ridiculous and so on.

I did find the section wherein he was learning French kind of funny, but overall I was not impressed. I have a feeling that he is a much funnier reader than writer, though I’ve never heard his NPR readings.

It’s kind of like if you meet a person and they seem… okay… but you don’t want to become good friends with them. David is okay, but I don’t like him enough to expand our relationship.

I have to agree with this (excerpt from an) Amazon review:

“To me, however, Gruen never managed to transcend her source material. The primary problem was the narrator’s voice. Although the book was sprinkled with circus-specific vocabularly of that era, Gruen utterly fails to capture the rhythm or syntax of the time or milieu. Gruen’s language felt inappropriately contemporary, which undermined the overall credibility of the story.”

For “historical fiction” it certainly didn’t feel it. I found the writing style and plot lines to be immature, the relationships with the animals to be shallow and the character development to be one-dimensional. I don’t HATE it, but I certainly wouldn’t want to read it again.

This movie made no sense. The plot, the characters… I’m not really sure why it’s so popular. I guess that maybe it makes sense if you watch it in Russian, but I was not.

We ended up turning it off an hour in.

Maybe it would have helped if I’d seen Night Watch first for background, but this was annoying enough that I don’t want to bother.

Umm. I gave up. I quit reading about 140 pages in.

It was just boring and I didn’t find the characters or scenarios engaging at all. I kept finding myself avoiding reading it, which is very uncharacteristic. A actually told me that he has never seen me read a book so slowly. Which might be true.

Maybe it was a translation issue because there were also SO many grammatical problems along the lines of “Bob and Fred were talking. He told him that he did not want to talk anymore.” Wait… what?! Who did what with whom where why??

I got really tired of having to re-read sentences that just made no grammatical sense and the plotlines and general style were not such that I am willing to forgive poor grammar.

I find this book very boring. Sad.

Just got Disc 2 of Season 1… and putting a hold on Disc 3. So far, it’s OK, I’m not in love yet, but it took me a while to really fall for the Sopranos too, and now I feel like part of the “family”. ;P

Ewa Fröling was so pretty. Amazing eyebrows.

This was far from a page-turner (particularly due to the fact that it literally has no plot) but definitely had some redeeming characteristics. Ferlinghetti added in certain phrases and themes throughout the book (fourth person singular, a piece of string, cigarette-lightbulbs, Piblokto madness, etc.) which gave an interesting déjà vu feeling – which is something I believe the narrator is supposed to be feeling to a degree and it is transferred very well to the reader. I found myself wondering at several points if I had read ahead, and I honestly am not sure whether it was me or the author’s repetition of certain phrases.

One other thing I liked was occasionally when the narrator would go on a particularly bizarre train of thought, he would sometimes add a phrase like “Or so I imagined, so I thought” or similar which I found to be an interesting technique for two reasons. For one, I felt that it cemented the relationship between the reader and the narrator to a degree in that we were not always expected to believe his outlandish yarns, but rather realize that they were metaphors or daydreams or hallucinations. Secondly, it made the instances in which he did not use this verbiage seem like “well he didn’t say he was dreaming this time, so perhaps it was real” – kind of a reverse Boy Who Called Wolf.

My main qualm is that I feel that the experimental style did not pair particularly well with the length and I found it somewhat arduous to get through the whole thing. Ferlinghetti is first and foremost a poet and while I can see the appeal in certain aspects of this book, I would think he should stick to poetry.

I found this very thought-provoking in regard to the differences (or lack thereof) between fate, “luck”, chance, destiny, purpose, miracles and meaning. I’m not a big fan of the actors (specifically I don’t care for Matthew McConaughey or Clea DuVall), but I thought the film was very well executed and found myself exploring similar themes within my own life as it progressed. Very interesting and soft-spoken film with deep resonance to me.