jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

A unique, amazing book. Highly recommended. I read the beginning curious to see how an author could possibly sustain a first person narrative by a five year old boy who had spent his entire life locked in an 11x11 room together with his mother. Jack, the little boy, has been taught by his mother that this room is the entire world and that the images he sees on TV are not real (thus the lack of articles, 'room' and 'chair' are sufficient words when there is only one of each in existence) -- something she does so that he does not get upset about everything that he is missing. Up until his fifth birthday when he spots a mouse, the largest creature he has seen other than his mother is a spider.

The first half is almost like a mother-son version of The Road, as the two of them work together to survive in an unimaginably harsh environment surrounded by cruelty -- in this case in the form of their monstrous captor. Reading it at times you are jealous of their relationship and experience and lack of greater worries and a tiny part of wishes for the same experience -- but then you're reminded of the brutality of their captor who punishes them by shutting off the power, raping and beating the mother, and not providing them with needed medicine.

The book is not plot driven, but SPOILER ALERT if you are averse to knowing anything about how the story develops. The second half is set outside of Room and the challenges the mother and Jack face as they try to integrate into the world that treats her as a saint and him as a freak. The second half is in many ways a more moving and challenging story, but it also suffers from the fact that the characters that surround them on the outside are cartoonish and at times implausible (e.g., and this is a minor example of which there are several, I found it downright bizarre that on Jack's first night in a home without his mother, following 5 years in Room and one week in a clinic, his otherwise loving grandmother would be annoyed about having to sit in his room while he fell asleep).

One of the best books of the year.

Ostensibly a sequel to Something Borrowed, this is really a continuation. The two together form a single, excellent novel. I had planned to wait several months before reading this but after sampling the first page or two I could not restrain myself from continuing on and on and on. Which was actually the right way to read it.

Something Borrowed was very good. It told the story about a smart, serious, woman named Rachel who steals her best friend's fiance. It was told in the first person by Rachel.

Something Blue, the continuation, is in the first person by Rachel's best friend Darcy, a New York publicist who is beautiful, superficial and selfish. The first quarter of it retells Something Borrowed from Darcy's perspective, which is wittier and, given the largely unsympathetic narration, more interesting than Rachel's version. The bulk of the book is about Darcy's self-inflicted adversity, her learning to overcome it, and a satisfying conclusion that really ties together both books. The form of Something Blue was a less conventional love story / chick lit / romantic comedy, but in retrospect one can see that is what it was all along.

Highly recommended.

A friend likened this book to crack. Unlike crack, however, when you read this on a Kindle you can at least hold out the prospect to passing strangers that you're reading the Wall Street Journal.

Largely in the Jane Austen genre of romantic comedy (complete with a character named Darcy, in case you missed the other cues), it tells the story of a woman's affair with her best friend's fiance. It gets you very emotionally invested in her eventual happiness and the resolution of the seemingly impossible solution.

Giffin, however, doesn't resolve it in a completely Austen-esque way -- having both more convenient plot twists and coincidences than Austen ever relied on, but also a little more complexity and ambiguity than Austen has.

I'm trying to avoid getting addicted, but not sure how long I can hold out before reading another Emily Giffin book.

This book zips along and is pleasurable but ultimately falls well short of awe inspiring. It is a hard-boiled, noir-like story set in California. A likable gambler shoots a mobster in the leg to escape paying a debt, he goes on the run, meets a beautiful woman also at odds with the law, and they hole up in a biker bar together. While they are spinning a plan to get millions of dollars she was framed for embezzling, the mob catches up with him and a certain amount of action ensues. Ultimately, the bad guys don't fare particularly well.

The dialogue is a strong point in this book, with well drawn characters and rapid fire repartee. And the plot is enough to keep you going with interest but not enough to, at the end of the day, say one be very impressed.

I have not read any other Denis Johnson books but if this is an appetizer then it makes me look forward to the main course.

Fermat's Last Theorem begins with Pythagoras, goes through Fermat's positing of his theorem, the attempts by Euler and others to solve it, and culminates with Andrew Wiles's solution. It is generally entertaining and has the occasional equation, with a few more in the Appendix. But most of the relatively light analytical machinery in the book is devoted to ancillary problems or general illustrations, Singh does not even go beyond an extremely superficial description of the main feature of Fermat's proof in the case of n=4. Instead a lot of the space is filled with detours that are often found in these sorts of books, from the role of women in French mathematics in the 19th Century to the puzzle fad in the early 20th Century. In that way this book fell short of Singh's Big Bang which felt more focused and a little more thorough in trying to describe how scientists discovered what they did about the big bang.

I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. Some of the stories are quite striking, original and memorable. But there is something overly defiant of any internal logic or coherence that gets in the way of them being fully satisfying. And there was a certain repetitiveness to them. That said, some are about as imaginative as anything I've read -- from about as macabre and twisted mind as one could imagine.

The weakest part of many biographies is the opening. After all, Shakespeare and Lincoln were not actually distinguished by their birth -- or even the first few years of their lives. But you know that this book will be different when it opens with Bulgakov addressing Moliere's midwife, across three centuries, warning her to be careful with the premature infant in her arms and explaining how well he will be remembered all around the world for centuries to come -- more so than Louis XIV even, according to Bulgakov.

The opening announces that this is a biography that will read like a novel. In fact, it is a hybrid with extensive imagined dialogue and scenes, but telling the story from birth to death with relatively little left out along the way -- like a conventional biography. In some places it was hilarious (although not quite up to Moliere's level), in other places moving, and everywhere interesting.

In some ways you see more kinship between Bulgakov and Moliere in Bulgakov's play of the same subject than you do in this biography, which tells of all the censorship that Moliere faced but also of all of his court-sanctioned successes as well. Which given that this book itself wasn't published for decades after Bulgakov's life suggests the analogy between them is an imperfect one.

Bottom line, very readable, enjoyable and highly recommended.

At it's best this book merits five stars. The opening scene -- in which the husband runs over a feral hog and the wife finishes him off -- is a masterpiece of psychologically insightful black comedy. And the advertising campaign developed over the course of the book for a company that makes both flared and straight blue jeans tops anything Mad Men has come up with. Overall, the book is highly original, funny, and psychologically insightful as it diagnoses a marriage that is falling apart and then comes back together. That said, it is also somewhat repetitive at points and aimless the second half is at times aimless. But I'm very much looking forward to Nancy Mauro's second novel.

This early novella by Wilkie Collins is a picaresque story of a young many from a good family who goes through a series of professions, from publishing anonymous caricatures of his unwitting friends to forging old masters to counterfeiting. His family isn't exactly blameless either: in a typical Collins device, a will leaves money to the rogue's sister and brother-in-law only if he outlasts his grandmother -- which becomes their motivation for checking in on the rogue every now and then.

The picaresque meanderings are interrupted by the rogue falling in love, an exciting escape/pursuit, and his becoming an honest man by getting married and settling down in Australia (the later location, against his will).

This novella provides only a distant glimpse of the best of Collins, which was eventually to come. But it is enjoyable and worthwhile on its own terms.

This book deserves a better review than: amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing.