Customer Comments

bstee has commented on (2) products.

Calico Joe by John Grisham

bstee, August 21, 2012

A bit of a disappointment. I love baseball, I love stats, I love the Cubs, I grew up in the 70's and I enjoy Grisham but this was a little too much cotton candy. The subjects were tough, a lost career, terrible father, touches on abuse, abandonment, these are heavy subjects. But we offset it with the joy of such a great little baseball story. I think I had trouble with the baseball story in that Joe was the best rookie of all time. I will say spoiler alert but not really - he broke perhaps every record possible in his short career. But knowing that an author can just pile on the rich stats, the amazing and quite unbelievable stats to a baseball fan, makes them, well unbelievable.

Throughout the book we are treated with comments about the amazing and never to be duplicated feats of Joe Castle. Yes, they were so amazing, that it took what was a very real story of a father and son on one side and offset it with a very unbelievable short baseball career on the other. Yes, this is nitpicking. However, it is like an author writing about an amazing and unbelievable Vegas winning streak. How someone wins the lottery and then wins a jackpot at a casino and then another - then crashes. The crash may be a very real story, but piling on just takes the story into the short fantasy arena.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

report this comment

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

bstee, April 10, 2012

The title fits in more ways than one. I could sense the ending, and I dreaded it as it came so quickly in this short read. The writing was supurb and the feeling memory as a living thing has never been better captured. However, this five star review lost a star (I wish I could reduce it just a half star) simply by the ending I so dreaded. I will not spoil the ending even with a hint, only to say that a book that made me feel so much suddenly woke me in the last pages (no that is not a terrible hint). Still this is a worthy Booker winner as the prose shows that Julian Barnes is really at the top of the English charts when it comes to gentle reflection of the male mind.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

report this comment