This is another Real Simple magazine recommendation but I didn't keep the blurb...
I started reading this on June 27 and finished it on July 5.
Some context - Carter Bays is the co-creator of the show How I Met Your Mother. I loved this show and watched it through twice - once live when it was on and once in the last few years with The Husband because he never watched it when it was on. It was really funny the 2nd time too. I didn't know this when I read the book - The Husband told me after he looked up the book.
So, in all honesty, when I started this book, I didn't like it. I thought it was boring, disconnected, and it didn't make any sense. But I kept reading it. I read an article once that advised that if a book doesn't grab you immediately, you shouldn't keep reading it - don't waste your time. I partially agree with this. Why agonize over reading a book you don't like. I've done that a few times. But what if, like with one of my favorite books of all time (Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card), after the first 150-ish pages, it turns out to be your favorite book and you understand then why those first pages need to be the way they are? So, I guess I'm a glutton for punishment for needing to continue with books I initially don't like to "see what happens" and "find out if I like it or not."
At first, I wanted to nudge all of the characters in the book and yell at them to get off of their phones. This phase reminded me of a ballet performed by the San Francisco Ballet a number of years ago about people obsessed with their phones and not paying attention to anything around them. Christopher Wheeldon choreographed "Bound To" and it was amazing! "In this ballet, Wheeldon comments on what happens to us when we’re tucked behind our screens. “It’s a false sense of safety because you’re not actually with someone; the screen is like a shield,” he says. When we let the world rush by unnoticed, “we’re not seeing the beauty in life.” On the flip side, he’s addressing what we can achieve when we’re together—when we see, acknowledge, and interact without any screens to shield us," as written on the SF Ballet website. So yeah, people, set down your phones and take a look around you!
I really wanted to know what was up with the narrator, how things would "click" and make sense and come together to make the book coherent. I wasn't sure that would happen. But it did. I really ended up loving this book (after hating it a little in the beginning). It is a book about people and their lives and things impacting their lives, their wants, desires, careers, social media, phones, attention. So many things.
The whole time reading the book, there was this narrator that seemed really familiar. It dawned on me as I was very close to finishing the book that the narrator in the book reminded me of the narrator in the movie Stranger that Fiction from 2006 - Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Highly recommend this movie.
By the end of this book, I liked it! I really liked it! All of these random vignettes, these random people, these random events, eventually loose their randomness and end up making perfect sense. And ending in a satisfying way.
Post written on July 6, 2023. Publication date reflects date I finished the book.
