Wow – this one hits hard. The story of someone growing up, from a student to an old man. There is a big fast forward in there, and from the older perspective he discovers some things that cause him to re-evaluate his past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the end of this book you realize that this is really two stories – one is happening in the background that you don\u2019t find out about until later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is some really good writing here to pull something like this off. Along the way there is some deep thinking on some heavy topics – age, memory, suicide, living life and getting old. Getting old comes with some real penalties, but in this book we can discover some benefits as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I liked how the story moved so quickly from youth to old age – I think it is rare situation to find in books. So often the drama is in the change of character over time, but here the older man is almost a new character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One criticism I have for the book is that in the second part one particular character has a strange way to interact – avoiding any explanation (why?) and being awfully mysterious for purposes that were unclear to me. While it develops the mystery and the suspense I couldn\u2019t find any other possible reason – and I don\u2019t think it was suggested in the text. Maybe I missed it but it felt unnatural and strange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wow – this one hits hard. The story of someone growing up, from a student to an old man. There is a big fast forward in there, and from the older perspective he discovers some things that cause him to re-evaluate his past. At the end of this book you realize that this is really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-X0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}