Book Review: Dear Life

This book is a compilation of short stories by Alice Munro.  The author describes the book as scenes from where someone's life reaches a tipping point and takes a turn.  But the question is, is the turn for better or for worse?  The reader finds out as each character's plot unfolds.  Although the stories are independent of each other, all of the stories take place in Canada from the 1930's-1970's. 

I enjoyed this book, although I would give it a 3 out of 5 stars.  Some of the stories caught me off guard in how they unfolded (which made for a great story), but some of the stories just left me feeling like there wasn't enough "meat" to the tale.  It was a little frustrating once I realized that all of the stories were completely independent of each other (I wanted them to be intertwined in some fashion), and there wasn't really an overall theme to the book.  If you really dig deep though, you'll realize that the book is about people who aren't proactive about life and just seem to let life happen to them.  Most of the tales are a bit sad in how they end.  So maybe the theme is - don't let life just happen to you.

Book Review: Elegance of the Hedgehog

Again, Elegance of the Hedgehog was a book club selection.  The author is French and the book was translated from French.  The book is about 300 pages, and the first 100 were pretty boring.  The author takes FOREVER to convey personality quirks in her characters.  There are chapters and chapters (albeit they are 2-3 page chapters) where the main character just babbles on and on about one thought process or another.  I actually couldn't finish this book in time for the book club meeting, partly because I got so bored with it, I started reading something else.  I didn't bother to finish reading it since I had so much more to go, but it did start getting good half-way through.

If you read this, I would recommend skimming the first half of the book unless you like this kind of writing.