This Book Will Save Your Life
Author(s):
A. M. Homes
Label: Viking Adult
Publisher(s):
Viking Adult
Studio: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Binding: Hardcover
Format(s): Bargain Price
List Price: $24.95
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. This Book Will Save Your Life is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.
Customer Reviews
And then . . .
Richard's life Vesuviouses. A bout of unbearable pain encompasses him, expanding his life from his unintentional cloistered existance. From knowing only his housekeeper, nutritionist, and personal trainer, he enters the lives of others -- who enter his life. There's the donut-maker, the woman crying in the produce section of the grocery store, the horse in the sinkhole below his house, the gourmet-cook movie star, the eccentric writer next door, and his own son. Oh, yes, and the area of Los Angeles undergoing its own cycle.
Great fun, as friendships evolve, new friends's lives intersect one another, and he makes conscious plans to enlarge his life.
Re-read it anually.
Forrest Gump meet Crash
I am not even sure how I came across this book. As is so often the case, I pick up a thread of a conversation or catch a reference in a footnote and the next thing I know I am reading yet another book that is unrelated to anything I am involved with in my daily routine. I am not a big follower of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or any of the other typical shows that show us just how hard it is to be rich and famous, so I am somewhat amused that I was captured by this story-line.
To briefly state my attraction, I think it goes back to the need I have as a human to be in community with other humans. The person of this book, Richard Novak, had created a life for himself that was void of meaningful relationships. In his isolated world he controlled everything and limited his interactions to a minimum. But unfortunately he could control the most basic thing, his own body and its ability to force him out of his cocoon existence. All it took was one health scare to take him out of his "bubble-boy" existence into the real world.
It is at this point that I felt as though the book took on a "Forrest Gump-ish" style. He finds himself in situations that are interesting, funny and improbable. I also felt as though i was watching a version of the movie CRASH and the inter-relationships we have within the community of humans.
It would be easy to have this book be of interest if you were a person who has devoted your life to a career at the expense of relationship and possibly have it serve as a wake up to rethink that strategy. But I think the book serves a purpose beyond just a wake up call to the overworked business executive. If I allow myself to get beyond the wealth and lifestyles of the rich and famous vehicle employed in the story, I am challenged to experience community with others beyond the nonphysical touch of online social networks, text messages and the thousands of other ways that I may simulate the human touch.
Online connectedness allows me to maintain relationships even when I am not able to be physically with the people I consider my friends. However, if I am not careful I could easily find myself, like Richard Novak, without the lavish lifestyle, touching through technology, regulating my interactions, avoiding the messiness of relationship and community. If this book serves the purpose of encouraging us to get out among people and engage as an active participant in community then it has served the reader well. If on the other hand, just as one might watch Forrest Gump and come away wanting to go on extended runs or eating more shrimp, well I suppose that is fine as well.
i love this book
when i have nothing to do, I like to re-read old books of mine. And something about this book... it is my most read one. It ahs no action, no suspense, no shootings, killings etc, its just a story of a divorced man trying to "survive" while also trying to get his son's love. And yet I cant let the book down. I love it so much, and everytime I read it I like the main character a little bit more.
This Book Will Enrich Your Life!
I thoroughly enjoyed this satirical look at Los Angeles and the culture of the misguided wealthy. As an L.A. resident, I often think about the collapse of the city - all these people and their money crumbling from an earthquake or burned by one of our enormous fires - but in Homes' book, the destruction is more than physical (geological?). Richard, the protagonist, takes the falling apart of his house to be a call to change his life. And so he does with a cast of quirky characters who provide him with the human touch he'd been avoiding for so long. What I enjoyed about this novel besides its unpredictability was how redemptive a story it really was. In an age of irony and cynicism, it was refreshing to read about a character who really does change for the better, who really does redeem himself in many ways. That is not something you get very often with modern novels. I highly recommend this book!
Boring Life of the Idle Rich
This is the worst book I have read in a long time. The last thing I want to immerse myself in is the life style of the super rich and clueless in modern Los Angeles, complete with a staff to provide special "health" diets, a personal trainer, meaningless meditation retreats, $100K cars, and an all-white sex palace on the Malibu coast. The addition of walk-on parts for Bob Dylan and Gerald Ford only makes it more unreal. Nor to I need an unbelievable series of disasters, from sink holes to collapsing houses to freeway kidnaps to a Los Angeles firestorm to try to inject some plot into this unfocused story. As a straight novel, it is a failure. Some reviewers call it a satire, and perhaps that is a redeeming perspective, but the cover blurbs take this weird tale with amazing solemnity.
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