The critically lauded Arthur Phillips and his fourth novel, The Song Is You, is a 21st century meditation on love and music that washes the reader in poetic prose and imagery, but ultimately amounts to ‘old wine in a new bottle’ or for me, just plain old bullshit.Phillips’ writing is amazingly good, and it’s on constant display throughout. He’s a natural at writing prose that’s poetic and effective. Much of the praise this novel has amassed is due in part to his skillful writing that weaves narr...

I really wanted to like this book. There was so much potential. I absolutely loved the beginning ("Julian Donahue's generation were the pioneers of portable headphone music, and he began carrying with him everywhere the soundtrack to his days when he was fifteen."). Even though I am just beyond the main character's generation, I get the soundtrack to life thing - how to hear a song reminds you of some past time and it's hard to separate that memory from the song. Good songs can get ruined by per...

I didn’t get past page 34! The dust jacket synopsis made this book sound like something I would enjoy reading. OOPS, I tried, but figured there were lots of other books out there I would enjoy & rather spend my time reading. I couldn’t get past the kitschy prose - NOT even interesting AT all! Also, I think I gave it a try because of the author’s book the Egyptologist.

I found The Song Is You to be ridiculous and amateurish, far beneath the level of Prague. The friendship/flirtation "relationship" between "Cannonball" and Cait is strictly schoolgirl-fantasy stuff. What I do like about the book is how it shows how much some of us are affected by music. For Julian, or Julian's father, music is even more than the soundtrack to real life. It's food, fuel, inspiration, a driving force. It's also what happens to propel both men to meeting their wives (neither of who...

And there I was, minding my own business on a Sunday afternoon, when suddenly I could not put down "The Song Is You" by Arthur Phillips. It was like I got hit over the head with a love mallet. It had to be, because for the first third of the book I was trudging through Phillips' metaphor mud, wondering why a character couldn't just wave his hands. He had to be "waving at the air as if bees were approaching his ragged beard with colonial intent." Etc., etc., etc. (As a metaphor abuser myself, I'm...

phillips has a knack for looking deeply into his characters and extracting something that his readers can understand and empathize with. on the surface, this seems like a love story. it is, in fact, a love story. its also a lust story, a sad story, and an unrequited love story. i'm providing this review just mere hours after completing the book, and, honestly, i almost think i need a week or so of digestion before writing a fitting review. this i will say: it is painstakingly real human emotion....

This book barely made it past the 50 page test, but I persevered, sure I would eventually like it. Then on page 101, this sentence appeared and I knew it was over:"Like an arrogant government minister forced by revolution into faraway exile where he can only find work as a cabdriver and who then assumes that all his fares despise him as completely as he would have despised immigrant cabdrivers in his home country back when he was a man of power, so it now was with the former lead singer of Refle...

Quotes:"I tried to turn on your television, but your vast array of remote controls stymied me. You obviously buy the same brand for each device to make it impossible for visitors to control your environment, and then you take narcissistic pleasure in being called to rescue them, infantilizing them and making of yourself a heroic figure." --pg. 42"One November dawn, Julian came upon a basset hound sitting on a bench on the Promenade, staring out at Manhattan. A few joggers in winter caps and Lycr...

This is a gorgeously written, intelligently crafted, expertly disguised run-on sentence. It's a beautiful novel but it amounts to almost nothing. There's no compelling story here; just 250 pages of an obsessive, insufferable narrator talking in circles until he reconciles himself with reality.

In this book, Mr. Phillips is only several atoms away from doing what I most love to read authors doing: a kind of gentle postmodern magical realism, which doesn't necessarily include actual magic or anything literally fantastical, but dabbles in the dreamlike, the linguistically indulgent, the poetic in its storytelling. It's almost perfect, even in its rather uncomfortable moments (of which there are several). The lines between what is really happening, what a character is imagining, and what

I read the gorgeously written prologue at the bookstore, and was convinced that it was well worth the $10.05 I'd pay with my employee discount. Boy, was I wrong. I have to say, skimming through the reviews that I'm a little bit surprised by the comments. Am I the only one who didn't enjoy the prose in this book? I found the vast majority of Phillips' sentences to be poorly constructed. Half of them ended in a place so far removed from the beginning of the sentence that I had to read them twice i...

I didn't get past page 25. I could not have cared less about the mysterious song he heard the day he got laid three times, the Irish girl half his age that he is obviously going to become entangled with, his failed marriage, or his great love for his iPod. Buh-bye.

I must say, I was rather pleased with The Song Is You. It's not that I didn't expect to enjoy this, because I did, but I also expected to feel like it was missing a small something. That's how I felt about Prague and The Egyptologist, both works that I enjoyed, but ultimately finished feeling a teensy bit dissatisfied (and also feeling like they went on just a touch too long). No matter what, though, I still really enjoy Phillips' writing style -- which is why I keep reading his stuff. When Libr...

In The Song is You, reformed philanderer Julian pursues Cait, a musician half his age rising to fame on her regrettably named demo tape, Your Very Own Blithering Idiot. It's easy enough to predict how this one is going to go, because you've seen it before.At its heart, the novel is Philips's attempt to share his love of music, but that's a difficult thing to write about. Either the references chosen are so pedestrian that they're dated and tedious (Audrey Niffenegger we're looking at you), or th...

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I tried. When I found out it was a love story that included music and I-pod addiction - it grabbed my interest. I wanted to get into the love story and feel what the characters did, but I couldn't. I did connect with them through their music addiction, but that is about it. At first, I liked the idea of the mysterious love affair and how it started. Then it ended up getting to the point where it was downright creepy! (and honestly, it takes a lot to cr...

And I can't get it out of my head...This book is a ballad, a haunting ballad that continues to play its plaintive notes in my head, like a refrain. Don't be fooled by the product description (of a man in love with his ipod). This is not a jaunty, trendy escape tale. This is for serious readers who love literature, and who love literature to descant.Julian Donahue is middle-aged, affluent, and adrift. After his son's death, his marriage unravels, but he remains tightly wound. He has a successful

Anyone who has seen the evolution from 33 1/3 to compact disc to digital download will be able to relate to this book, at least parts of it if not the plot romance. The part that music plays in contemporary life if visceral, and the ability to have an entire library in your pocket is to me still a miracle. Julian is described as not knowing the names of the sharps and flats, but knowing the emotional trigger they can provide. The beautiful prologue, for instance, describing his father's love for...

I was intrigued by the premise of The Song Is You, the latest offering by Arthur Phillips, the bestselling author of Prague: the power of music, its ability to invoke emotion and bring to mind memories, both the good and the not so good.Julian Donahue is a 40-something director of commercials in Manhattan. Julian inherited his love for music from his father, who lost his leg in the Korean War. Before his deployment, he attended a Billie Holiday concert at the Galaxy Theater, where he met his fut...

Beautiful cover, brilliant prologue, interesting premise, terrible execution. That pretty much sums up my review of "The Song Is You" by Arthur Phillips. Don't get me wrong, I love beautiful lines of prose (and Arthur Phillips can write very well - my hat tips to him) and I love music-themed books, but this was one of the examples of how not to use music within a story. The references to Julian Donahue's Ipod in this story were too much and more telling than they were showing in natural veins. A...

Beautiful, joyful (yet terribly sad), haunting, frustrating. That's how I'd describe The Song is You in ten words or less.Now for more words.Reading it, I often found myself in an intense state of panic. The action itself crawls, and yet the future of the story constantly feels frighteningly urgent. Arthur Phillips completely ignores the rule of "show, don't tell" by filling the vast majority of his story with exposition over action and dialogue, and yet it seems okay. Even necessary. Through so...