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This is my first experience reading Anthony Doerr, but it will not be the last. I loved reading these stories. My reactions varied throughout from frustration to sadness to happiness to occasional fleeting moments of joy as I watched these people struggling with momentous choices or small, repeating incidents building in their lives. The concept of memory and it's place in our everyday lives is used from many different angles, effectively from my view. To say much more would be to try to summari...
Wow. This book really knocked me out. The six stories in Anthony Doerr's fantastic collection each deal with memory--what memories (and their loss) mean to us, how they move us and how conscious we are in the creation of new memories. (A character in the first story says "Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.")Each story has a wholly different premise and different main characters, and takes place in a completely difference place and time, fro...
My only complaint with this book is that it came to an end.
I am a huge fan of The Shell Collector, so was a bit worried when I started reading this collection. The first story takes a rather dystopian view, writing I don't usually warm up to. However, I soon realized that Doerr has chosen to go in a different direction than those stories of his past. He challenged himself, and more than rose to the occasion. I have never read writing quite like this, especially in two of the stories, Memory Wall and Afterworld. And when I was taken abruptly out of these...
Aldous Huxley once famously said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” In this luminous collection of short stories (including an 83 page novella), Anthony Doerr probes the fragility and endurance of memory, in locales that vary from South Africa to Hamburg…from Lithuania to Wyoming…and from the heinousness of the Holocaust to an immediate dystopian future.This masterful collection is bookmarked by an opening and an ending story with two diverse elderly women as key protagonists. The
Podcasts have really been influencing my reading lately. This is the second book I went looking for after the "Forbidden Crushes" episode of Dear Sugar Radio (the first was Wedlocked: A Memoir by Jay Ponteri.) This collection of stories had nothing to do with the topic of forbidden crushes, but was mentioned in passing. Most people know Doerr from his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, but he had published a few books prior to that success. I was unfamiliar with his previ...
This is a beautiful collection of stories that explore memory, its power, its pain, and how it affects who we are and how we live. I found every story meaningful. I choked up repeatedly--I was not prepared for how sad and poignant the stories are.The title story is a futuristic tale of a time when memories can be extracted from the mind and kept in cartridges. The story is set in South Africa and deals with apartheid as well as the memory loss of the elderly woman, Alma, the subject of the story...
Disappointed in this book, and it came so highly recommended! :) I do have to say that his writing style is nice, I enjoy the simplicity and also the depth with his careful word choice. For my tastes, the style is slightly too abrubt, but just as I said, that is just my taste. He did a good job at making these characters come alive and without actually saying but showing exactly what they feel. I was disappointed though with the lack of direction that the stories seem to take. The only direction...
I read this for a face to face book group that took place last night at my local independent bookshop Five Leaves. It is not a book I would have been likely to choose for myself but it certainly made for a lively and interesting discussion. I have never read Doerr before.This book is a collection of a novella and five stories, set in several continents at various times in recent history, linked by a theme of memory, how it works, how it shapes lives and what happens when it is lost. The prose of...
Phenomenal. Still reeling from its awesomeness. When I finished this book, I remained stuck in a sort of trance state, sitting in my living room, but traveling through the worlds that Doerr created. I even lived through a particularly crowded and harrowing commute home without even flinching because I was so rapt by this book. This collection of short stories was so vivid - the last one especially. Without giving too much away, its exploration of epilepsy and memories, practically time travel, m...
"What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?”These are the central questions in this novella plus additional short stories. Without trying to provide easy answers or falling back on clichés, Doerr takes the reader deep into the fractured minds of his characters.I was immediately drawn into the title novella’s premise, set in Cape Town. Alzheimer afflicted Alma has had a medical procedure to allow her memories to be “reaped” and replayed electronically. We get to know her...
Memory Wall - Doerr audio performance by multiple narrators 5 starsAnthony Doerr published four books before the phenomenally successful All the Light We Cannot See; one novel, one memoir, and two collections of short stories. Memory Wall is the collection that was published in 2010. There are six stories in this book. Not one of the six is even mildly disappointing. The stories differ in characters and setting. Memory Wall, the title story, is a about an elderly, white, dementia patient and tak...
This book is filled with memorable characters, images and prose. It will make you happy and sad, occasionally both at the same time. It's clear the author cares a lot about everything and everyone, even animals.