The Life We Bury
I hated this book. If it hadn't been chosen for my book club, I would have given up after thirty pages. But seeing as I'm organizing and hosting the book club, I couldn't just not read the book. So I powered through (frequently swapping to a different book for a break), and ended up with nice long list of grievances. The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out. The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author el...