Bookish Thoughts

This book was so much fun. It's a little bit Almost Famous , a little bit That Thing You Do , and a little bit Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It follows the meteoric rise and fall of Daisy Jones and The Six, a rock band in the late 70s. It's told as an oral history, as the various members of the band and the people surrounding them talk about coming together, recording their album, going on tour, and how everything fell apart. Taylor Jenkins Reid does a fantastic job of creating complex and memorable characters. Especially since the book is 100% dialogue. And everyone is just telling the story as they remember it. Sometimes their accounts are in direct conflict with each other (who won a bet, who stormed out), and it's up to the reader to decide who to believe. That unreliability of the narration adds to the atmosphere of the drug-soaked seventies. Who can be sure of anything? And how many of these problems got so much worse because no one was ever sober? Reid does a great ...

I loved this book so much. I'd been intrigued by it since I first heard of it and every new thing I learned just made me want to read it more. So I convinced my book club to give it a go, and I'm so glad I did. I read it in two days, because I just couldn't put it down. Evelyn is a wonderful character. She's ruthless and manipulative and mostly unapologetic about it. After all, she got everything she ever wanted, didn't she? Why change a thing when she was met with so much success? And if that success was swathed in scandal? Well that just makes it more fun. I was surprised by the variation in her many marriages. She married for all sorts of reasons: to get to Hollywood, for love, for family, to further her career, to distract from an entirely different scandal. Some of her marriages were complete shams, but others had a surprising amount of honesty and affection at their core. I think Evelyn experienced just about every kind of love there is over the course of ...