I finished Born Round today, and I was disappointed in the last 150 or so pages of the book. I really enjoyed the beginning. I found the parts about his childhood and family funny and interesting. Once it began focusing on his adult eating issues and career, I lost interest. I thought some of the writing about his food critic career was interesting, but that it dragged on for too long. I found myself skipping paragraphs and even pages.
In the spirit of Frank Bruni's star rating system, out of three, I give the book one star. The beginning was good enough to save it from zero stars, but it was too much of a struggle to get through the end to get a higher rating. The only reason I was able to get through it was that I have Hunger Games waiting for me. I'm glad that Hunger Games should be a much faster read. I need something exciting and action packed after Bruni's book.
- Miss H.
Hunger Games is sooooooo much better! Since three of us are now done, I'm going to add on to your comments and post my opinion of Born Round below. So...spoiler alert! Here goes...
ReplyDeleteWhen I picked up this book, I was hoping for food-related vignettes, a la Anthony Bourdain or the blog, Orangette. What I got instead, was a few vivid descriptions of food interspersed into a narrative about the author’s relationship with food through the lens of his weight struggle. I figured weight would be a part of the story…I didn’t expect it to hold center stage.
The memoir had its highlights. The description of Frank’s mother’s preparations to host Thanksgiving for the entire extended family brought to mind images of my mother-in-law preparing for Christmas – post-its and all! His use of repetitive sentence structure to build suspense and emotion remained true to my recollections of his restaurant reviews. The description of his job as restaurant critic was fascinating, but too brief! Just when it started getting interesting, he ended the book and left me wanting more! I was expecting at least half the story to be anecdotes about life in the food writing biz. All in all, I found the stories of his childhood and life as a critic compelling, but the rest of the story was forgettable. The constant struggle to lose five or ten pounds was tiresome, and bordered on whiny. I wanted to shake him and tell him to get over it. And don't even get me started on how he traveled from NY to DC every week just to work out! This book totally altered my perception of Frank, and not in a good way!
- Rebecca DeW
Oh, and PS...I finished The Help. Love, love, love! More on that later - thanks for sharing it!
ReplyDeleteR.DeW