Book Challenge (Week 2 review)

Hi all. Hope life is well with you. It's pretty okay over here.

Still going strong in my book challenge and still loving it. In case you missed it here's an obligatory link to last weeks review...and on that note I'll jump right in to my thoughts on week 2, Waiter Rant:

Hilarious. That's a good description for the whole book. And a bit eye-opening. Honestly, I enjoyed the whole book. It's not a story and it's not a biography, and yet it is. It reads like a fictional story but really it's a true story about a guy, The Waiter, figuring out what he wants to do with his life beyond being a waiter and anonymous blog writer.

It includes some hilarious stories about customers, crazy bosses, and an array of coworker types that I don't think I would be able to deal with on a daily basis. He also talks about differences between good and bad customers, how to be a good customer, what life is like for anyone in the restaurant business as well as a couple of chapters about what really goes on sometimes.

Those chapters scared me a little to be honest. I may not eat out again for a while. Or ever.

His blog was always full of funny stories about pretentious idiots and while the book had those too, it had a lot more openness to it that I really enjoyed. An underlying theme was feeling like a life failure and I think we can all relate to feeling that at least once.

Given that it's a true story about someone's life, I can't do pro's and con's so I'll just say that overall a great book about a good guy just trying to survive life the best he can, and I highly recommend it.


For week 3:

In the waning years of the nineteenth century there was a hunger for tribal artifacts, spawning collecting voyages from museums and collectors around the globe. In 1897, one such collector, a Chicago insurance magnate, sponsors an expedition into the South Seas to commemorate the completion of his company’s new skyscraper—the world’s tallest building. The ship is to bring back an array of Melanesian weaponry and handicrafts, but also several natives related by blood. Caught up in this scheme are two orphans—Owen Graves, an itinerant trader from Chicago’s South Side who has recently proposed to the girl he must leave behind, and Argus Niu, a mission houseboy in the New Hebrides who longs to be reunited with his sister. At the cusp of the twentieth century, the expedition forces a collision course between the tribal and the civilized, between two young men plagued by their respective and haunting pasts. An epic and ambitious story that brings to mind E. L. Doctorow, with echoes of Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bright and Distant Shores is a wondrous achievement by a writer known for creating compelling fiction from the fabric of history.

Look, I'll be honest...90% of the time, I pick up books based solely on the cover. A eye-catching cover and I'll add it to my list of wants. And that's exactly what happened here. Saw it at the library, didn't even read the back, and just brought it home. I thought it was a history book like "The Mayflower", turns out it's historical fiction...which is awesome because that's my favorite genre.

Prediction: knowing nothing about it, I'll probably love it. Or I'll get halfway through, something tragic will happen and I'll completely hate it. Could go either way so...
stay tuned and happy reading!