Twenty-one Truths About Love
2019 • 352 pages
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
From the author of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend comes "an unconventional, endearing tale of impending fatherhood" (The Washington Post), Matthew Dicks's Twenty-one Truths About Love...
Reviews with the most likes.
You've heard of list-icles. Now meet the list-ovel... list-novel? Anyway, I didn't know how this format was going to work out in telling a story but it's been an entertaining ride. Dan, who agonises about leaving his stable teaching job to open a book store, write lists as a coping mechanism. When you list down everything, you can still tell a fairly decent story. So Dan's wife Jill got pregnant and this sends him into a secret panic mode because the book store was not making money and babies cost a lot. He had to come up with money before their child arrives. This list of a book managed to sketch out the relationship between him and Jill, his employees at the book store, and his attempts to raise cash. Pretty fun read.
This eARC of ‘Twenty-one Truths About Love' is courtesy of NetGalley.
I stopped on page 8 and sent the book back to Amazon but declined a refund because I deserved to be punished for ordering it.
Twenty-one Thoughts About Twenty-one Truths About Love by Matthew Dicks
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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NOVEMBER 48:10 AM
5 Problems with Lying
1. We lie most often to the people we love.
2. There is no greater shame than getting caught in a lie.
3. A lie often requires additional lies, making it impossible to ever come clean.
4. Liars are the worst human beings.
5. Lies always cover up the worst parts of you.NOVEMBER 48:40 AM
How liars with the best intentions are like the owners of every iteration of Jurassic Park
They never set out to hurt anyone.
They operate with enormous hubris.
Denial both perpetuates and intensifies the problem.
The situation inevitably gets worse and worse as time goes by.
The end is never pretty.
Ah, I like this one.
Mind you, it's very Bridget-Jones-ish and it can get repetitive. But it's also...I don't know, sincere? The character comes across as completely and totally genuine and his worries are completely and totally...well, worrisome. It's set with school teachers as characters and they, too, are believably real.
Dan has issues, lots of issues, more and more with every page as you read along, and he's in a mess, and he can't think of a way out. He quit his secure job as a teacher in which he was wildly unhappy and unsuited and started his own bookstore business which is also floundering. His wife wants a baby but he's not sure he will be much of a dad.
So he starts this book of lists, and it's funny and sad and everything we like in a book.
