03 February, 2015

Book Review: Not Quite What I Was Planning.

From Goodreads: Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.
From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-size pieces.
The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs.
From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

Thoughts: Can't quite remember where I heard about this. I knew it wouldn't be a long read, but it's an interesting idea.
It's a great concept, can you tell a story in 6 words? For me, some of these six word stories were brilliant - conveying as much emotion as a full book.

So devastated, no babies for me. 

Young optimist: proven wrong. Prematurely old.

Others read more like PostSecret's than stories.

Not What I Was Planning was a nice read, nothing brilliant, but enough to encourage me to seek out more stories. If you're interested in more 6 word stories, here's a good place to start.

http://www.sixwordstories.net/

Not What I Was Planning gets 3 stars.

*        Did not like it
**       It was OK
***      Liked it
****    Really liked it
*****   It was amazing




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