[guessing at the star rating / mining my old FB notes now that they are almost impossible to find]

after getting a heads-up about this book at girl detective, i put this book on hold at the library months ago. when it finally showed up and i saw the cover, i realized why it was in such demand: it's a movie! in fact it's an oscar-nominated movie.

the first 2 pages are funny and then it goes to sad and stays there. the story has left me with mixed feelings. from the start, it hooked me and so i read about two-thirds of it over the weekend, but then i put it down and the urgency simply disappeared. i realized i didn't care all that much about the main character and whether he came to terms with his father's death on 9-11. and then i thought about how easy and cheap it is to set your story with 9-11 as the background - a whole emotional well to pull from without having to do the heavy lifting of creating that drama on the page. same thing with referencing the dresden fire bombings without actually bringing them to life on the page. characters seemed to have good lines (for a movie?) but didn't have compatible philosophies described.

lastly, i don't want to read about old people having sex using the same type of descriptions and vocabulary as is used with young people. or maybe i just don't want it described by a father in a letter to his son. (pretty sure the son wouldn't want to hear it / read it either)