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Summary: My Opinion on Breathing Lessons from a Teen
Review: For the last two weeks I have been reading, "Breathing Lessons," by Anne Tylor. This book talks about a married couple's life and how they view little everyday events that happen. Feelings of the Morans marriage sucks the reader into own life and individual thoughts. Anne Tylor takes you the lets your feelings become involved when reading this 324 pgae book. This book starts around the 80's in Balitmore. it's a small town where everyone seems to be involved in everybody else's life. Maggie and her husband, Ira, have been married for around 20 years or so. Each have thier different ways of thinking. They argue everyday like most couples do, but as they argue, the reader finds themselves taking sides on who is right. Little everyday words are taken in as the reader reads and strikes a different meaning. "Ah, God, I have been stuck with these people all my life. and I'm never going to be free." Pg. 165 Frases so often spoken by ourselves, but never seem to love what we have around ourselves. We as people don't realize enough with our busy life. The cover of this book illisrates a flying bird over a green plain. The only thing a person could think of when seeing this cover is to think of being free from life's pressures. To once in life, take a step back from our busy sheldules and enjoy life. This book to me wasn't the best book I have ever read because I think this book was written for adults. I am a teen and wouldn't recommend it to other teens. I couldn't relate much and the story to me was a bit boring. Little flashbacks and car trips only made this reading process longer.
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Summary: I was not entertained by this book.
Review: Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler, was not a very interesting book. It had no focus or plot in my opinion. It had very little story line. It began with Maggie Moran and her husband, Ira, on a trip to her best-friend, Serena, deceased husband's funeral. It started that way then it left me with them helping an elderly black man. Then it switches in mid stream to a long flashback that gives the reader and idea on what's happening in the present. Not quick switches, just I couldn't find a point to the switches. The characters, I thought, were well developed and you could picture them, but it's like, they have no mission. You could find their flaws and how the views where so different but you knew who was wrong and who didn't look at the whole situation. I would recommend this book to people you like things simple. It doesn't take a lot of thought, because there's no mystery. I'd also like to recommend it to people who like ordinary life. The simpliest of life's mistakes are seen throughout this novel.
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Summary: If you love character developement you will love this book
Review: but otherwise this a plotless book that goes nowhere. I belong to a book discussion group that read this book for one of our selections. Some loved it, but some did not, we were split about 45% liked it and 55% did not. Although the charactors may be interesting they do not really change or develop in the day that the book covers. The humor in the book caused some to laugh loud and long while the rest of us thought it was almost contrived, feeling that all of this could not really happen to one person in this short of time. When you finally discover that Fiona could not have been the person who was on the radio talk show, Maggie becomes a very ignorant sitcom type charactor. Her constant imagining of how others are thinking or reacting to her and the situations they are in do nothing to improve her image. Her awareness of how her actions effect other people does not change from the beginning to the end. If you like to get to really know a charactor in a book, enjoy, otherwise don't bother.
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Summary: The first Anne Tyler book I ever read, and the best
Review: I am surprised by the lack of enthusiasm other customer reviewers have felt toward this book. Breathing Lessons is my absolute favorite book by Anne Tyler. I even have a copy in Italian (Lezioni di Respiro)! Anne Tyler is the only author I have read who can capture everyday small things and give them personality and power. Just read the first paragraph when Maggie is walking down the street pulling up her stockings--how accurate and cute. Capturing the whole family in a story that lasts from sun up till sun down reflects the same technique the Greeks used in their plays. Anne Tyler is a genius here--giving meaning to the lives of these simple people. Breathing Lessons is a testimony of faith toward very common everyday folks. More so than any of her books, one can identify with the characters in this book. In fact, we can see them in our own lives.
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Summary: A minor work by a great writer
Review: Anne Tyler is one of my favourite writers, but of the twelve of her books I have read, this is one of my least favourite. As ever the writing is of a high quality and there is the usual assortment of quirky characters and gentle humour, but this book never really took off for me. Maggie is just a bit too annoying and unbelievable. As a child she liberates a pet hamster only for it to be eaten by the cat. Maggie appears to have spent the next forty years doing similar things, yet never learning. Tyler's best characters, however eccentric, develop during the novel. Maggie does not. I thought the best section of the book was the short second part which is seen through her husband's eyes. Maggie, for all the faults he observes in her, is a more sympathetic and likeable person when seen through Ira's eyes rather than through her own.
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Summary: Yes, these characters are so Baltimorean!
Review: Ms. Tyler is one of my favorite authors because of her accurate development of eccentric characters. Yes, Maggie is extremely annoying, and you want to tell her to stop trying to manipulate other people's lives, but she essentially has a good heart. The scenes of her telling the older gentleman that something was wrong with his tire because he was going too slow are hilarious. Haven't you ever wanted to do the same thing but never acted on it? Though Maggie does, she is immendiately sorry and goes about trying to correct her actions. Ms. Tyler has the ability to "paint" such poignant scenes that will remain with you forever. I have read six of her books to date over the years and can remember characters and their actions in all of them. All are very quirky with a slightly lovable air around them, like many of the people in Baltimore itself. Though you may not want them as best friends, people like Maggie and other Tyler characters certainly do enrich our world.
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Summary: maggie, the main character, is really annoying.
Review: The further I got into the novel, the more I disliked Maggie. She's the personification of the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". She's a nosy busybody, and I can't help feeling that her family would have gotten along much better if it weren't for her simplemindedness. The only redeeming trait Maggie has (if you can call it redeeming) is that she plugs on with her life no matter what happens. The book is readable, but you can find much better novels by the author.
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Summary: The Anti Misanthropist
Review: Graham Greene said that the novelist needs to have in his heart a chip of ice. Arnold Bennet wrote that a novelist should possess a 'Christ-like all consuming humanity'. I know to which school Anne Tyler belongs. Her books are, quite simply, funny, wise and sad. Her characters, as G K Chesterton said of Dickens' creations, are such that 'you couldn't forget them if you would and you wouldn't forget them if you could'. Buy them all, read them: they'll improve your life!
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Summary: I tried very hard to like it...
Review: ...but I just could not. The predictability of Maggie's inability to drive the car without running into a truck or a mailbox, her consistent misprepresentation of what other people had or had not done in order to get them back together --- these are just two of the things that made it difficult to care for or even about the protagonists. The book jacket talks about their making 'extraordinary discoveries' about themselves on the road to the funeral. I reached the opposite conclusion - they end up very much as they started, behaving at the end exactly as they did in the beginning. I have the feeling that, if this were made into a movie, and a great actress were cast in the part, it could make a big difference. My mental image of Maggie is that she is a meddlesome, tiresome klutz. I know that is not how other readers see her, but that is how she came across to me.
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Summary: Just lovely...
Review: The overwhelming impression I'm left with after reading Anne Tyler is that here is a woman who just loves people. Her fondness for her characters is contagious, and her books are a joy to read.
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