Reading 1001 discussion

4 stars
I really did not know what to expect from this novel, but I ended up finding it fascinating. Moore's wordplay is great, and when your main character is a poetry teacher, the wordplay easily fits into the story. The title is also a clue to this book. It's not a novel, it's not short stories. A life as an anagram might be the best way to describe it without spoiling anything.

Rating: 4 stars


I went into this one with low expectations, given my disappointment with A Gate at the Stairs. I was pleasantly surprised, however, and thoroughly enjoyed this. It is a clever collection of stories in which we see (view spoiler)[ alternate lives of the main characters. In an anagram, letters are rearranged. In these stories, different aspects are rearranged leading to different outcomes (hide spoiler)]. I loved the humor and wordplay.

(moved here from accidental duplicate thread...)
This was an interesting novel, in which not all the characters are real, but while it is clear something is 'off', it is not obvious till the end which characters are real and which are imaginary. In this story a woman imagines herself companions to make up for her otherwise lonely life, after her relationship with Gerard goes pear-shaped. I found it hard to really relate to Benna, the protagonist of this story, but I liked the concept of making up imaginary friends as an adult. I had to wonder how many people in real life do something similar. I think I prefer Moore's short stories still, so far, but this was a decent, fast-reading novel, and I would recommend it as such. I like that Moore's characters in this book are not just young people, so at least for parts of this book the characters were about my age and their issues were more similar to my own as a no-longer-YA reader.
I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

I really had no idea what to expect with this book, and I found the concept interesting, but I definitely enjoyed the earlier sections better than the later sections. It's a fascinating idea to tell the stories of characters in different combinations, like anagrams of words remixed from the same letters. Overall, the whole book just left me feeling melancholy.

This was an interesting concept, but I didn’t find the characters engaging enough to care about them. The puns were clever and I felt Moore was a very intelligent writer, but after a while I needed a break from the relentless stream of puns.

For me, this would have made a brilliant short story, and I wasn’t surprised to read that Moore wrote short stories prior to this debut novel. As a novel, it became rather repetitive, but it was still an interesting read.