Uncommon type - some stories. Tom Hanks
I read this book review from NPR:
"Tom Hanks has heart. It's no news to his fans that empathy fuels his acting — including his back-to-back Oscar-winning portrayals of an AIDS victim in Philadelphia and the endearing hero of Forrest Gump.So it should come as no surprise that empathy also drives his first collection of fiction. While all of the 17 stories in Uncommon Type feature a different antique manual typewriter (Hanks is an avid collector), they are linked by something greater than typewriter ribbons: a decidedly benign, humane view of people and their foibles.
In a world where the news is unrelentingly bleak and much fiction tends toward the dystopic, post-apocalyptic, dark, or edgy, this is a gentler, sweeter kind of storytelling than we've come to expect. Some of the stories are whimsical, some funny, some downright sentimental. Even when Hanks writes about somber subjects like the durable distress of combat or the high stakes for immigrants fleeing persecution, he finds a sweet spot."
So naturally I went to the library and got the book, had to wait forever on the reserve list for my turn . I should have read this review in The Independent first:
"It's rare that a book is actually painful to read, but getting through Tom Hanks’s short-story It’s rare that a book is actually painful to read, but getting through Tom Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type, was like pulling teeth. “Some Stories” it reads on the front cover – some? At 400 pages, it felt like it was never going to end.
No volume of short stories should be this long. The exception to the rule is the collected works of Alice Munro or George Saunders, writers who’ve earned those pages through years of honed, hard graft; certainly not a debut, even if the author is an Oscar-winning actor and American national treasure. collection, Uncommon Type, was like pulling teeth. “Some Stories” it reads on the front cover – some? At 400 pages, it felt like it was never going to end.
No volume of short stories should be this long. The exception to the rule is the collected works of Alice Munro or George Saunders, writers who’ve earned those pages through years of honed, hard graft; certainly not a debut, even if the author is an Oscar-winning actor and American national hero.
At the very least, I would have expected Hanks’s editor to have picked a smaller selection of the strongest offerings. Instead, we have 17 stories, ranging from downright terrible to decidedly mediocre. I’m just going to come out and say it: written by anyone else, I don’t see how this collection would have been published.
I wished I would've read the latter first then I wouldn't have read it
