Melini

A Gloomy 18 Hour Trudge

Revisado: 07-12-24

I can’t believe I made it to the end of this book. The writing and narration were good, and perhaps if it was edited to a quarter of its length I could better appreciate a well-written tale of a life of unrelenting disappointment and drudgery.

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Incredible story. Beautifully written and narrated.

Revisado: 09-13-23

The beautifully and bravely written story, the afterword offering social/historical context, and the rich and considerate narration made this an amazing listen.

I appreciated watching the documentary by the author of the afterward after listening to the audiobook.

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Totally Enjoyable. Amazing narrator.

Revisado: 08-03-23

It’s just good, silly (but not stupid) fun. Exactly the book I needed to hear.

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Narrator was clear but robotic

Revisado: 01-30-23

I might have taken more from the book but I really struggled to stay with the narrator. His voice was crystal clear, but there was no variation on his pace or voice or any indication that he was thinking about what he was reading.

I read the book as an individual looking to improve my performance in sport, and although there were a few good nuggets, it seemed the target audience for the book was really coaches, managers, and CEOs trying to motivate their teams.

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Fitzgerald’s Best Book; Horrible Narration

Revisado: 12-29-21

The content of this book is so good and holds up so well over time that I think it would be worth re-recording it.

Before you buy this audiobook, I recommend clicking on the sample to see if you can handle the rapid fire, shouting, monotone. I had to slow mine down to 0.8x speed to get through it. If reading the old fashioned way is an option for you, it’s the way to go for this title.

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Light and Easy but Well-Written (and Narrated)

Revisado: 06-14-21

This book was the escape and breath of fresh air that I needed. It’s not going win literary awards but it’s a fun, well-told romantic comedy that is just what a girl needs to hear sometimes.

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Good for a Few Hours then Jumps the Shark.

Revisado: 05-18-21

I enjoyed this book for the first few hours. It draws heavily on stories most surfers will know...Barbarian Days, Laird Hamilton's personal story, etc, but the main character is unique. The exploration of what it is like to be famous when you've aged out of the the source of your fame (and can't let go) was interesting. The authors' depictions of the other types of people (the crazy, drunk mother, women in general, Hawaiian locals, people he meets on his travels) is, to be generous, lacking in empathy and charicature-ish.

The story rolls along and along and along like a pleasant TV show that you binge for a season or two or three. The story of Joe Sharky's growing up and early rise to fame was sprinkled with some hard-to-swallow scenes but still pretty entertaining. Eventually as an interlude to the inevitable search for big waves that soul surfers with waning fame pursue, the author arranges for the biggest mid-novel shark jump ever: the author writes Hunter S. Thompson's downward spiral into drugs and paranoia into the main character's story. The main character also goes through a parade of absurd women (a mix of crazy, maternal, sexually insatiable, and magically wise young women), and by the time we got to Hunter, I was turned off by all of it. I bailed. If the show rallies in the final season, I missed it.

The narrator has a velvety, five star, books-on-tape voice for most of the narrative parts of the story. Unfortunately, he does one star character voicing that seemed more like mockery than acting. He destroys the pronunciation of common Hawaiian place names and other routine words that most people who have even vacationed in Hawaii would know. His efforts to speak pidgin and do a local accent are shameful. The women are narrated in creepy, breathy falsettos. Even the grizzled manly-man voice he put on for the (white male) main character was over the top.

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Running bits 5 stars. Overwhelmed by navel gazing.

Revisado: 03-03-21

Although the author seems very interested in meditation, this is a story of extreme attachment. Her attachment to her father is as intense as I've ever known of anyone's to be. Her dad's attachment to his things and work and archives, and her attachment to rediscovering every scrap of meaning from that past became pretty tedious for me to listen to hour after hour before getting to any significant running content (which doesn't start until somewhere after the four hour mark). At times it seemed like a journal being kept as part of a therapy assignment rather than a book that was meant to be read by anyone in the world. The author does have a wonderful writing style, inspiring running tales, and the narration was outstanding.

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Phenomenal narration. Helping me so much.

Revisado: 11-05-20

Simple, actionable, and effective. I’m so grateful to have this tool to manage my experience of these chaotic times.

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Loved until he was petty and cruel to Kellyn T.

Revisado: 08-09-20

As a 46 year old who's been spending the last two years being a full-time pretend pro athlete in another discipline who took up running to cross train, it's like this book was written just for me. The author has the running chops to hang just enough with the pros to really experience their routines, so there's loads of nitty gritty training stuff if you like to geek out on that as I do, but not so much of it that it becomes a "how-to" instead of a narrative about his experience.

My own experiment and heightened awareness of athletes of a certain age makes me believe that for many of us, it's the time invested, belief in ourselves, and commitment to the process that falls away moreso than an absolute capacity to improve and perform well as we age. One of my favorite parts of the book was the conversation around this topic with the non-pro woman and Matt during the retirement chapter at the conclusion of the author's journey. There's also a line from Steph Bruce that's repeated a couple of times (paraphrased) to "not let anyone trivialize your pursuit of running" that was a lovely touchstone to take away from this book for anyone who struggles to justify their passions to those who think sport for all but a few should be "just for fun."

I wished that he had dug into a more frank appraisal of the demands on the real pros for keeping a perky, inspirational, Instagram-worthy face...the reality that they make more from selling their image than from prize money. He made a statement to the effect that they got to nap in the afternoon while he had another job to do, but he left the pros' (and Team NAZ Elite's) "other job" maintaining endorsements largely unexplored. Of course, every second that they took away from focusing on their own training to help a famous writer in his pretend pro pursuit was time they spend doing this job of building their public image.

Kellyn Taylor is unusual among the pro runners in than rather than trading on her public image, she has been pursuing a regular job and raising and fostering a whole posse of kids. The author does mention her work, but with so much positive that could be said, he almost always brought up her bona fides in some backhanded way...referencing her newly minted paramedic skills; making sure you, dear reader, know it took her two tries to pass her firefighter test. It seemed to me that unlike her team and many teammates, it was not in her business model to fluff the ego of the pretend pro with a powerful pen, and he decided to punish her for it with a series of petty swipes at her personality every time she entered the scene of his book. Maybe he thought his story needed a bad guy? It didn't.

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