Vote for the 2025 BC Day contest winner... again! New entries added!
Please take a moment to check these great new entries here.
Breathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: Global Overview for this book
ISBN: Global Overview for this book
Registered by siriradha of Colorado Springs, Colorado USA on 4/29/2004
This Book is Currently in the Wild!

1 journaler for this copy...

Pre-numbered label used for registration. Paperback purchased at Goodwill yesterday.
From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
In perhaps her most mainstream, accessible novel so far, Tyler spins a tale of marriage and middle-class lives, in an age when social standards and life expectations have gone askew. While she remains a brilliant observer of human nature, there is a subtle change here in Tyler's focus. Where before her protagonists were eccentric, sometimes slightly fantastical characters who came at the end to a sense of peace, if not happiness, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira are average, unexceptional, even somewhat drab; and outside of some small epiphanies, little is changed between them at the story's close. It's this very realism that makes the story so effective and moving. Taking place on one summer day, when Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania to a funeral, with an accidental detour involving an old black man they pass on the road and a side trip to see their former daughter-in-law and their seven-year-old grandchild, the novel reveals the basic incompatibility of their 28-year marriage and the love that binds them together nonetheless. This is another typical Tyler union of opposites: Maggie is impetuous, scatterbrained, klutzy, accident prone and garrulous; Ira is self-contained, precise, dignified, aloof with, however, an irritating (or endearing ) habit of whistling tunes that betray his inner thoughts. Both feel that their children are strangers, that the generations are "sliding downhill,'' and that somehow they have gone wrong in a society whose values they no longer recognize. With irresistibly funny passages you want to read out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing lives in an unsettling world, this is Tyler's best novel yet.
From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
In perhaps her most mainstream, accessible novel so far, Tyler spins a tale of marriage and middle-class lives, in an age when social standards and life expectations have gone askew. While she remains a brilliant observer of human nature, there is a subtle change here in Tyler's focus. Where before her protagonists were eccentric, sometimes slightly fantastical characters who came at the end to a sense of peace, if not happiness, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira are average, unexceptional, even somewhat drab; and outside of some small epiphanies, little is changed between them at the story's close. It's this very realism that makes the story so effective and moving. Taking place on one summer day, when Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania to a funeral, with an accidental detour involving an old black man they pass on the road and a side trip to see their former daughter-in-law and their seven-year-old grandchild, the novel reveals the basic incompatibility of their 28-year marriage and the love that binds them together nonetheless. This is another typical Tyler union of opposites: Maggie is impetuous, scatterbrained, klutzy, accident prone and garrulous; Ira is self-contained, precise, dignified, aloof with, however, an irritating (or endearing ) habit of whistling tunes that betray his inner thoughts. Both feel that their children are strangers, that the generations are "sliding downhill,'' and that somehow they have gone wrong in a society whose values they no longer recognize. With irresistibly funny passages you want to read out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing lives in an unsettling world, this is Tyler's best novel yet.

Journal Entry 2 by siriradha at Regis University in Colorado Springs, Colorado USA on Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Released on Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at Regis University in Colorado Springs, Colorado USA.
Left in the Official BookCrossing Zone. I hope you like the book you picked! I also hope you will feel free to come back and take another when you are done with this one, and that you will consider leaving a book for somebody else to enjoy!
Left in the Official BookCrossing Zone. I hope you like the book you picked! I also hope you will feel free to come back and take another when you are done with this one, and that you will consider leaving a book for somebody else to enjoy!

Released on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 at UCCS Library exchange shelf in Colorado Springs, Colorado USA.