Pencils Make Good Darts Dan Balman 9781463671235 Books
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Humorous and poignant, serious and funny (exactly what you get when a middle age man with the mind of a child less mature than his own children writes about life), Pencils Make Good Darts is a collection of short nonfiction essays that are well suited for reading on the toilet or before you go to bed and will either make you curse the author for wasting your time or laugh and cry like you are young again.
Pencils Make Good Darts Dan Balman 9781463671235 Books
This book was just plain fun and I almost gave it five stars but I wanted so much for it to be longer that I couldn't give all five. No, it was not the funniest book I have read, or the most original, or the most well written, but it was light yet interesting and made for great diversion whether in the doctor's waiting room or to uplift on a depressing rainy day.The stories are short and are snippets of the authoer's life, but the main thread I felt running through them was a sense of family, a sense of home, the feeling that this man was not the perfect father and he knew it but he tried and they loved him and he loved his family. You get a true sense of home, a bit of nostalgia, and a few good laughs.
I highly recommend this book and hope to see more from this author.
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Pencils Make Good Darts Dan Balman 9781463671235 Books Reviews
If only this book were longer. Then I could carry around pocket sized anecdotes to help me get through life day to day. Like irreverent bible leaflets for the perpetually lost. Although I usually spurn non-fiction I will always be glad I made an exception with this book. I say this with the utmost humiliation, I have been on a bender. I needed to enter a new type of rehabilitation facility until I read "Pencils Make Good Darts". Now all the wind has gone out of my sails. I will not sully my new-found euphoria with another book for a while. I might start writing again though. Thank you for making it available for free. Now Mr. Balman tell your publisher to pay you more, you damn genius!
From all of the five star ratings, I figured this book would be great, but I was very wrong. My annual Christmas letter is funnier than anything this guy wrote. Who is this guy's editor? I wasn't looking for mistakes, but there were so many I couldn't ignore them! Horrible spelling and grammar! He wrote "prizes" when he meant "pries", "passed" when he should have written "past", "J.C. Penny", used possessives like "bolo's, Polaroid's, and thingy's" for what should have been plurals (I HATE that!), "backup" (a noun) for "back up" (verb), "caste iron" and "Oh contraire" should have been "Au contraire". Since a lot of people can't spell, this stuff probably didn't bother them, but this guy claims to be an author! The ironic thing was that in one chapter he made fun of a guy's spelling on a Craig's List ad! And, as usual, way too much use of the F-word and the S-word. The book didn't really start out that way, but these were liberally sprinkled through the rest of the book. Nope, I don't agree with one reviewer -- this guy should definitely NOT quit his day job. Dave Barry he is not.
Very disappointed, not funny. Tried a story between books, trying to get through it, even that didn't help. Bailed and removed from my . (I force myself to stick with some books, couldn't take the punishment.)
This was cute. Although it had me laughing out loud on occasion, I can only give it three stars. This, more than anything, is a result of it not being what I expected. Each chapter represents a totally new story and "chapter" of the authors' life. It was comical, but there was no timeline (stories jumped from being married and having kids, to being a kid, to joining the military). It would make good reading for those times when you only have a few moments and do not want to get into a long book.
I have not even finished this book of short stories and felt compelled to write a wonderful review about it. This guy knows about parenting; he knows about the complex issues of getting older while being a parent.
I have laughed often- and out loud - and so far want to recommend this book to everyone I know. I have 4 sons and one of them has 4 daughters. He will absolutely get a personal recommendation.
This is simply real life. If you have kids you will understand and you too will laugh out loud!
Traditionally, publishers avoid printing books of short stories, because they don't sell. If any given story excites 5% of the readers, and bores 95%, a novel will have 5% of the readers grabbing their friends by the throat, insisting that they buy it, but a collection of shorts is considered just so-so by all readers.
And I was in a collection of shorts that were, to be fair, considerably better than average, when I decided I was just to bored to continue. I closed that book, possibly to return later, but probably not, and started at the not-yet-read books stacked in my . The title of this one struck my fancy, and I dug in.
Reading in bed is a tough venue for an author. If he puts you to sleep, you think of his book as sleep-inspiring, and if he keeps you awake, you're annoyed, and it's that damned book's fault. But I lasted through the first story, thinking "this is great - and now I can encounter a so-so story, and nod off." Unfortunately, the second story was good as well.
It was in the third story that I noticed, "Hey, this guy isn't killing his babies. That's a violation of the rules." The idea is that if you come across a particularly colorful way of expressing a thought, you need to do away with it, because readers will pay attention to the expression of the thought instead of thinking about the story you're trying to tell. If you can't communicate the story you're telling, you're an abject failure.
But for some reason, his cute turns of phrase weren't destroying the narrative. I would read the story, smile at the phrase, and keep right on reading without getting sidetracked into daydreams of my own invention. I don't know how he's done it, and I intend to go back and study his work a bit, because it would be a skill worth cultivating.
There aren't any spectacular events in this book. You're not on the beach with the only two people left in the world. You're not in a Georgia mansion as Sherman makes his march to the sea. You're not watching over the shoulder as a woman is faced with the impossible choice of which of her children's lives to save.
Instead, you're faced with the smaller version of the life-or-death struggle, trying to keep the gas pump from clicking off when the tank is not yet full, trying to stop the gas pump at an even number of dollars with no cents, trying to explain to the wife why you bought ten dollars worth of gas for two women, and it's not because they are young, blonde, buxom, and excessively cuddly, and you're sure of that, but you're not sure of what it is. Yeah, the kind of stuff we deal with on an everyday basis.
There are also some things we don't deal with on an everyday basis. Dan tells us why soldiers put themselves in harm's way for the rest of us, for instance. I can taste the Georgia sand he eats.
But it's well-written, well-formatted, and the only copy-editing mistake ("to" instead of "too") I found was actually in the "About the author" instead of in the book, per se. I didn't find myself coming to a halt between stories, but instead charging into the next story. This book would make a good gift.
This book was just plain fun and I almost gave it five stars but I wanted so much for it to be longer that I couldn't give all five. No, it was not the funniest book I have read, or the most original, or the most well written, but it was light yet interesting and made for great diversion whether in the doctor's waiting room or to uplift on a depressing rainy day.
The stories are short and are snippets of the authoer's life, but the main thread I felt running through them was a sense of family, a sense of home, the feeling that this man was not the perfect father and he knew it but he tried and they loved him and he loved his family. You get a true sense of home, a bit of nostalgia, and a few good laughs.
I highly recommend this book and hope to see more from this author.
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