Sorry please thank you by charles yu used11/25/2023 Like wearing a stranger’s coat, still warm with heat from another body. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the morning: I get to work three minutes late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. Doesn’t help when you are on your third broken leg of the day. The shift manager never stops reminding us. Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimbursement for painkillers. Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. ![]() He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegu A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: " Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you." Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero?. If you like different, you might like it, too.The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories. A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date. But I spotted it on a table in The Strand bookstore a couple of months ago and the title tickled my memory, so I bought and now have read it. But I never spotted it at Barnes & Noble, and since my To Read list is very, very long, I never sought it out. I put it on my To Read list back when it was published, in 2010, because it sounded intriguing. It likely will mean different things to different people. The book needs to be experienced, not explained. In a way, the book, and the time travel conceit, is a metaphor for life and how people get stuck in their life while searching for something that may or may not really matter. The main action takes place in flashbacks/memories and the protagonist's narration of his past. His father invented time travel, though that's a story in itself, and the author, uh, I mean the protagonist is searching for his father who disappeared years ago.There isn't much story here. This book's central conceit is that time travel exists and the main character, who shares the author's name, repairs time machines for a living. REVIEW: Charles Yu's HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSEHappy Reading! Read more ![]() As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. The full review is at my blog, which you can find linked below. If you haven't read the book, this is oddly a difficult book to spoil, but use your own judgement. Book club reviews will always have spoilers, so if you read the book, you're good to go. So glad this ended up being our book club pick for January! Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. This is a book I can see myself coming back to again and again, because there's so much to get out of it. ![]() This is the kind of book that resonates with me deeply on an emotional level, because it touches on so many things I can relate to, and yet the science and geekery makes the book fun to read. Not only does that allow the voice to hook you and stick with you, but it helps when the narrator goes on the tangents comparing time travel to memory and all that wonderful fun stuff. This book is META, and it's a fascinating and fast read, but I will say it's best read in big chunks. The book is so many different things at once: a fictional memoir of what I bet is a somewhat factual story a time-travel loop brain-melter a humorous piece a story about memory and regret and family a love letter to science fictional geekery everywhere. And because most of my review is quoting, really, all you have to do is sample the book, look at the quotes, to see if they resonate with you at all. My Rating: ExcellentThis book is not for everyone. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. ![]() The key to locating his father may be found in a book. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. The premise: ganked from BN.com: From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father.
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