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There are currently 26 member reviews
for Activities of Daily Living
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MARY H.
Life and Multitasking
There is a disconnect between many of the chapters of this novel. After reading it straight through, I then went back to read a chapter at a time but not in order and the story still read the same. Many of the chapters were intense and complete in themselves as a short story would be and others left me wondering how it even pertained to the storyline.
Life is definitely about multitasking and Alice was a pro. Her ability to manage her life, the life and demise of her Father and the Artist's life. Throughout the story we are introduced to varied characters that interact with Alice and then there is the constant interjection of authors, movie titles, book references and quotes. At times the novel seems to be a jumble of random thoughts without a consistent thread. I may try again, or maybe this just wasn't my type of book.
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Joan P. (Owego, NY)
Activities of Daily Living
I found this a difficult book. There are two main threads. One tells about The Artist, the life and accomplishments of a Chinese immigrant that is a performance artist. The second tells of The Father who is slowly walking the path to dementia and death. Time and it's boundaries and vagaries seems to bind them together. I related to the story of the father as I am on the same path and have a loving daughter to guide me. This was beautifully written and insightful. At other times I felt confused and irritated at the bombardment of extraneous material and name dropping. Was this the authors expectation?
Once I start a book I am compelled to finish it. For the reader that needs the story to 'grab" them in the first fifty pages, This book is not for you.
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Lee L. (Los Angeles, CA)
Good but a few structural issues
?I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I appreciated the uniqueness of this book's structure, where the entire story essentially followed the main character Alice as she went through various "activities of daily living" that included becoming a caretaker for her stepfather as well as working on a project about reclusive artist Tehching Hsieh. Each chapter consisted of seemingly random snippets into Alice's life, interspersed with various tidbits about the Artist (as that is what he is referred to throughout the story), though the details ended up melding together to the point that it becomes difficult to tell whose life — Alice's or the Artist's — was being described.
Having said all that, the unique structure was also what made this a difficult read for me — the narrative seemed to lean toward the philosophical and abstract, with the story also going off on so many different tangents that it made the main arc hard to follow. To be honest, even after finishing this, I found it hard to describe what the story was about. There was tons of "name-dropping" — references to famous people from the literary, art, and philosophy worlds as well as historical places and events, which in itself wasn't a problem, but then the author, Lisa Hsaio Chen, would follow those references with details that would go on for pages, only circling back to the current situation at hand near the end of the chapter. While Chen never makes any connection outright between all the random people / places / events that get brought up throughout the story and the things going on in Alice's life, my guess is that, in structuring the story this way, perhaps Chen was expecting us to see the parallels and make the connection ourselves. Nothing wrong with that technically, but it just made for an exhausting read that I had neither the time or patience for at the moment.
The other thing that made this a frustrating reading experience for me was the inconsistency of the writing, which made parts of the story hard to follow. In addition to more grammatical and sentence structure issues than I would've preferred (I mean, I understand that this is an ARC, but still), there were also times when the author would insert new characters into the story without introducing them or wait until several pages in to introduce them— this was frustrating in the sense that it was both distracting and it broke the flow of the story, as I had to flip back to previous sections of the book to see if I perhaps missed a reference somewhere.
Going into this book, I really wanted to like it and while I found the premise interesting, plus the concept of the story had a lot of potential, the execution unfortunately didn't really work for me. There wasn't much of a plot to speak of, which is usually fine as long as the characters are well-drawn, but in this case, I couldn't seem to connect to any of the characters either.
With all that said though, there were some elements that were done well and held my interest (hence I didn't rate this as low as I probably would have normally), it's just that I wasn't expecting for it to be so tedious and require so much patience. Of course, it could just be me — since this one doesn't publish until April, I would suggest waiting for a few more reviews to come out first to get a a more well-rounded opinion before deciding whether to pick this one up.
Received ARC from W.W. Norton Company via BookBrowse First Impressions program
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Rebecca G. (Havertown, PA)
A Tale of Two Stories and Musings
I have to admit up front that I'm conflicted about this book. It's basically a book with two story lines but it's also packed full of little known snippets of information and the authors musings mostly about those little snippets. I actually found this to be the best part of this book, absorbing the information and looking things up. I did appreciate the story of her stepfather and his slow descent to dementia and death. I loved reading about her care of him as I'm dealing with some of this myself right now. The other people who move in and out of her life were much less interesting to me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Tehching Hsieh is a real person and I am inspired to learn more about him. I was frustrated with the authors ramblings and occasionally I found my mind wandering while reading and had to reread. I think this book would appeal to anyone dealing with a parents decline and perhaps anyone interested in performance art.
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Mary D. (Richmond Hill, NY)
All Over The Place
I started reading not knowing what to expect. I am familiar with the term Activities of Daily Living. But as the story of The Father progressed, along with it went The Artist, and lots of other bits and pieces. At some point, I felt, "Enough!". I did not finish the book and so my review is incomplete. Perhaps someone else would appreciate this style, but I did not.
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