Joan SilvermanRezensionen

I enjoyed these essays and as someone who has recently reached midlife, I can really relate to her point of view.½

Thanks to LibraryThing and Brauhan publishing for this book.

Considering it was a lot of her columns, etc. put into one it melded quite nicely in her writing and her chapters. I enjoyed reading a lot about her life and how she feels about many things. The title is only mentioned at the end of the book. I guess I thought it would have more meaning. One thing that didn't mesh out for me was because these were from many places, there were some places that she mentioned "they." I have no idea if she's talking about a friend, spouse or what. She does mention friends by name though in this book.

Overall, a fast, good book

After reading this book, it seems like the author, John Silverman, and I have a great deal in common. She describes certain affinities, traits and habits that make me think she must have a direct connection to my head.

Where I once used to be (honestly) a slob, and now dance right up to the line of OCD tidiness, she exactly puts into words what I could not, why I can no longer bear dishes left overnight: “Forty years later, I now see what’s fundamentally wrong with dirty dishes awaiting one first thing in the morning. They’re like tarnish on a new day, a reminder, a throwback, as if yesterday never came to a finite end.”

My feelings about organization and how it can transcend the feelings of enjoying a clean desk are an echo for her first experience in an organization store: “I confess that my first trip to the store was not your standard retail foray. It was more like visiting a museum, church and therapist, all in one.”

I am not a big fan of change when I find something I truly like – and apparently she suffers the same curse as I: “So it goes that once you’ve used a product for years, and can’t imagine life without it, it vanishes.”

And most tellingly, the moral dilemma I have been undergoing for years in my love of the feel, smell, texture and permanence of physical books and bookstores…versus the ease and flexibility of an e-reader. “Whoever envisions a paperless society places his trust in the air, for the vision is one of invisibility, without texture or touch. A virtual world, where sense is made formless, and words lack a permanent home, is a place where meanings can shift like the wind.”

Yet despite these similarities, and despite appreciating her clean and clear writing style…I felt that “Someday This Will Fit” was really missing something. I kept waiting for it to be funnier when instead each anecdote comes across as mildly amusing. I was searching for a real heart to it, especially since many of the essays are about painful subjects and emotional themes, but instead felt the real soul of the book was under lock and key. And I never got either. This book was good…but I feel that it could have been great.

I love to savor short stories, and it was hard to put down and keep my self from reading ahead. Lots of "been there" moments and laugh out loud moments. I'm hoping for more soon from this author!

I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I enjoyed this book of 1 linked essays.

Life is funny and sad and confusing and ridiculous and wonderful....and Joan Silverman captures the wonder of everyday life through these essays;

As a reader who has passed through "midlife", truly enjoyed this book and recommend it (and secretly wish I had written something similar!)

This is a nice book of essays that have to do with all the things that you experience in life. It was well written and grouped by subject. Thank yo to Bauhan Publishing and LibraryThing for providing me with a copy.

Thanks to Bauhan Publishing via LibraryThing for an ARC.

This book consists of 15 chapters of themed vignettes about things that happen and matter in our lives. Some of the topics are At Home, Habits and Routines, Food, At Work, Health, Obsessions, and other topics that we all live and deal with.

Joan Silverman's intelligence and wisdom are displayed throughout while she entertains us with her observations on everyday occurrences in this modern age. She guides us through the fluctuations in our lives and definitely knows how to express her opinions. She's amazing on knowing how to keep us interested. One reviewer stated that her essays remind us of the wonders of everyday life. My thoughts exactly!

A book of personal essays covering a vast array of subjects. Some were very interesting, but I got tired of the author's "voice" as it went on.

quick, easy read. This is a quiet book. very calming and relatable. a couple stories I had no interest in so I skipped them, but for the most part a good read.

This is a delightful and reflective collections of observations of life. I wish each had been longer! I thought I would read one or two before bed, but found them more profound when reading a chapter of linked essays. A good gift idea for the reader or the writer-want-to-be.

I've enjoyed several biographies and memoirs lately, and was intrigued by the idea of this one being a little less personal about the authors life, and more about how several essays she's written over time are so relatable. I'm a millennial myself but still managed to connect with most of the stories and annecdotes. I definitely enjoyed this, and it's a great, short read!

Memoirs have fascinated me for a long time now, and I find myself reading at least a dozen of them a year. The best of them are as fascinating as even the most melodramatic novels that top the bestseller lists every year before fading away into well-deserved literary oblivion. Memoirs, rather than fading away right on schedule, live on because they are real stories that happen to real people – people just like us – people willing to open their souls to the rest of us. Some writers tell their stories in standalone, one-volume books; others need two, three, four, or more volumes to get the job done. Good memoirs have a different tone than their cousin the autobiography, that first-person, birth-to-present-day chronological accounting of a person’s life. The memoir format grants its authors an almost unlimited freedom to explore incidents, influences, and traumas to a degree that the autobiography format can never match - and that’s why I prefer memoirs to autobiographies.

But despite all my prior memoir-reading, I don’t recall ever reading one quite like Joan Silverman’s Someday This Will Fit: Linked Essays, Meditations, & Other Midlife Follies. Silverman is an East Coast writer of op-eds, book reviews, essays, and columns whom I had not read before learning of Someday This Will Fit because I simply don’t read newspapers now like I used read them in the good old days prior to the internet. What caught my attention about the book was seeing it described as “an original memoir-in-essays.” Just how is a memoir fan supposed to resist that?

What Silverman has achieved here is really rather remarkable. Someday This Will Fit is not a story about extraordinary events in the life of a person shaped by them or lucky to have survived them. Rather, this is the kind of memoir one would expect from the neighbor down the street, a person busy trying to negotiate her way through everyday life, someone experiencing the same on-the-job training that life throws at all of us. What makes the book so remarkable is that after reading these dozens of short, connected essays, I actually do feel like Joan Silverman is someone who has lived next door to me for the last decade or two.

Silverman has sorted the chosen essays into fifteen distinct aspects of everyday American life: “At Home,” “Habits and Routines,” “Food,” “At Work,” “Health,” “Obsessions,” “He Said, She Said,” “But Who’s Counting,” “Family and Friends,” “Mother Lode,” “Shopping,” “Say, What,” “The Great Outdoors,” “Scents,” and “Departures.” Each section contains five or six page-and-a-half reflections that taken together gradually reveal the real Joan Silverman, a person, as it turns out, who is very much like her readers are likely to be. At only 159 pages (ARC version page-count), this is not a long book, but at about the half-way point, I began to think of Silverman as someone I knew, a person whose views on any given subject were less of a surprise to me than they were like a chat with an old friend over morning coffee. And It certainly doesn’t hurt that Silverman has a fine-tuned sense of humor and that she is not afraid to use sarcasm to make her point – just like all my best friends.

Review Copy provided by Bauhan Publishing

This book was a conundrum for me. There were parts that I loved about it and could relate to and there were parts that I found absolutely no interest in. I vacillated between highly entertained and laughing out loud to just about falling asleep. I suppose that justifies my three star rating as it wasn't bad but it certainly wasn't something that I would recommend or read again. Perhaps if I knew the author personally I would find that these pieces "fit" the person I know. Instead, it felt a little disjointed to me.

This collection of short essays by Joan Silverman is an entertaining read with a slant toward domestic humor and witty wisdoms. Perusing the simple activities of daily living then incorporating humorous comments keeps Silverman's reader engaged. There are topics covering work, obsessions, habits and routines and health that make you smile, chuckle and sometimes laugh out loud! This book would make a nice gift for a female friend.½