Tom Hanks is one of my favorite (Hollywood) celebrities so of course, when I first found out about his short story collection, I rushed out and bought a copy as soon as it came out back in 2017. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to read the book when I bought it (because, well, life happened), and so it has been sitting on my TBR all these years. In a way, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as this was one of the first books I thought of when I decided to restart my audiobook journey and boy am I glad I went with this format because the audiobook experience was absolutely FANTASTIC! I mean, seriously, for a Tom Hanks fan, what better way is there to experience a book than to have Hanks narrate it to me? And with the bonus of Hanks’s award-winning acting chops, all the stories came alive in a way that would not have been possible if I had just “read” this book as is. As if that weren’t enough though, Hanks gave audiobook listeners a special treat by having a few of his famous celebrity friends join him in a full cast production of the one short story in his book that is a essentially a movie script -- in addition to Peter Scolari and Holland Taylor (Bosom Buddies reunion right there!!), Hanks also enlisted Peter Gerety, Cecily Strong, and Wilmer Valderrama to perform the story “Stay With Us” -- which, by itself, was already well worth the price of admission in my opinion.
Most short story collections are linked together by a common theme and this one was definitely no exception – as Hanks has mentioned in interviews, the common feature that links all these stories together is the typewriter (or shall I say “typewriters” in the plural form). Yes, in each of the 17 stories in this collection, Hanks finds a way to have a typewriter play a part – whether in a “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” background role (or to use a more acting-appropriate term, an “extra”), a supporting role where it is featured in a few scenes only, or in a central “leading” role where the story pretty much revolves around it. (Another reason to go with the audiobook version – the typewriter sound effects that Hanks actually performs!). Not only that, some of the stories also take different forms – in addition to the movie script format mentioned earlier, some are written in a newsletter format while others are in the format of journal entries written in first person. The icing on the cake for me though, is the fact that Hanks typed up all the stories on his own collection of vintage typewriters (definitely no easy feat in the modern age given the ubiquitous ease and speed of typing on a computer).
Overall, I found this collection delightful, entertaining, and tremendously enjoyable. Of course, as Hanks is not a professional writer, I was not expecting these stories to be particularly literary or brilliantly written, which is why I was surprised (and confounded) to see so many “complaints” about this aspect of the book -- at one point, I read reviews where people were trying to compare Hanks to Ann Patchett or Fredrik Backman, which honestly makes absolutely zero sense to me given that, again, Hanks is not a writer by trade – it’s like trying to compare apples to bananas and saying they should both have the same taste/texture/look by virtue of both being from the broader fruit family (for the record, I have an English Literature degree, I read tons of literary fiction, and I’m a diehard fan of both Patchett and Backman, yet never once did it cross my mind as I was reading Hanks’s story collection that I should be holding it up to the same literary standards as other professional writers). In any case, I will leave it at that…
Lastly, just a quick mention that, like with all short story collections, there were some that grabbed me more than others. Some of the stories that majority of people liked (such as the most critically acclaimed “Welcome to Mars” and “Alan Bean Plus Four” that had appeared in the New Yorker) I actually didn’t take to as much (mostly because I’m not keen on science fiction or time travel). Instead, I prefer the more humanistic stories about ordinary life and the “good, bad, ugliness” of the human condition. So for me, my favorite stories from this collection are as follows:
“Christmas Eve 1953”
“A Month on Greene Street”
“Who’s Who?”
“A Special Weekend”
“These are the Meditations of My Heart”
“Go See Costas”
“Stay With Us”
I definitely recommend this collection, though I would highly suggest going with the audiobook version, as I feel that, in this instance, it makes a huge difference in terms of the reading experience. If I had read this in print instead, my opinion of it might actually be different, which is why I mentioned from the getgo that I’m glad I listened to the audiobook version. With that said, given the different formatting with a few of the stories, it might be a good idea to also check out the print version since those might not always come across clearly in audio.
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