Lake Wobegon Days

witty, satirical, endearing, but ultimately there is no thread that pulls me through. every few pages there are new characters - and they really aren’t “characters.” they are names and deeds that happened in and around Lake Wobegon. an anthology of human quirk centered on a small town in the northern US. i think it’s the monotonous stream of prose with no break or continuity even for a whole family life. he’s telling the stories from far above with a telephoto lens. mythic but impersonal and mystifying. i feel like i’m reading a series of long, really wry jokes with punchlines subtle or semi-extant rather than a story about a town and its people. again, i feel i am to unsophisticated to read this properly. my head is not in show more this space at this time. show less

The best way to enjoy Lake Wobegon is always to listen to Garrison Keillor himself read about his fictional hometown. This audiobook reminds me of hours listening to Keillor on Prairie Home Companion and listening to cassette recordings — yes, actual cassettes! — of his shows.

I had forgotten so much! A farmer who sells live Christmas trees, warning his customers that Christmas trees are terrible fire hazards. A disappointed former Lake Wobegon adult who returns with his own 96 Theses against the small town. A young Keillor hitting his older sister with a ripe tomato when she bends over while gardening. Ralph’s Grocery. Keillor’s mother pondering whether a funeral was “too much” for a young Garrison; deeming himself to have show more been subject to too little, too much sounded just perfect to Keillor. Most of these vignettes I heard on Prairie Home Companion, but they’re evergreen tales I could listen to again and again. Love it every time. show less

At 337 pages of continuous droning, this book was extremely difficult to get through. Although Keillor did really well articulating small town Protestant life in the Midwest, he made the book WAY too long to hold my interest. The novel seemed like a disjointed work of short stories or essays instead of a believable whole. At times I wasn't sure who was the narrator or where the story/ies was/were going. Despite these setbacks, I found myself laughing at the second half of the book a lot more than the first. Once Keillor got past the uninteresting (and unfunny) early settlement history of Lake Wobegone, the book was a lot more digestible, albeit in very small doses. While not my particular cup of tea, I would recommend it to an older show more crowd, listeners of "A Prairie Home Companion," and Midwest Lutherans/Scandinavians who can relate to the author's specialized humor. show less

A friend of mine saw I was reading this book and expressed surprise; she didn't think this would be something I'd like. "So you think a big city gal like me can't appreciate small town charm?" "Yup," she answered. I'd love to prove her wrong, because I'm perverse that way and hate to admit she knows me that well--but... well. I gather it helps if you've listened to Garrison Keilor narrating The Prairie Home Companion on radio--I have not.

More than a few reviewers, even the complementary ones, have called this book "rambling"--and is it ever. It has no real narrative focus from what I can tell from the 50 or so pages I could make myself read. It seems more loosely connected stories and history of fictional, Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, show more U.S.A, a small town not far from the twin cities. In the opening chapter, "Home" it shifts without warning from a super-omniscient to first person and back, from present to past tense and back. There seems to be a narrator, because we hear about "when grandmother died" and "in 1958 when six of us boys" and how he had "turned 16" but it just didn't gel for me. I soon lost patience with the folksy voice and boy did I hate the frequent footnotes--by the time you got through them you've completely lost the thread of the main narrative. And though I tried this because it was listed on "The Ultimate Reading List," I didn't find this funny. I not only didn't laugh out loud, I didn't crack a smile.

I could see this was literate and lyrical and got an idea why some might be charmed, but I was irritated and bored out of my mind. Humor is such a personal thing. Just not for me. show less

I found this book on the clearance rack for a dollar so most important of all, don't over pay for it. There are plenty of copies to go around.

On the positive side, this book was brashly honest. Keillor talks very frankly about the feelings of an adolescent young man and having been an adolescent young man... well, let's just say that he's being very honest. The author's dry wit for which he's famous is evident as he takes us on these boyhood exploits and unveils his early formative days.

On the negative side, and this may seem prudish and contradictory, it was at times almost too honest. To put it bluntly, a lot of what boys think about at that age is sex. And when they're done thinking about that they think about sex some more. And in show more between long protracted periods of thinking about sex, they think about how they're going to get some sex. While this is all very truthful and revealing, it just isn't the image I had of Mr. Keillor. Part of his appeal is his homespun squeaky cleanness and this... well, it just wasn't clean. It wasn't lude either, but it just wasn't quite what one expects.

In summary, I'm glad I read it but it has changed my image of the author forever. This is not a diminishment of his person or character, just a rather humanizing change. On the whole that's probably a good thing but it isn't what I would have predicted when I picked up the book that's a certainty. show less

I'm not quite sure how much of this rambling, darkly funny narrative is fictional and how much of it is drawn from Keillor's own childhood, but it makes for an interesting companion to Keillor's 'News from Lake Wobegon' segment on Prairie Home Companion. I thought the earlier half of the book was more successful than the latter—the first half is resonant with Keillor's trademark, wry humour, and works well as a satire of certain genres of historical writing. The remainder of the book lacked a little in focus, and I thought suffered from the book's format—maybe a series of short stories, but not quite. Still, worth a look if you're a fan of his radio stuff.

Keillor's monologues, presented here as short stories, remind me of the small town I grew up in. They are about a place and time that was not better than now, and not necessarily worse, but memorable.