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A little bit of Bukowski goes a long way. The first few stories and poems (which I read as prose; I'm not terribly fond of poetry) were engrossing, but as the same themes cropped up repeatedly in each piece, I'll admit that my interest flagged.

Aside from the repetitive themes, I was quite happy with the editing of this anthology. The story choices were quite good: I was able to sample Bukowski's work across the decades, but each story flowed into the next without the choppiness one might expect from such a broad range of work.

While I am happy to have read the book, I am in no hurry to seek out more of Mr. Bukowski's writing. Tales of writing, boozing, and womanizing get pretty tired pretty quickly.

This is a book sorely in need of an editor. It reminds me of the narrative flabbiness of the Harry Potter books after book 3. Once writers become famous, it seems that editors become more timid with their editing. I skipped entire chapters in the second half of the book without losing much in the way of plot. This is a bad sign.

The story itself is a bit flimsy and didn't really interest me. I really enjoy Murakami's writing style ( through his translator), so I powered through as well as I could, but I definitely lost interest by about page 600. The story just felt stalled.

This is my first full-length Murakami novel, which I understand to be a bad place to start, but it was the first title available at the library. Murakami still intrigues me, bit I'd recommend skipping this doorstop of a novel.

I bought Tales of the City with little idea of what it was about aside from glowing reviews and a $2 price tag. The book turns out to be a pioneering novel that openly and honestly depicted the lives of gays and lesbians living in mid-1970s San Francisco. Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, the book has become a classic of the genre.

I found the stories themselves to be a bit melodramatic, populated by a fairly large number of cartoonish characters. It could be that there were just too many characters to give any one sufficient time to develop much depth. The authentic narrative of life in 1970s San Francisco was intriguing; I knew relatively little about the period.

I'd recommend the book for its perspective on the time and place, especially the attitudes and interactions of people in what was clearly a time of transition.