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Sep 19, 2008

Suzanna rated it:

I didn't like this book, but it was mostly because I didn't like the main character and her lack of personal substance. She never, ever, even once, feels any joy, passion, or grief. There is one period in her life where she appears to experience depression, but again, there is a lack of strong emotion, which really is typical of depression. A person who has three children, marries twice, and is widowed twice, usually experiences some sort of deep emotion. This flaw in her personality had me More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 25, 2012

Sarah rated it:

A breathtaking and thoroughly original novel. I'm completely in awe of the choices Shields made in the shaping of this narrative. The whole is flawlessly cohesive. The parts are poetry unto themselves.

Essentially, it's a book about loneliness, every kind of loneliness: starved, suffocating, denied, cherished, physical, existential, or simply the result of petty misunderstanding. --And it's not always clear cut. She allows for ambiguity. She allows for the reader's subjective response More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 03, 2008

Heather rated it:

What I enjoyed about this book is the perspective of the writing, or lack of. The chapters chronicles Daisy' life, but always from an external perspective. She is never the voice and rarely do we ever "hear" her speak. All the dialogue is provided by those around her and facts are her life are circumstantial. Hearing about her life from multiple voices make me question what are the real facts of her life, what parts are how she is perceived by others, and how she thinks she is perceiv More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 30, 2010

Sally rated it:

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book was suggested for the Mostly Literary Fiction book group that I lead at the Hayward Public Library, and we read it for our May 2009 discussion. A poignant and extremely creative approach to the imagining of one fairly ordinary (and extraordinary, in its rendering) individual. My reading of this novel coincided with my 85-year-old mother's illness and hospitalization. I read parts of it while waiting with her in the emergency room, and the following day sitting by More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 12, 2008

Tracey rated it:

I love this book. It has been 14 years since I have read it and I still remember clearly what it means to me:

Life is long....and in this long life you lead a series of mini-lives. In each "life" you become a different version of you. We are blessed with the chance and sometimes forced against our will to reinvent ourselves again and again until one day we are very old and find that we are living in Florida wearing polyester pantsuits. Did you ever imagine that would be you More...

1 comment like (18 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2008

Sommer added it

Ugh, love/hate relationship with this one... I read it for an English course in college where all of the required novels were Pulitzer Prize winners from the 90s. Again, I had a sadistic teacher who put together a list of the most depressing books to win in the 90s: The Hours, Mambo Kings, Rabbit at Rest, etc. Granted most of the winners in the 90s were works oozing depressive themes, he still could have inserted a more uplifting selection in there.

So basically this book was uber de More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 06, 2007

Grace rated it:

This book won a Pulitizer Prize in 1995, and it was an honor well deserved. I'd never even heard of it, I just picked up up at the Goodwill because the description on the back cover intrigued me, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

The story is a fictionalized autobiography of one Daisy Goodwill Flett. Born around the turn of the 20th century and living until the 1980s, Shield's Flett reflects simultaneously on her own tragic life and the life of a North American century. T More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 01, 2007

Trish rated it:

I read this quite some time ago, and could never think of an adequate review. It's simply a wonderful book. It follows in exquisite detail the life of Daisy Stone in ten chapters: Birth 1905, Childhood 1916, Marriage 1927, Love 1936, Motherhood 1947, Work 1955-1964, Sorrow 1965, Ease 1977, Illness and Decline 1985, Death. Daisy's life is ordinary but utterly absorbing; through the years, the reader almost slips inside her skin, sharing her experiences.

Quotable
A thought comes i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 01, 2007

Tulara rated it:

The Stone Diaries tells the story of Daisy Goodwill - from the moment she is born to an unsuspecting mother, Mercy. Mercy was heavy and the year was 1905 - sexually backward in her marriage, Mercy was baking a desert for her husband who was due home from his job in the stone quarry. She died in childbirth and sets the stage for Daisy's life. Daisy is given to Mercy's best friend by Daisy's father - his grief is too much to bear. With the addition of someone special in her life, the neighbor More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 11, 2007

Jennifer rated it:

Pluck out any one person’s life for close examination, and you’ll find yourself with a whole pages of footnotes about others; an entire cast of secondary characters that influenced the path that the person takes (or doesn’t). This book traces the life of Daisy Goodwill (who narrates, an observer of her life), from her unexpected birth on her mother’s kitchen floor in 1905 through her death in the nineties. Her story unfolds like a kind of scrapbook of her existence, only she is the one behind More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 17, 2008

John rated it:

Like finding a shoebox in the attic.

Here is the life of Daisy presented mostly through narration, but buttressed by letters, tombstones, photographs (which occasionally contradict the narrative), words etched into a Victorian plate, a luncheon menu, Aunt Daisy's Lemon Pudding recipe, to-do lists, a list of books read and a sheet with every address Daisy lived.

People are introduced and explained, summed up, classified. I envy anyone able to boil down other people to an un More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

It's ironic that I read this book while I was reading Sex and the City. The two novels are as disparate as different planets. One book is a about an ordinary housewife struggling with life's little trials, the other, a place peppered with big names and obscene money, fur coats and Lear jets.

Guess which one was better.

This book is phenomenal. It's probably the best book I've read in the last year. And it's funny to think about because there is no person, or plot twist, o More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 16, 2008

Mary rated it:

I first read this novel around 1995 when I was in a book discussion group. I did like it a lot, thought it was a rich piece of literature. And it made me curious about other works of Carol Shields. So I've read a number of her works.
About a month ago, I decided to reread THE STONE DIARIES. Much of it I'd forgotten, and it was odd to read my occasional pencil-written comments; still, I found that I agreed with my "younger self" in many cases about passages I found meaningful. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 28, 2008

Simona rated it:

A really good read: describes the life of a woman (Daisy) and her family from before she was born to after her death. Shields uses interesting narration and is gifted at playing around with time. With her non-linear style, you learn everything and more about the main character. However, you don't learn who the main character is for some time because of the detail Shields goes into for every character in the book. This is not a drawback, though. In fact, it's one of the book's major strength More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 18, 2009

Stuart rated it:

this is a terriffic novel. it is beautifully written and addresses some interesting ideas: the offhand catastrophes of everyday life; the way one person can casually devestate another without feeling a thing; the crime - and inevitability - of wasted time; the ability of women to suffer in silence to their dying breath; the impossibility of accurate autobiography; the sad ridiculousness of the idea that there is any justice to be had in this world.

the author treats her characters More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2009

Andrea rated it:

Forced to read this in my Canadian Lit post-1945 class, my mother rightly predicted that I would hate it. HATE. Magic realism on the prairies didn't work for me. Why? Because I'm from the Prairies. Full stop.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 30, 2009

Madeline rated it:

"My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: 'Take some slices of stale bread,' the recipe said, 'and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.' Of course she's didvided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 14, 2009

Sarah Beth rated it:

This is one of those books that grabbed me from the first chapters, one of the few books that I described to Rob while I read it, as though I was giving him updates on a friend of ours. But somehow, it became less compelling as I read and really jumped the shark (nuked the fridge?), in Chapter 6: Work, a dreaded epistolary chapter.

Alice Walker pulled off an epistolary novel and the fellas who wrote the Bible certainly put it to good effect but mostly I just find it kind of tiresome More...

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Dec 31, 2008

Antof9 rated it:

Read this on a flight and then shortly thereafter used it to revive a bookring, so my review is abbreviated. And the notes I took on this are lame .... However, here's the review I wrote on BookCrossing, such as it is:

I loved this description: "This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup."

LOL!

Unfortunately, I am having a hard time remembering much more More...

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Feb 03, 2012

Dawn rated it:

This is book was good. It begins with a hugely fat woman whose loving husband is off at work when she begins to have major stomach pains. She collapses and the neighbor comes over just in time to see a baby pop out. The woman didn’t even know she was pregnant.
The main characters in this are simple but lovable. The husband of the above woman, Cuyler, is a quiet man who doesn’t understand why his wife died (in childbirth) and why she didn’t tell him she was pregnant. He thought it was an a More...

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Oct 22, 2011

Dianne rated it:

I know this won't win me any friends among Canadian readers, but I don't like Carol Shields writing. Granted I've only read this one through to the end. A few years ago I started another one and didn't like it either so I quit about a quarter of the way in. I suspected at the time I was not a "good" reader and that her books were over my head. I've gained some "reader confidence" since then and learned that it's ok to not like certain styles of writing just on the basis of p More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 10, 2011

Gaye rated it:

Can I say confused? I enjoyed the writing enormously. The prose was deep and meaning-filled...I'm just not sure I always got the meanings I was meant to. I loved so much of this book and then I would be oddly surprised and find that things weren't what I had thought they were. Symbolism was rife in the book and the tangents of sex were odd, random and so out of place. The pacing was all over the place – or maybe I was all over the place. I was at times eager to read on and at others wishing the More...

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Jan 30, 2011

Nicola rated it:

In The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields takes on the tricky task of making an ordinary, even boring, woman’s life story feel poignant and important. Surprisingly, she not only succeeds, she succeeds magnificently. (Give the woman a Pulitzer! …oh, wait.)

Stone is, at times, perfectly written, rife with beautiful, thoughtful observations about life. Shields imbues with significance tiny, everyday moments; makes banality into romance. Parts of the novel are truly breathtaking. It’s fair to say More...

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Nov 29, 2010

Shana rated it:

I first took notice of this book when a local bookstore had it as their book club selection a few years ago. I have no idea when I actually got around to buying it, but I saw it used, probably at the Strand, and picked it up. Unfortunately, it languished on my shelves for some time because I have more than an entire bookshelf overflowing with books I've bought and not yet read. I finally started reading it about a week ago because my friend Ellen is working her way backward through the Pulitz More...

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Nov 17, 2010

Jocey rated it:

Another book I read this summer was The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields. The book is about a woman, Daisy Goodwill Fiett’s life. The book takes place between the time period of 1905-1985. Throughout The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields expresses the theme that family isn’t only people with blood relations but those who are there for you. Daisy’s mother died at child birth, so Daisy was raised by her neighbor Clarentine Fiett, a woman who has no blood relations with her. She raised her until Dais More...

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Oct 31, 2010

Mary rated it:

This is a beautifully written story of a woman's life. I was more caught up in the frustrations and limitations of Daisy's life, and critical of her. Having just re-read it, I think I have a better understanding the point of the novel, and I'm in a place that it is beautiful.

The review from the publisher captures better than I can why I found this book so compelling reading it twice, almost twenty years between the readings:

"This is the problem that Carol Shields More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 29, 2010

Harmonybites rated it:

This book grew on me--at first appearing distant in how it treated its subject, Daisy Goodwill Flett, but ultimately moving and singular. The chapters in the table of contents tip you off you'll be reading about a life entire: Birth - 1905; Childhood - 1916; Marriage - 1927; Love - 1937; Motherhood - 1947; Work 1959 - 1964; Sorrow - 1965; Ease - 1977; Illness and Decline - 1985; Death.

Yet, despite that, the first line, the title, this isn't memoir. First person peeps out only in bit More...

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Jul 09, 2010

Harkinna rated it:

I read this book a few months ago, over the span of only a few days. The story is somewhat straightforward: the book tells the story of one Canadian woman’s life and is told to the listener/reader through varying points of view. And even while the teller of the story, or manner of telling the story may vary, time continues to pass. This is one thing that makes the book incredibly unique and enjoyable. The first part of the book has the main character telling the story of her birth and her family More...

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Jul 06, 2010

Stephanie rated it:

Carol Shields, who won the Pulitzer prize for her book The Stone Diaries, is certainly a master of the interior monologue, although she does not use it in The Stone Diaries to as great effect as she does in her later book, Unless. I thoroughly enjoyed The Stone Diaries, a book telling the story of Daisy Goodwill, whose life nearly spanned the twentieth century, using Daisy's own voice, the voice of the omniscient narrator who is so attuned to our inner selves, and the voices of family and frien More...

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Dec 09, 2009

Laurel rated it:

This beautifully written book defies classification. Is it the story of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary events, or an extraordinary woman living through ordinary events? Daisy Goodwill reflects on her birth (Manitoba, 1905) and her death (Florida, 199?) and everything in between. Sometimes it is Daisy's story, then it shifts to the voices of her friends, neighbors, and children, or an omniscient third person. One chapter is told entirely through letters. Like a real biography, the More...

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