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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
Interesting story. Didn’t love that it seemed to glamorize and normalize alcoholism. However, I loved the relationships between the men in the bar.
There is a memory that I think about really too often. This past New Years Day, I was sitting in Jen's parents living room reading Gatsby and drinking a beer, which was chasing the Mudslide which had chased the taste of Scotch, and feeling just the slightest buzz. As I started to read the description of Tom and Daisy's house, flying up the lawn into the fluttering curtains and the sprawling people and completely open world, I (this sounds dramatic) shed a tear - something that very rarely happens when I am reading. I just truly could not grasp the beauty of the words, of the world, and of the space, couldn't wrap by head around it, and was left overwhelmed with the power of creation out of nothing and the way of words to paint a picture of the world as we experience it rather than the world as it is. Reading that back, I sound way beyond the slight buzz that I had, but that was the beauty of the experience, in that I cannot describe or recreate it in any way. I picked up Gatsby again the next day and read just the same scene but did not get the same reaction, so I decided to reread the whole book in search of it, but again was left empty. This memory was with me a lot while I was reading this book.
I have an idealized vision of my life as a barfly, one that I rarely take any action on but which seems like, with just a couple of small changes in life through this point, could have been the way I walked. I see Zinnies, Belmont, Blue Monkey, Green Beetle, and a dozen other bars littering Memphis, and wonder what it would be like to combine my addiction + addictive personality, love of alcohol, deep insecurity in and longing for male friendships, and general tendency to back my way into stupid things with a haven from anyone telling me to avoid those tendencies. I view bars as a space similar to that memory of Gatsby, somewhere where the consistency of the world and slowing of my mind allow me to view the world as I want it to be presented, rather than as it is. In my first year in Memphis, many of the memories that I see as the most restful came in bars, sitting with Jen late at night or reading alone on a Sunday afternoon. This book paints a picture of the same idealized life, the bar as the refugee and as a place to hide from the responsibility and burdens of the world. These are a lot of half formed thoughts bc I am putting them together in bits and pieces throughout the school day, but I also think the thoughts are half formed bc every book that I read romanticizing the life that I will never live but will always hold onto as something that I wished to live cuts out a smaller and smaller piece of the world as I view it and admire it, from my perspective, and replaces it with a piece of the world that is undeniably out of my control and not on my side.
Anyways, I am not making any sense. Just read the book.
I have an idealized vision of my life as a barfly, one that I rarely take any action on but which seems like, with just a couple of small changes in life through this point, could have been the way I walked. I see Zinnies, Belmont, Blue Monkey, Green Beetle, and a dozen other bars littering Memphis, and wonder what it would be like to combine my addiction + addictive personality, love of alcohol, deep insecurity in and longing for male friendships, and general tendency to back my way into stupid things with a haven from anyone telling me to avoid those tendencies. I view bars as a space similar to that memory of Gatsby, somewhere where the consistency of the world and slowing of my mind allow me to view the world as I want it to be presented, rather than as it is. In my first year in Memphis, many of the memories that I see as the most restful came in bars, sitting with Jen late at night or reading alone on a Sunday afternoon. This book paints a picture of the same idealized life, the bar as the refugee and as a place to hide from the responsibility and burdens of the world. These are a lot of half formed thoughts bc I am putting them together in bits and pieces throughout the school day, but I also think the thoughts are half formed bc every book that I read romanticizing the life that I will never live but will always hold onto as something that I wished to live cuts out a smaller and smaller piece of the world as I view it and admire it, from my perspective, and replaces it with a piece of the world that is undeniably out of my control and not on my side.
Anyways, I am not making any sense. Just read the book.
New to reading memoir s.
I really enjoyed most of the book. If anything it wrapped up too quickly. I read this for book club tends different
I really enjoyed most of the book. If anything it wrapped up too quickly. I read this for book club tends different
2.5 stars
Engaging at times but also seemed a bit too wordy in some parts.
Engaging at times but also seemed a bit too wordy in some parts.
Although this was really well written and I enjoyed it, it was a slog for me to get through :/ The author is really good at giving you a sense of time, place, and the characters...but maybe sometimes too good as descriptions could be overly long. Can't wait to see the movie adaptation that's currently filming near here! (also...whatever happened to Uncle Charlie???)
It was well-written, but I guess I'm not a big fan of memoirs. I got bored...
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Me ha gustado. Hay un trozo a mitad del libro que se me ha hecho un poco más pesado, pero en general muy bien.
Masterful and wonderful to read. Like a good scotch, The Tender Bar should not be rushed through and instead, savored slowly and thoroughly. Also like scotch, it took me a couple of exposures to The Tender Bar before I started liking it.
The first exposure was when my husband and I were researching bars we should visit while in Tokyo. During my googling, I found a few mentions of this book but read a blurb about it and thought it sounded boring, so I let it slip my mind. In Tokyo, we visited an eponymous bar on the fifth floor of an anonymous looking office building. (Coincidentally, the master bartender who works at this bar shares the same first-letter, lastname combination as a former colleague at Goodreads.) At this bar I had one of the most expertly shaken drinks of my life. All subsequent drinks would be compared to the ones I consumed at the Tender Bar.
My second exposure was after I had read The Great Gatsby for the first time since highschool. The book that I only thought of as a requirement during my first reading revealed its subtleties and sad themes during my second reading. After finishing the book, I wanted more books like it and consulted some reading lists online for comparable books. The Tender Bar was mentioned and I added it to my to-read list. It wasn’t till a year later, when someone on a gaming forum mentioned the book, that I finally got around to reading it.
Although I categorized the book as a bildungsroman, it’s less of a coming of age as it is a coming to terms book. Moehringer crafts a Dickensian (I hope you like that word because it comes up more than a handful of times in the book) tale about the men at a bar. Like life, it’s not any one story or experience or even one person at the bar that changes the boy, but a culmination of events and disappointments that pushes him into being the type of man that makes his mother proud.
The Tender Bar is the type of novel I’d want to read by the fire with a comforting glass of scotch. It’s heartbreaking at times, but there’s a certain hopeful undercurrent to the writing. Even in the sections where Moehringer is an adult, it was easy to see that he was still very much still a boy.
The first exposure was when my husband and I were researching bars we should visit while in Tokyo. During my googling, I found a few mentions of this book but read a blurb about it and thought it sounded boring, so I let it slip my mind. In Tokyo, we visited an eponymous bar on the fifth floor of an anonymous looking office building. (Coincidentally, the master bartender who works at this bar shares the same first-letter, lastname combination as a former colleague at Goodreads.) At this bar I had one of the most expertly shaken drinks of my life. All subsequent drinks would be compared to the ones I consumed at the Tender Bar.
My second exposure was after I had read The Great Gatsby for the first time since highschool. The book that I only thought of as a requirement during my first reading revealed its subtleties and sad themes during my second reading. After finishing the book, I wanted more books like it and consulted some reading lists online for comparable books. The Tender Bar was mentioned and I added it to my to-read list. It wasn’t till a year later, when someone on a gaming forum mentioned the book, that I finally got around to reading it.
Although I categorized the book as a bildungsroman, it’s less of a coming of age as it is a coming to terms book. Moehringer crafts a Dickensian (I hope you like that word because it comes up more than a handful of times in the book) tale about the men at a bar. Like life, it’s not any one story or experience or even one person at the bar that changes the boy, but a culmination of events and disappointments that pushes him into being the type of man that makes his mother proud.
The Tender Bar is the type of novel I’d want to read by the fire with a comforting glass of scotch. It’s heartbreaking at times, but there’s a certain hopeful undercurrent to the writing. Even in the sections where Moehringer is an adult, it was easy to see that he was still very much still a boy.
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Cursing, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Panic attacks/disorders, Violence, Grief, Death of parent