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ladyofthelake68's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
I think the main reason for my low rating is the format. As an audiobook it was difficult to tell when one story ended and another one began. Many of these essays are more like pondering in that they didn't have a traditional story structure and functioned more like a series of interesting thoughts. I did enjoy a lot of the stories but the lack of resolution continuously frustrated me.
emzapk's review against another edition
4.0
Phillips is an excellent storyteller. This book made me wish I was a journalist and could experience such a wide variety of unique things, and also have the skill to share about them so well!
cindypepper's review against another edition
5.0
An exquisite set of longform essays that expands upon the farthest reaches of this world and larger-than-life characters (a Mongolian sumo wrestler in Japan, the Yukon in the wake of the Iditarod, an Oklahoma City gothic, an animator forever in the clutches of his unfinished Gogol adaptation) and makes them instantly familiar. The essays that stuck with me the most are the character studies ("The Little Gray Wolf Will Come" and "But Not Like Your Typical Love Story" spring to mind), mostly because Brian Phillips does a great job at humanizing his subjects from mere characters to the real human beings that they are.
chillcox15's review against another edition
5.0
Curious about the world and wry in the writing, Impossible Owls is exactly what I want from an essay collection. Each essay is about something vastly different, and yet it's all linked together through Phillips' regal style of observation.
dreamgalaxies's review against another edition
4.0
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Wonderful prose. This is the kind of book of essays I want to read more often. I think Phillips has it, and I came away with some really interesting information and bigger thoughts about some of the cultural analysis he does. Unfortunately, I think he also is constrained by his history as a journalist. I get tiny glimpses of personal context, but we only truly see the writer in the final essay. I'd like to see more of the narrator here, beyond "I was in a shitty place while writing this essay for unspecified reason."
Wonderful prose. This is the kind of book of essays I want to read more often. I think Phillips has it, and I came away with some really interesting information and bigger thoughts about some of the cultural analysis he does. Unfortunately, I think he also is constrained by his history as a journalist. I get tiny glimpses of personal context, but we only truly see the writer in the final essay. I'd like to see more of the narrator here, beyond "I was in a shitty place while writing this essay for unspecified reason."
jamesthesnake's review
4.0
all but one of the sections is great , but three of them have already been published. Just a wonderful book that everybody should read, there really isn't an overall theme, but just six interesting parts of life.