Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom HanksMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
"I want my yet-to-be-conceived children to someday read the meditations of my heart. I will have personally stamped them into the fibers of page upon page, real stream-of-consciousness stuff that I will keep in a shoebox until my kids are old enough to both read and ponder the human condition!"
Oh wow! Some people truly have it all. Not only is Tom Hanks a great actor... Boy oh boy, he can also write!
This collection of short stories are all optimistic and hopeful in tone, even the sad ones...and I closed it with a light and peaceful feeling, the same feeling I would have had if I had spent the afternoon chatting with a dear friend. To be honest, I could hear the actor's voice in my head as I read the book. Kind of like an internal audio book. 😂
The stories are widely varied but they do share one thing: typewriters. Somewhere in the story will be a typewriter, either mentioned in passing or becoming the protagonist altogether.
As someone who was taught how to type on a typewriter before a computer keyboard (I wince at the memory of cut fingers when they fell through the tight cracks and had to be extricated slowly and painfully)... The fictional typewriters evoked a very pleasant nostalgia of simpler and happier times.
My favorite story was THE PAST IS IMPORTANT TO US, a love story about a man who keeps travelling back in time (to the 1939 New York World's Fair), risking life and limb just for the chance to see and speak to a certain girl. Now there's an idea... What if the one we were meant to be with lived several decades too early, or too late? Actually, I think several of these short stories would translate well into movies!
In a highly politicized and troubled world, this book is a welcome rainbow of different kinds of light.
It also comes with a set of four postcards! What a nice invitation to go back to oldfashioned, more intimate ways of communicating!
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