For One More Day

I'll be honest; I had no desire to read this book. I have no idea why I own this book. I imagine it was something my mother bought that ended up on my bookshelf at some point during my time away at college. The same applies to the only other Mitch Albom book I've read, The Five People You Meet In Heaven. I mean, Mitch Albom sucks. The guy is only fifty-six years old and he's basically replaced Andy Rooney as American media's lovable curmudgeon. Deadspin has had a field day with Albom's red hot takes through the years. (Link here.) The man is corny and hackish with his prose, and he's also a known fraud. So, why did I read this book at all?

Truthfully, I just wanted to knock a short one out of the way in order to continue pursuing my goal of finishing 25 books in 2014. This one marks the twentieth, and I've got seven more weeks to bang out five more. If they all went as quickly as this one did, I'd be in great shape to have things squared away well before Thanksgiving. This was barely more than 200 pages long, but they were small pages with larger font than I'm used to finding in books meant for adults. And every third or fourth page was half blank thanks to an abundance of chapter breaks. I thought this would take me two or three hours to finish; it barely took me one.

The story's premise is simple, and frankly, appealing to a simple audience. "What if you could spend one more day with a deceased loved one?" Lowest common denominator stuff, right there. Albom targets the masses with his tearjerkers and makes it a point not to really explore his own themes with any depth or introspection. Plenty of better and more daring authors have tackled the concept of reconnecting with the dead, but Mitch Albom seems content to limit himself to a perfunctory glance at a vague afterlife without his protagonist experiencing any emotions beyond, several times over, "this can't be happening - you're dead!" Worst of all, the characters are so flat here that they're almost one-dimensional. The narrator is depressed. His dead mother was a saint. His father is an asshole. His sister exists.

I've blasted the author and criticized the book, but if I can stop being cynical for a second here and give the benefit of the doubt, I really can't say I disliked the book. It was brisk and ridiculously easy to digest, and it gave me just enough of a case of "the feels" at certain points for me to admit that Mitch Albom is pretty effective at what he sets out to do with his soccer mom-ready novellas. I'd never call the man a good author, but this really wasn't a bad book. Neither was The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Both set such a low bar that it would have been difficult for either to come up short. I mean, sincerely, I could have written either book, and the biggest challenge for me during the process would have been staying interested enough to stay on track and avoid falling into the temptation to do something remotely interesting. Is that a back-handed compliment? Of course it is, but it's a compliment all the same. For One More Day didn't try to do much at all, and it very much succeeded!

Anyway, I don't have five more Mitch Albom books - or any, for that matter - so we'll have to see what my path through five more books by year's end hits next.