{"id":2398,"date":"2003-03-04T15:08:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-04T22:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/?p=2398"},"modified":"2003-03-04T15:08:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-04T22:08:00","slug":"books-empire-falls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/2003\/03\/04\/books-empire-falls\/","title":{"rendered":"Books:  Empire Falls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I talked The Queen into seeing <a href='http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/SpiritedAway-1116064\/'>Spirited Away<\/a>, and she loved it even though she doesn&#8217;t much care for <i>anime<\/i>.  She returned the favor by convincing me to read <a href='http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0375726403'>Empire Falls<\/a>, even though it appeared to be exactly the kind of book I try and avoid.  Set in the tiny burg of Empire Falls, starring Mr. Nice Guy, and written by an author with a long string of &#8220;relationship novels&#8221; to his name, this looked, to me, to be little more than a novelization to some &#8220;Hallmark Feelgood Family TV Special&#8221;.  But it <i>did<\/i> win the Pulitzer Prize, and I reckoned that the entire Pulitzer Prize committee <i>and<\/i> my wife couldn&#8217;t both be wrong.   So I decided to give it a whirl.<\/p>\n<p>The first third, however, seemingly confirmed my fears.  As the story opens, we are introduced to Miles, a put-upon, heart-of-gold sad-sack who is in the midst of a divorce, father to a teenage girl, and indentured to the town matriarch.  He also runs Empire Falls&#8217; only diner, which means that he (and the reader) is in constant contact with the city&#8217;s zanier denizens, including The Silver Fox (owner of the local health club and fianc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I talked The Queen into seeing Spirited Away, and she loved it even though she doesn&#8217;t much care for anime. She returned the favor by convincing me to read Empire Falls, even though it appeared to be exactly the kind of book I try and avoid. Set in the tiny burg of Empire Falls, starring [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}