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Audiobook13 hours
Everything Matters!: A Novel
Written by Ron Currie
Narrated by Mark Deakins, Lincoln Hoppe, Hillary Huber and Abby Craden
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, Junior's loved ones emerge with parallel stories-his anxious mother; his brother, a cocaine addict turned pro-baseball phenomenon; his exalted father, whose own mortality summons Junior's best and worst instincts; and Amy, the love of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that could save humanity. While our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from a doomed planet, Junior's final triumph confounds all expectation, building to an astonishing and deeply moving resolution. Ron Currie, Jr., gets to the heart of character, and the voices who narrate this uniquely American tour de force leave an indelible, exhilarating impression.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Author
Ron Currie
Ron Currie Junior lives in the USA.
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Reviews for Everything Matters!
Rating: 3.904651126511628 out of 5 stars
4/5
215 ratings21 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This had all of the potential to be a 5-star book, but at the halfway mark it sort of fell apart and became a little outlandish. I'm never a fan of the abrupt use of "all expenses paid by a government agency" just to propel a storyline forward (and solving lung cancer in a month? okay...). BUT the quality of writing and first half of the book was excellent enough to keep the rating high.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beautiful book. This existential tale is oddly constructed but superbly creative. The "voice's" part in this book seems outrageous, but down to the last lines of the book, it works and works really damn well.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book was great!!! It makes you appreciate ALL of life's moments - even the unhappy or painful ones. A poignant, moving, and expertly constructed story of humanity, and the fight for survival, love, and happiness. It explores a man's long road to acceptance of the inability to rescue oneself or loved ones from experiencing life's ups and downs.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you're looking to read a book that makes you think why do we do the things we do then this is the book for you. Junior was born knowing when the end of the world would occur. This information gives him a bleak outlook on life though at times he is spurred to do the right thing, mostly for the wrong reasons, or by the voices in his head. When the end of the world arrives Junior is given a choice that can change his life forever. Both I and the voices in his head were surprised by the decision he makes. A bitter-sweet story of love, life & loss.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Often tedious, with irritatingly shallow takes on addiction, love, genius and second chances, the book is (surprisingly) worth working through for the finish. Exceedingly soft, touching, walking a line that I couldn't have imagined not falling off into deep maudlin schmaltz, Currie pulls it off wonderfully.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Adult fiction. I was afraid that this book would turn out to be too preachy, or too philosophical, but it's neither. It is, however, profound and v. engrossing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An odd, surprisingly sweet book that I was really glad that I read. I picked it off the TOB's long list and am sorry it didn't make the short list. I'm really liking this spate of non-cynical books.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ron Currie Jr. (God is Dead) weaves a wonderful tale of human connections and the timeless existential dilemma, in a style that blends unapologetic realism with raw insight and a dash of the fantastic.
A boy is born with specific knowledge of humanity's impending demise via comet, and spends his life struggling in various ways to fight fate and to deal with the apparent uselessness of everything. It's told from multiple perspectives and has an interesting narrative structure. Most importantly it is an honest book, exploring simultaneously the despair of knowing our end (which, let's face it, we all do anyhow) and the amazing fact that even in the face of that despair, even against its inevitability, still "everything matters" - beauty, sacrifice, family, love.
Definitely one of the betters books to have come out in recent years. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What a bizarre novel. I think had I read it vs. listening to the audiobook, I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While I did end up liking this book, I really felt the middle section kind of wandered all over the place. Without wholly giving anything away, that 'wandering' made more sense as things moved along, but I still didn't think the end saved the book entirely.
Definitely a book where the enjoyment wasn't so much in the journey as it was where you were at the end of that journey. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Based on the premise, “what would you do if you knew the world was going to end”, I was looking for something a little more profound. With the title Everything Matters, it would seem like the author would make some attempt to convey that feeling. It only comes in during the very last 20% of the book and through a twist. In the meantime, you have a very choppy narrative told by different characters of which, only the omniscient voice is reliable. Furthermore, some of these characters just seem to fade away in one-dimensional imagery, others just seem to get annoying. I kept running the title through my mind as I thought, “What is the point to this section?” I also felt that the last 20% of the book could have been just a short story or novella that could really convey the same feeling I was looking for in the book. While in the womb, Junior is told by a mysterious voice that the world would end 36 years after his birth. As the story progresses, each narrator from Junior, to his girlfriend, his mother and father, and to his brother Rodney, construct the plot. Junior becomes obsessed with the end of the world and ends up alienating his girlfriend in the process. The other characters aren’t really affected by this and carry on about their lives. You learn about their struggles in life and what happens to them, but it doesn’t seem to get to any sort of point. It was very difficult to make a connection with the characters with the narration so choppy. Then 80% into the story, there is a huge twist and demonstrates the real point of the story. I did make a connection to the point at the end of the story. That it is important to live in the present and enjoy the time you have while you have it. It’s a good message to live in the present and realize that everything that is happening at this very moment matters, no matter what. The last part’s theme makes up a bit for the tedious story, but it’s too long to get through to make it as satisfying as it could be. "Everything ends and everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but in because of it. Everything is all you got; your wife’s lips, your daughters eyes, your brothers heart, your fathers bones, and your grief. So you were wise to welcome everything, the good and the bad alike and cling to it all, gather it in, seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever, ever turn away, not once, from here until the end because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable and it is all preferable to one dreadful alternative.""This is the key, you have learned to relinquish control to relinquish the desire for control even in this late drama, to try and control is to go mad and so you do your best to let it all go…"(less)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A modern Candide. Voltaire used his episodic tale of misery and woe to demonstrate that happiness can never really be found, not until the very end, when the main characters all live in a shack and tend a garden outside. Living life is the only true happiness that mankind can have, and no amount of philosophical reasoning, or wealth, or fame, can ever get him that status. Except that's not the book I'm here to review. I love apocalyptic books. I can remember reading When Worlds Collide by Wylie and Balmer at Band Camp, laying on the couch in the building next to our cabin and loving every minute of the book (well, the comfy couch and air conditioning helped.) There's nothing like the end of the world, and Currie's book is all about that. Except, the main character, Junior Thibodeax, has known all his life that the world will end on a certain day in the future, and it's the alien voices' experiment to see whether the knowledge of impending doom has any impact on his life. Whether, in a world where nothing matters, if anything matters at all. Starting with a blow by blow of his deliverance in the hospital, to his destruction by asteroid (maybe), the book details his life with a sardonic irony and humor that is quite entertaining. With Junior's knowledge and intelligence he sets out to save the human race, trying to fight the prediction that everyone will die in a gigantic fireball. However, whether he succeeds or not, we aren't really sure, because the aliens come to him right before the end date and explain to him something he already knew... that the Earth he lived on is only one of millions of possibilities in a multiverse separated only by a sliver of a second. That basically there is a ring around the sun of different realities, and in each of those Earths, Junior makes a different decision, from not squashing a bug to not telling his big secret to his girlfriend, which effects the outcome of the world tremendously. It's the whole butterfly in the Sahara theory. A bit of a spoiler, but, the ending chapters are considerably different than the rest, and nothing much happens, but in the end, Junior's realization that Everything Matters proves the aliens wrong in their original assumption, and proves Voltaire right.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A nominee for one of the books I'd have everyone in the world readcontest. The premise is: does anything you do matter if you are bornembedded with the absolute certainty that the world will come to end onA specific date some 30 years after your birth? The journey toward "yes"is amazing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"A great novel, probably unlike anything else you've read. Imagine learning, on the day you're born, when and how the world will end (during your lifetime). What would YOU do with that information?"I really enjoyed this book. Good for fans of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. Good commentary on the human condition and on the state of our world and our culture. Nicely fleshed out characters. And they all felt consistent, even after the alternate shift in the last 30 pages. I've got a weakness for shifting points of view, for kaleidoscopic narrative progression, and Currie did it well. I liked the rather experimental sections at the beginning and the end (the womb and the alternate ending) -- they provided nice bookends to the main body. I was refreshingly immersed in this book, read it in less than a week.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The story of a man who was born with voices in his head that tell him things -- true things -- including the exact date and time of the upcoming end of the world. It's a strange and fascinating novel, well-written, and features some philosophical questions and answers that are thought-provoking without being too heavy-handed. It's not entirely without flaws, though. For one thing... Well, there's a useful rule of thumb in speculative fiction that says that readers will give you one wildly unbelievable premise for free, assuming you do something interesting with it, but once they've granted you that indulgence it's unwise to ask for too much more. And, maybe two thirds of the way through, this one threw in a couple of additional implausibilities that caused my previously easy suspension of disbelief to snap pretty badly. That wasn't entirely fatal to my enjoyment, and it may be something that's unlikely to bother anybody but me, anyway. But that, along with perhaps some other much harder-to-put-a-finger-on issues, ultimately left me feeling that this book, which seems as if it could have been utterly terrific, is instead only good.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Somehow, I didn't check my list of books before listening to this....again! And I loved it even more a second time, not even realizing that I had listened to it previously. I'm always working on something while I'm listening but it doesn't say much for me doing two things at the same time. At any rate, it was a great story and everything DOES matter, spelled out beautifully.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: Junior Thibodeau has known, since he was in the womb, exactly how and when the world was going to end: by direct impact with a comet on June 15, 2010, at 3:44 p.m. - roughly thirty-six years after Junior's birth. Junior has voices in his head that tell him as much, along with other prophetic tidbits of information, much more than any child can or should have to handle. But, despite knowing that he'll never see his thirty-seventh birthday, Junior goes through life, coping as best he can with his cocaine-addict-turned-pro-ballplayer brother, his overprotective and alcoholic mother, his distant and ill father, and Amy, his childhood sweetheart and the love of his life. Junior is unique, but for all of his skills and knowledge, can he possibly prevent the inevitable? And if he can't, what difference do any of his other choices make, anyways?Review: This book started out with two things very much in its favor: a fantastic premise, and an author who is very skilled at crafting dryly funny, slightly bizarre, immediately recognizable characters, situations, and scenes. And yet, in the final analysis, I felt like Everything Matters! came out as less than the sum of its parts. I'm not saying it was bad, by any means. I definitely enjoyed reading it. But I wanted to love it, I should have loved it, and I just didn't. I finished the book not sure whether I should be weeping or overcome with a serious case of the warmfuzzies, and while I can appreciate that the author may have left things somewhat ambiguous on purpose, it was still strange to come out of a book not only not sure what I should be feeling, but not even sure what I was feeling, other than a bit wrung-out. I think part of my problem was that the novel never went in the direction I was expecting it to. In fact, it never went in the direction it was setting itself up to go. Like I said, the premise of the novel is fantastic: If you know for certain that the world is going to end, what's the point of anything? Does anything you do matter, and why? And how? The book's conclusion is given away in the exclamatory title, but I felt like we never really got to satisfactorily see Junior (or anyone else) wrestle with the issue, and never had a convincing bulk of evidence presented for either the "Everything" or "Nothing" side of the argument. Instead, it felt like the novel's focus on its postmodern, slightly wacky, multiple POV slice-of-life vignettes kept it from ever fully engaging with the issues it wanted so badly to raise. It's well-written, and interesting enough in its own right, it's just not the story I thought I would be getting.Despite all that, however, I still think this one is worth the read. Everything Matters! is one of those special cases - like Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child - where the premise is so interesting that I'm willing to overlook the flaws in the handling of the story in favor of the thought-provoking questions that it raises. 3.5 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Worth reading for the concept, and probably worth reading for the story as well - just don't expect them to always to match up.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While still in the womb, the voice in his head tells Junior that the world will end on June 15, 2010. Kind of a depressing way to grow up, no? So the question Junior wants to answer is does everything matter? Or does nothing matter? At various times of his life, he answers this question differently, so we follow along with him on his roller coaster of high achievement and drug/alcohol abuse. If you knew the world was going to end when you are 36 years old, how would you choose to live? The format takes getting used to--Junior's story is told from many different points of view, including the disembodied voice, his mother, his girlfriend, his brother. There is lots of philosophy of life here, and a good dose of Vonnegut-esque humor. Slightly meandering at time--some of the plot lines could have been shorter, but overall very satisfying.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unexpectedly, this was a book I couldn't put down. Despite the fact that it's clear from the first few pages that the world is doomed, this story of a boy who has been given this information since before birth, and who grows up with the knowledge of exactly how long he will live and how life will end for everyone here, is mesmerizing and beautifully written. Told from various viewpoints, including that of the beings who have given Junior this information and continue to talk to him throughout his life, the simple humanity of Junior's life and of those around him pulls the reader in and forces the reader's emotional involvement. Magical.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"Everything Matters!" tackles the question: how would a person live their lives with the knowledge, given to them before birth, that in 36 years all life on Earth will cease to exist? Given the ultimate outcome of life, whether by comet, car crash or natural death, do any of our actions really matter?Told from the perspective of John Jr., or Junior, the knowing protagonist, The Voice that bestowed the knowledge and then accompanies him through life, and various family members, the novel follows Junior's choices from birth to the time the cataclysmic event draws near.There is a point in the novel where Junior's character becomes a bit unlikeable. There are also some plot twists that could feel a bit implausible, but Currie's strength as a writer is getting the reader to trust him enough to suspend disbelief. His witty and captivating writing style successfully smoothes over the rough parts. His voice is fresh, sometimes sardonic, and often deeply philosophical. In a novel with an obviously depressing theme, Currie manages to inject hope. It's a unique novel that remains engaging even through the minor bumps in the storyline, and entertains while provoking some interesting philosophical questions.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you knew from birth the world would be destroyed when you are thirty-something, would every thing matter? Or would nothing matter? I loved this book -- I found it thoughtful and original. I happened across an advance copy, and can't wait until it's published and I can push it.