A strange and lovely collection. The title essay is a surprise and a delight. Most of us have had the experience of viewing an old photograph and finding the face startlingly similar to someone we know, but an internet image search reveals that Mooallem's twin-from-another-century is eerier than your average doppelgänger.

Many essay collections attempt to hew tightly to one theme, at the expense of the book as a whole. I love that each essay in this collection stands on its own, and every one is as unexpected as the last.

I really enjoyed these essays. Mooallem is a great writer who brings real humanity and insight to his subjects. I will be seeking out other writings by him.

Throughout the essays in this book, Jon Mooallem dives into the pathos and bathos of everyday life.

The first book of essays I ever read was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is admittedly a very high bar to beat. Since then I've read a handful of books of essays, and generally enjoyed them all.

What really works for this book is the sense of gentle tragedy that Mooallem brings to the fore in many of the essays, tempered with an edge of wistfulness. For the most part he tackled issues I'd never heard of, and I liked the very human side he brought out in his subjects. Life can sometimes be very inexplicable and weird, and the author does a good job of showing this.

However, I didn't enjoy the essays that leaned into more mainstream subjects as much as I did the others, though I am unsure why. I think it may be because the author did not tease out the reasons why we should care as much as he did with the more obscure subjects.

My favorite essays in this book were "Why These Instead of Others?," which is about an accident that befell Mooallem's friend in a remote region, and "A Cloud Society, about an amateur society of cloud watchers who identified a new cloud feature.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC of this title.

I really enjoyed Jon Mooallem's previous book, This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together - it brought a humanity and a varied perspective to a real event. This is a fantastic collection of Mooallem's earlier pieces, along with a few new ones, and it brings the same great eye to the many subjects he covers.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Random House Publishing Group Random House for an advanced copy of this collection of essays.

The problem with living in the future is that the now and the past don't resonate as well as what we want the future to be. Living small lives, lives that people wouldn't watch a reality show about, or lives that take to long to describe on TikTok, but maybe would make a good podcast are considered hokey, so last year. Influencers are the thing, not people without followers, or an app. People especially post- pandemic seem lost, throwing themselves into anything to get them to feel something, though empathy seems to be fading fast. That is why Jon Mooallem's essay collection is so important and so necessary for our lost time. Serious Face essays remind us that people, odd, loners, criminal, innocent dreamer and schemers are the real influencers. These are the people that remind us to live.

Jon Mooallem has a gift for finding people and sharing their tales, whether writing about people who have experienced great tragedies in their life, physical or emotional. An essay about a man who lost three limbs, how the shadow of prison stays with a person, even well after he is let free. An essay on Charles Kaufman, screenwriter of classic movies, and a burgeoning almost codependence between subject and writer at the early stages of the pandemic. There are criminals, and people who see the world through a different prism, but it is the personal essays that really are touching and rewarding. A reader wants to know more almost from the first paragraph, and Jon Mooallem more than delivers.

The writing is very good, with a nice flow and an ease with the subject that makes the essay seem much more than a profile. Mooallem has a way of hooking the reader without the reader knowing it till suddenly the end of the essay is near, the eyes are a little misty and the reader feels that more of a journey has taken place, not just a simple reading. Most of the essays are excellent, none are bad or ever boring.

Recommended for the post-pandemic survivor who feels they have lost a step with humanity. A simple pass on Twitter, Facebook, or media of any kind makes one wonder why anyone would bother with humans. However essays like these remind us that people are people, flawed, failing and flailing. Some deserve praise, a lot deserve our scorn, but to not feel anything is giving up. A very good collection of essays to remind us of this. I can't wait to read more.

I am terribly behind as this is my first Jon Mooallem but what an absolute gift to be able to experience this. Heartbreaking and profound while all at once being something that brought me insurmountable joy while I was reading.

I couldn't pick a favourite topic or essay as the whole collection is so seamlessly blended together that each feeds off the next.

I cannot wait to have a physical copy in my hands!