Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks’ Icing on the Cake.  

What a pleasant surprise to find that Tom Hanks isn’t just a great actor, he’s a good writer, too!  His prose is sharp, intelligent, polished and his stories run the gamut from funny to thought-provoking—with one head-scratcher thrown in the mix.  

I can almost hear Tom’s voice in each story, many of them seeming to correlate to his movies or life as an actor. One story is about an actor’s exhausting press tour, one about WWII with tones of Saving Private Ryan. Another leads us through Central Park and the streets of New York City which makes me think a little differently of one of my favorite movies, You’ve Got Mail. The common thread through each of the stories is the appearance of a typewriter.  

I don’t want to say that Tom should give up his day job, because I love him too much as an actor. But I sure could see him turning the story of the laugh-out-loud, exhaustingly controlling Anna into a full-blown novel (minus the Apollo 13-like space exploration). 

Write, Tom, Write!

A Few Other Celebrities Who Wrote Fiction:

·       Ethan Hawke: His four novels have cushy 3+ ratings on GoodReads: The Hottest State (1996), Ash Wednesday (2002), Rules for a Knight (2015), and Indeh: A Story About the Apache Wars (2016). 

·       Sean Penn’s Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018), doesn’t fare quite so well with a 2-ish rating on GoodReads.

·       Steve Martin:  Shop Girl (2000); The Pleasure of My Company (2003); An Object of Beauty (2010); and Late for School (2010)—all received good ratings. 

·       Anthony Bourdain: Besides his bestselling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain also wrote a fiction book called Bone in the Throat—a tale of murder and the mob. I’ve had it in my reading stack for years. Maybe it’s time to dust it off and check it out!

·       Kareem Abdul-Jabar: Yes, the famous basketball player together with screenwriter Anna Waterhouse write a mystery series about Sherlock Holmes older brother, Mycroft Holmes in a novel by the same name. First published in 2015 it got high ratings and with more books that followed.

·       Former President Bill Clinton and James Patterson put their minds together to write a best-selling thriller, The President Is Missing. Published in 2018, over 6,200 people gave it a thumbs-up.

·       Willie Nelson:  In 2008 singer Willie Nelson wrote a well-received western called A Tale Out of Luck. 

A Few Other Celebrities Who Wrote Children’s Books:

·      Barak Obama: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters

·      Whoopi Goldberg: The Sugar Plum Ballerina Series

·      Jada Pinkett Smith: Girls Hold Up This World

·      Jamie Lee Curtis: Has over a dozen titles including Today I Feel Silly, I’m Gonna Like Me, and It’s Hard to be Five

·      Jullianne Moore: Has eight books including seven Freckleface Strawberry books and My Mom Is a Foreigner, but Not to Me.

·      Jimmy Fallon: Some titles:  Everything Is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada

·      Madonna: Mr. Peabody’s Apples, Yakov and the Seven Thieves, The English Roses and more.

Happy Reading,

Annette