This is a collection of genuinely heartwarming and pleasant reads.

If you're looking for stories that are fast-paced and exciting then this isn't for you. However I did find the majority of these really enjoyable.

I really liked:
- Three Exhausting Weeks
- Welcome to Mars
- A Month on Greene Street
- These are the Meditations of My Heart
- The Past is Important to Us (my fave)
- Steve Wong is Perfect (my second fave)

I didn't enjoy:
- The Hank Fiset stories - they didn't click with me
- Stay with Us - I lost interest is this pretty quickly

The others were okay.

Overall if you're a fan of Tom Hanks and are intruiged by this collection (my driving factor for reading it) then I do recommend it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Tom Hanks has delivered a nostalgic slice of Americana in this varied selection of short stories set in different eras, calling to mind the many disparate roles he has played onscreen – in films such as Forrest Gump, Apollo 13 , Saving Private Ryan, The Circle, etc. His straightforward style captures the plain-speaking, folksy dialogue of the ‘average Joe’ with a unique narrative to relate, and is imbued with Hanks’ own cinematic Everyman persona of old fashioned charm, which somehow avoids cloying sentimentality.

I am reading Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. This is a beautiful collection of short stories. I love short stories anyway and it’s always fantastic that people are still writing them. I’ve admired Tom Hanks as an actor, my dad is a fan and he introduced me to Mr. Hanks’ earlier films. When I heard in Twitter that he was publishing a book that wasn’t an autobiography I was intrigued. This volume of seventeen short stories are all unconnected but they do share things in common, they look at the humour in life and examine human kinds foibles, they are also linked by typewriters. As a fan of Tom Hanks I know that he likes and collects typewriters so it’s perhaps unsurprising to see that they play a part in these stories, sometimes as a minor detail but other times they are at the tales forefront.


These tales are beautiful, funny and sometimes melancholy but they are sublime joys to read. This is a book I’ll be bying in paperback to give as a gift as these stories, much like the films of Tom Hanks, are meant to be shared and enjoyed.

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