This is an intriguing book, awfully well written, which takes a rather novel approach to story telling. The book contains 3 novelettes, representing the same 3 characters in different guise and at different times in history - past, present, and future. I listened to the first 2 on an audiobook, read masterfully by Alan Cummings, and read the 3rd. In each setting, the characters must cope with challenges of their times and struggle with issues of trust, physical and/or mental handicap, and survival. Walt Whitman has a role, too, including lending the title from one of his poems. It's a fascinating book, actually worth rereading, for I doubt if I picked up all the interesting complexities of this ensemble of stories on first read.

Imaginative & tender and giving glimpses of real interesting themes concerning the core meaning of being human, or mainly man. What's real and what makes a life. How much machinery is there in a medium/standard man? Far from other works I've read by Cunningham, and not near his best.

3.5/5

This book was a disappointment to me. The similarities in names and the object of the bowl through the three stories didn't seem to make any difference.

A previous reader said that the use of Walt Whitman is gratuitous, and I agree.

Specimen Days consists of three stories, each one from the past, present and future, and within each of them a man, a woman and a boy. These stories are tied together by the poem "Leaves of Grass" by American poet Walt Whitman.

The first one, "In the Machine", is a ghost story that tells the tale of a young boy named Lucas, who is coming to terms with the death of his brother by taking a job working on the same machine that killed him, one that is haunted with his brother's spirit (3 stars). The second is a thriller, "The Children's Crusade", which portrays the life of Cat, a policewoman who tries to prevent violence from people with mental problems and who is more or less overwhelmed when all of a sudden children start committing suicide bombings (2 stars). The final story, "Like Beauty", is a futuristic science fiction set in New York 150 years in the future, and features Simon, a male cyborg; Catareen, a female alien lizard; and Luke, a homeless boy (1 star).

This was my first Michael Cunningham novel, so at first I didn't expect anything about it, or how his writing style would be. Now that I've finished it, all I can say is I am dazed. Yes, the three stories (or should I say novellas) are absorbing, it had a unique approach, very imaginative, and sometimes bizarre. But for me, overall it was too deep and too hard to follow. I liked the first story, the 'past' part, though it's not as scary and compelling as any other ghost tales. I kept hoping it would get better as I go into the 'present'. However, it went worse. The second story is a bit mediocre and the last one was absolutely a big letdown.

Although Specimen Days is uniquely constructed and showcases the author's talent for building three different worlds and developed characters, I felt that this was one big book of horror and sadness. Honestly, I didn't like it. The only reason I am giving it two stars instead of one is that it was well written.

I finished Specimen Days with a sense of great disappointment and money wasted (although it was actually a cheap buy for only 15 pesos, tee-hee).

The novel is really three stylistically different novellas united by a common setting (New York in the past, alternative present, and dystopian future), recurring (sort of) characters, similar themes, and the poetry (and, in at least one or maybe two stories, the person) of Walt Whitman. I liked the second story the best, perhaps because of its contemporaneity and the character exposition. There are gorgeous passages of writing in all three stories, but this novel never comes together for me like some other multi-narrative works it might be compared to (Cloud Atlas, To Paradise, and Cloud Cuckoo Land in particular come to mind).

Missed this when it first came out. I’m so glad a friend’s recommendation brought it to me. The three linked stories are thought provoking,insightful, and readable. I really did want to know what was going to happen. I found it to be a great example of being both deep and wide.

"Specimen Days" shares its title with a collection of notes and essays written by Walt Whitman, as close as he ever came to an autobiography. It was published near a time Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was re-issued, 'Leaves' being his masterwork poem which celebrated mankind and nature, and addressed the eternal cycle of life. During this time New York was becoming a major city, and symbolized for Whitman the growth of modern America. Whitman also did his own version of 'Lighting out for the territories' by traveling to the West in 1879.

Cunningham's 'Days' consists of three linked stories, taking place for the most part in NYC: first around 1900, then a few years after 9/11, and at last about 150 years in the future. In each case, there is a woman named Catherine (or some variation), and man named Simon, and an imperfect child called Luke. The thread connecting them all is the poetry of Whitman, "The first great American visionary poet. He didn't just celebrate himself. He celebrated everybody and everything." Many of the characters struggle in various ways to discover their souls, to witness 'the birth of stars'. Each story is in a different style and focuses on a different member of the core trio, but the life force present in Whitman's poetry is always paramount. I found this novel hypnotic and enthralling, and I now have an entirely new appreciation for Whitman.

I think reading this book in spurts was a disservice. All three "stories" within the novel are interconnected, but it is hard to evaluate the novel as a whole because the three sections seem almost more like individual novellas. All three stories have three main characters (who share names, but shift their roles as protagonists/antagonists and their characterizations: Simon, Catherine/Cat/Catareen, Lucas/Luke) and Walt Whitman's poetry (and occasionally the poet himself) features in all three stories.

Of the three, "In the Machine" resonated the most, but I suspect that was because it was the first and I had no concept of the book as a whole. Cunningham vividly evokes the New York sidewalks and factories of yesteryear, with meaningful experiences of the underserved and outcast woven into a pseudo-ghost story.

The middle section, "The Children's Crusade," shifts to a more recent present, with a gritty protagonist whose choices, however, are less convincing than those of "In the Machine". The final offering, "Like Beauty," is an indulgent shift into sci-fi dystopia land, which ends up being a good read with an edge, but left me wanting the backstory that might have been included if it had been an entire novel.

Some have criticized the work as being too similar to Cunningham's The Hours in its use of Virginia Woolf. I can't comment on that, but I will say that the use of Whitman didn't always pack the same level of punch across the three stories. I found the Whitman quotes most compelling and interesting in the "The Children's Crusade" where as they seemed more of an annoyance in the other two.

It probably deserves a more concentrated re-read from me, because I'm sure I missed interconnections and allegories. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading each section as a self-contained story, even if Cunningham's genre experimentation was not consistently convincing.

Well this was a tough one for me and I'm not really sure why. I've read books before that I didn't really love or like that much but read them anyway. I guess I really wanted to know how it would all end. It wasn't because it wasn't well written, because it was, or that it wasn't an interesting theme; take the same three characters and put them in three different century's and see what happens. For me it just took a very long time to finish and for a time I put it down and read two other books. I stopped reading during the last story, there are three in all, which was actually my favorite and only because it had a sci-fi theme and that was more interesting to me than the other two, the first I suppose taking place during the Industrial Revolution and the second during modern times.

I think by the time I got to the last story I was pretty much over these three characters seemingly doomed to repeat their sad and tragic lives while one spouts Whitman quotes. From the previous stories I knew that there would be no real arc and that the ending would leave me feeling somewhat lonely and sad, which I have to say is exactly what it did, and since none of the three stories had chapters themselves, each story, about a 100 pages or so each, seemed very long and endless, and left little for me to look forward to. Unfortunately I couldn't quite grasp what the author was trying to convey and when I finally picked it up again to read the last 20 pages or so, I felt a great burden lifted and that I could finally move on.

I put off reading this for a while, even though I'd liked The Hours, because the reviews kept dwelling on the science-fiction-y third part and as I'm not a big fan of sci-fi, I thought I wouldn't like it. But I was wrong! This was really beautiful -- the writing was incredible, dizzying at points, dense and lyrical and intense. The book is structured in three thematically linked sections, each set in NYC and inspired in different ways by Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The first section, In the Machine, is set in the industrial age and follows a young boy (damaged -- or blessed -- in some way as at various points he is compelled to speak in quotes from Leaves of Grass) who is haunted by the ghost of his brother, killed by the factory machine he now mans, and by his love for his brother's fiancee. The second section, The Children's Crusade, borrows from detective novels in this account of an African American policewoman after 9/11 who is trying to solve a series of suicide bombings by children that involve Whitman quotes. And the third, and perhaps the strangest, is set in postapocalyptic NYC, and includes an amusement park version of "Old New York" where you can pay to get mugged in the park, and includes giant lizard aliens looking for and not finding sanctuary on earth. All three sections worked both as stand-alone novellas and as linked sections of the book, and it was really interesting to think about how they resonated with and informed each other. Excellent.

What happened to Michael Cunningham after the marvelous THE HOURS? I expected to like SPECIMEN DAYS, knowing that he utilized Walt Whitman in it. Alas, the only thing that I liked about it were the appearances of Whitman in part one and all the quotations from the glorious Whitman throughout all three parts. But those are Whitman, not Cunningham. Cunningham tries to tell three stories, from 19th-century NYC, from early 21st-century NYC, and from about 150 years into a post-apocalyptic future. And he tries to interweave the three. The effects (apart from darling, peerless Walt) are torturous, strained, and in part three, totally bizarre.