There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours – days, if I have to.
I finished reading A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Thank goodness I did because it meant that this book could be the best book I read in 2012. Last year was not a good year for me and novels. It was looking quite hopeless in terms of having a favourite book for a long while there. Egan’s book is filled with wonderful, wonderful lines (especially ones that sound exactly like Twitter) and I thoroughly enjoyed the character studies. I love this book and Egan is my latest favourite author find, I think, but I have one teeny tiny complaint and that is that like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom it is trying to be a zeitgeist novel and that’s a big ambition for a reader to take on. (I personally prefer when Franzen went intimate, like with The Corrections or even when he wrote something much cleverer than I think he knew he was writing, like with The Twenty-Seventh City). Anyway, A Visit From the Goon Squad was very satisfying.. have you read it and if so, what did you think?
P.S. Notice how I have been mostly too lazy even for my lazy blogging idea these holidays?
Just in time, I was looking for something to read!
Yes, I’ve read it. I loved it. It took me places I had no idea I was going to. The language was mesmerizing. I think Egan and Franzen’s desire/ambition to write a zeitgeist novel is cultural, just in their DNA. You’re right, it is a mammoth ask, and I resisted it, but I found, especially with this book, it totally worked.
I started it and really couldn’t get into it. It’s unusual for me to put a book down, but I did with this one, despite multiple recommendations from people whose taste I trust. I did love “Invisible Circus,” though, so I might try again.
Read it, didn’t love it. Loved things about it, some chapters and characters and the writing but it didn’t gel somehow, as a whole. When I think about it now (I read it in 2011) I can recall only vignettes.
By far my favorite book of 2011 — I read it that summer. And, lucky me, Jennifer Egan has twice been a guest in the craft class of the Writers Studio (where I’m both a student and teacher), and in the second class she told us all about the PowerPoint presentation story, which wasn’t even in the book when she sold it. I cry when I read that story. Charts and graphs! And I cry.