This novel snaked through my filters--put in place to keep me from wasting time reading books I'll likely abandon and pin with one-star reviews I really don't like to give--due to the following:1. Unanimously positive critical reviews2. Promise of electrifying writing or storytelling (see #1)3. Fantastic title4. Author, whose work I've never read, endorsed a petition in May 2016 in protest of the current president along with 450 other authorsThe positive vibe didn't last long. A Visit From the G...

Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one. Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and c...

A must-read for "creative writing" types interested in POV/style variation. Otherwise, for the second consecutive year, the Pulitzer committee awards nearly empty formalism (see "Tinkers"). Both "Tinkers" and this one are formally "unconventional" and concerned with time, yet otherwise seem to have very little to say, as they used to say.I liked the PR/General chapter. I liked a description of old tattoos on saggy flesh. I liked the big fish caught in the East River. I really liked the sudden ju...

The older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book as if it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. Either I have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded. Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling colle...

hell's bells. believe this hype.this book is the saddest, truest, wisest book i have ever read in a single day. which is not to belittle it - my tear-assing through it is because i did not want to stop reading it and resented any interruption that tried to get in my way. i am someone who plans things. i have timetables in my head - i have to, in order to get everything done. nothing important, just "at 8:00 i will untangle my necklaces while i watch my netflix. at 10:00, i will fold my laundry a...

The National Book Critics Circle Award. A Penn/Faulkner Award Finalist. The freaking Pulitzer. It has to be good, right? I thought so, to the point that it was the only book that i brought with me on the plane this weekend, but I was really disappointed. This book, a collection of quasi-connected short stories, covers a span of time between the 1970s and 2020s and follows a variety of people, most notably a former punk rocker turned music executive and a young troubled kleptomaniac turned an adu...

Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in a nu...

I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?*It is all three.I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way...

Christmas Eve, 2011. The foreboding sheen of a room filled with excited anticipation and beautiful glimmering presents piled up under the Christmas tree. This traditional family habit blending festive elation with infantile sibling jealousy and rivalry ever fuels surreptitious reflections on the guileful art of giving. Every year, I ingenuously and silently wish for a book. (Oh frustration! Do you recognize this experience? Having to live with an avid or obsessive reader, people might think they...

There are two paragraphs in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , that heavily hint on its fundamental theme but were not at all written by the author. One is the book’s epigraph, taken from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is...

Um, this is just BAAAAAAD. Bold-face, capital-letters BAD. Absolutely awful! What.....were.....they.....thinking????? Oh, I forgot, they weren't!When did the Pulitzer become the Puke-litzer? I'll never again trust that prize designation except with books from a long time ago. Don't be fooled by the first chapter, which is not too bad. Sort of an interesting start, about a kleptomaniac aging punk rock chick. After that, FORGET IT! Dumpster filler. A lot of people make a big mention of the PowerPo...

I attended a novel-writing workshop last week and one of the things that I took home with me was: write to express and not to impress. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong on this since I am just a paying reader, that Jennifer Egan wrote this novel A Visit from the Good Squad mainly to impress. Well, it won the nod of the Pulitzer jurors so the trick worked!Each of the 13 chapters is told in different points of view mostly by people who the two main protagonists, Bennie, the gold-eating re...

Normally I don't start reviewing books before I've finished them, but saying how much I hate this book at the halfway point is cathartic.I hate this book. I HATE IT SO MUCH. Is it well-written? Probably. Complex characters? Yeah, I'll give them that. That being said, even reading one chapter of this leaves me so freaking depressed that I want to put it in the sink and light it on fire. Also, the characters may be complex, but I don't care what happens to any of them. I really don't. There's this...

Taking home the Pulitzer, it's clear to me what type of novels are favored: the novels deemed fresh and classic simultaneously. Like "Olive Kitteridge" or "The Interpreter of Maladies", this is a novel made up of short stories, all of them vivid anecdotes of people surrounding the music industry (as in musicians, roadies, fans, relatives... etc.) in precise clear-cut slivers of everyday life. Jennifer Egan's prose is exciting, her method of bleeding one story onto the next, of building up these,...

Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:“Remember Bennie Salazar?”“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was...

This book felt so transparent to me. I could feel her writing and thinking and smirking and patting herself on the back. Normally, I have no problem with that. I love arrogant people when the arrogance is earned. But these stories didn’t ring true for me. They felt staged and cute and show-offy. “Oh, look what I can do. I can write a chapter in the second person for no reason and another one in PowerPoint and another one in cyber-gibberish. And I can connect a bunch of simplistic but oh-so-quirk...

This is the best book ever that has a whole chapter done in power point. I hate power point. I think it was invented by the devil and given to humanity to make us even dumber than we are now. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate power poi...

"...it may be that a crowd at a particular moment in history creates the object to justify its gathering... ...or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar."I loved it. It wasn't a light read, even though it's fairly short. It had a unique format that works equally well as both a collection of short stories and a novel. It's a pretty gutsy narrative that requires some men...

I have never read Jennifer Egan before. I had no expectations for this book except that it carried the caveat of Pulitzer Prize Winner. The book as it turns out is really a series of interlocking stories. A minor character in one chapter may be the main character in the next chapter. I thought Egan locked these stories together seamlessly making for an enjoyable quick read. I found myself reflecting on my own life, the trials and tribulations of these characters certainly struck a nerve with me

Dubliners for the Digital Age.Whereas Joyce used naturalistic prose to depict a specific time and place, Dublin, Ireland in the early twentieth century, author Jennifer Egan uses the same style and perspective to describe life in the late twentieth century, early twenty first century. Also like Joyce, Egan has structured her work into a series of loosely connected short stories, though Egan’s novel, or collection of short work, is more narratively connected than the earlier work. Likewise, Egan’...