In which I take a very brief detour.

Instead of my more typical reads, my most recent dip into things word-ish is actually award-winning litrachure.

Here is what I said on goodreads about it.

A Visit from the Goon Squadby Jennifer Egan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All I knew was that this was the rock-and-roll-American-Culture-post-Baby-Boomer book that won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and that intrigued me, but not enough to actually make a priority of reading it.

And then… I did.

I love gimmicks when they work. This collection of tangentially related short stories has a gimmick that works brilliantly–but don’t go looking for it, because it won’t work or even make sense out of context. It also made it difficult to read on my Kindle, but if it hadn’t be so easily available on my Kindle, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to read it, so there ya go.

Finally, when trying to decide how many stars to give it I decided on four because–I recognize why it won the award and I have no quibbles about that at all. But in the final analysis I won’t be buying this book in hardcover just to “possess” it, so from my personal pov, it’s a really good book and I’m glad I read it, but it’s not one I cherish.

Let me know what you think.

View all my reviews

One more thought that I may add to the goodreads review–it’s hard for me to imagine this working as an audiobook because each short story is about a different character with very distinctive styles and voices.  And I do think it would read best as a real book because of the one chapter I mentioned.  I could read it on the Kindle but I’m thinking a lot of people might not be able to.  Maybe people with other ereaders would have different reactions.

 

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