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14th out of 22 books
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7 voters
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Wonder Boys
In his first novel since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work--the story of the friendship between the eponymous "wonder boys"--Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Tripp, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.
Paperback, 368 pages
Published
April 29th 2008
by Random House Trade Paperbacks
(first published March 14th 1995)
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For a straight man, Chabon is very gay friendly. I know there's been stuff written, possibly by Chabon himself, about early gay liaisons he undertook, but now the man's married with three, four kids. And yet Chabon's smart enough to write this:
"[James] looked over at Crabtree with a smile that was crooked and half grateful. He didn't seem particularly distressed or bewildered, I thought, on awakening to his first morning as a lover of men. While he worked his way up the buttons ...more
"[James] looked over at Crabtree with a smile that was crooked and half grateful. He didn't seem particularly distressed or bewildered, I thought, on awakening to his first morning as a lover of men. While he worked his way up the buttons ...more
Second only to Catcher in the Rye in my all-time favorite list of books. If you are a writer, if you've taken a creative writing class, if you've verged on totally and completely fucking up your life with sweet redemption held just at your fingertips, but which you chose to thumb your nose at for just a teensy bit longer....god, read this book. If you love prose, good prose, jubillant, wild, ecstatic indulgent prose, read Chabon. I just want to roll around in his words and bathe in it like a ...more
Wonder Boys
Over Christmas I met a woman named Storm. When she found out I was a writer she became excited and inquisitive. Her therapist, she said, told her she should "reinvent" herself so she signed up for a five-day writer's workshop. She asked me all sorts of questions and I answered truthfully. I told her writing was a great way to find out who you are, and also, a great way to express yourself.
Now I come home and find this book "Wonder Boys" on my book...more
Over Christmas I met a woman named Storm. When she found out I was a writer she became excited and inquisitive. Her therapist, she said, told her she should "reinvent" herself so she signed up for a five-day writer's workshop. She asked me all sorts of questions and I answered truthfully. I told her writing was a great way to find out who you are, and also, a great way to express yourself.
Now I come home and find this book "Wonder Boys" on my book...more
He tried far too hard to be eclectic, over the top, and kitschy. The entire novel came off as insincere. The only likable characters, in my opinion, were Hannah and Sara, because they were the only ones with any kind of grip on the real world. Grady was a slacker and an asshole, Crabtree was a disturbing, self-absorbed douchebag, and James was just pathetic in every way. Actually, I take that back. Emily's parents, the Warshaws, are entirely likable. How can you not love old Jewish parents...more
chabon's adaptation of the famous tenacious d song.
I read this book after I saw the movie, so I am judging it a bit backwards. I read with a vision in my head of the way the characters were portrayed in the film, and tried to envision them the way Michael Chabon wrote them. For example, in the book, Grady Tripp is a large, imposing man, and his friend and editor, Terry Crabtree, is the same age as he is, and they have been friends since college. Of course, in the film, the slender Michael Douglas plays Grady, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Crabtre...more
What does a boa constrictor, a tuba, a transvestite, Marilyn Monroe's jacket, a man called Crabtree, a lot of pot, a car with buttprints and a blind dog have in common? They all crosses Grady Tripp's path in the course of two days where Tripp's wife finds out that he has a mistress and that she is pregnant...
So this is no ordinary weekend and Tripp finds himself in one awkward situation after the others. Towards the end, you as the reader finds yourself thinking "figures!" every ...more
So this is no ordinary weekend and Tripp finds himself in one awkward situation after the others. Towards the end, you as the reader finds yourself thinking "figures!" every ...more
I really wanted to dislike Wonder Boys. I even tried to dislike it. I mean, here it was a book about writers (barf) by Michael Chabon (barf) who kind of gives me the willies (I think it’s the hair). Despite all that, Wonder Boys still crawled into my heart.
So we’ve got pot-smoking, wife-cheating, never-ending-novel writing Grady Tripp and the weekend from hell. His editor comes into town for writerpalooza or something and brings along a drag queen. Grady’s wife has also chosen that day...more
So we’ve got pot-smoking, wife-cheating, never-ending-novel writing Grady Tripp and the weekend from hell. His editor comes into town for writerpalooza or something and brings along a drag queen. Grady’s wife has also chosen that day...more
Ce roman se déroule dans le milieu universitaire, département littérature. Il aurait pu être écrit par un David Lodge sous cocaïne ou un Bret Easton Ellis sous Valium. Du coup, il est un peu en demi teinte et ne transmet ni le charme et la drôlerie d'un Changement de décor ni le côté complètement déjanté d'un Moins que zéro. L'histoire est racontée par le personnage principal d'un seul jet sans chapitrage ni pause dans la narration. Cette technique, comme le tournage caméra à l'épaule au cinéma,...more
Last year in my A to Z Reading Challenge I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written by Hunter S. Thomson . I loathed that book, which was a gratuitous orgy of abuse of drugs, alcohol, and women . There was no redeeming value. Michael Chabon, in writing Wonder Boys,
has told the tale of another author also caught in a personal struggle with the "midnight disease."
Grady Tripp is a professor of creative writing at an unnamed university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (th...more
has told the tale of another author also caught in a personal struggle with the "midnight disease."
Grady Tripp is a professor of creative writing at an unnamed university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (th...more
It's funny, but every time someone tells Grady his novel's a bust, I'm not sure if they mean his Wonder Boys, or the one in my hands.
Because oi, what a bust.
First off, Chabon's a great writer. He globs the exposition thick, but his simile and characterization are so spot-on that I let it pass. As for story....
The big beefs:
1. Great first one-hundred pages. Then we're ripped out of Philadelphia and all central plot lines (the finishing of the novel, th...more
Because oi, what a bust.
First off, Chabon's a great writer. He globs the exposition thick, but his simile and characterization are so spot-on that I let it pass. As for story....
The big beefs:
1. Great first one-hundred pages. Then we're ripped out of Philadelphia and all central plot lines (the finishing of the novel, th...more
I learned that being a pot smoking, washed-up, hippie-like Professor in Pittsburgh isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I also learned that it's one of the things I aspire to be most, although maybe not in Pittsburgh. But somewhere.
Read it, you won't be disappointed. Chabon does an incredible job telling the story of the above described Grady Tripp...especially for an author who's been so consisently good in the past. Upon further reading, it's apparently about an old Profess...more
I also learned that it's one of the things I aspire to be most, although maybe not in Pittsburgh. But somewhere.
Read it, you won't be disappointed. Chabon does an incredible job telling the story of the above described Grady Tripp...especially for an author who's been so consisently good in the past. Upon further reading, it's apparently about an old Profess...more
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Jennifer
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
A die-hard Michael Chabon fan
Shelves:
read-in-2012
(spoilers) I really wanted to like this book. I had read a different Chabon book and enjoyed it, and I've heard great things about Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Bob Dylan even won an Oscar for a song inspired by this/written for the soundtrack of this movie. Yet, as I was reading it, I found the prose got very tiresome, perhaps much like Grady's hulking novel he couldn't finish. I didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them. I didn't care that Grady's wife left him. I did...more
"Sara would read anything you handed her--Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet--at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle...more
When I decided to read Wonder boys by Michael Chabon, I did not expect much. However, this is just like how I go in to all books. I do not expect much until I actually read it and I take it from there. So when I started reading Wonder Boys, I realized that I had made a great decision on the book I had chosen. This book was one of those that was extremely hard to put down. I stayed up late at nights reading it, I used my breaks at work to read a chapter or two, and I carried it around with m...more
It's a book about writing and writers. A washed out stoned professor is trying to keep the strands of his life together as they unwind over a fateful weekend. I like when Tripp feels that escape impulse, like when he tells Leer they're leaving town and they must get supplies. The only downside of the book is the dinner with his relatives, which I thought dragged a bit, even though the characters were rounded enough individually.
There is a certain ambitious impatience throughout the book, w...more
There is a certain ambitious impatience throughout the book, w...more
I'm totally addicted to American novels about the problems of the asshole middleclass/inteligentsia. To me Updike's 'Rabbit' (s) showcase the talents of a world-weary grown-up, Franzen's 'Freedom' and 'Corrections' a visciously critical culture genius, DeLilo's 'White Noise' a highpriest of the intersection of post modern philosophy, popculture. 'Wonder Boys' helps Chabon fit right into this crew. His characters, of course, are the heart and soul of the contemporary American literature scene. T...more
I recognize Chabon's strength of his characters in the two books I have read. He tends to tie a Jewish bond between most of them, so this book may not be for you Jesse James types. The main character, Grady, is a curious fellow failing his third marriage. You get to see the well rounded lifestyle of a writer finding an angle to get a novel completed. During the process, the story goes on many curves as he survives his lifestyle around many other writer's of success. The ride of this story a...more
Grady Tripp has problems. He is a college english professor, struggling to finish his 4th book that he has been working on for years and has written 6 different endings to. His book is over 1,000 pages. His wife has left him, his mistress is pregnant, his editor and long time friend Crabtree is a walking pharmacy who has picked up a transvestite on the way to the annual writer's Wordfest hosted by the college. A student of Tripp's has stolen the coat Marilyn Monroe wore when she married Joe ...more
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon was a little bit of a surprise for me, mostly because the other Chabon I’ve picked up in the past (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) wasn’t really all that great, which apparently is an incredibly rare opinion to hold in the blogging community, hehe. But, unlike Kavalier and Clay, something about Chabon’s mostly terse, occasionally achingly flowering prose seems to lend itself incredibly well to the novel.
The story follows Grady Tripp, an agin...more
The story follows Grady Tripp, an agin...more
It’s funny when I think about how much it took for me to read this book. I was basically prodded and yelled at and asked repeatedly to read this book for the better part of a year before I did. A friend of mine was like, “You’re a writer! It’s about writers! You have to read it!” Eventually, I broke down and did. And man, were they right!
I read the book right on the heels of Richard Russo’s Straight Man (which, interestingly enough, the two books make wonderful book ends to each ...more
I read the book right on the heels of Richard Russo’s Straight Man (which, interestingly enough, the two books make wonderful book ends to each ...more
Reading this book was a real treat it was fresh, the plot exciting and driving you deeper and deeper into the lives of the characters within and the quality of writing that any writer can see is truly inspiring.
The novel doesn’t miss a thing. Chabon does an amazing job making inspiring statements without interrupting the expertly crafted sentences in his prose.
"Wonder Boys" is a treat on both levels, the intellectual and the emotional. The story in itself havi...more
The novel doesn’t miss a thing. Chabon does an amazing job making inspiring statements without interrupting the expertly crafted sentences in his prose.
"Wonder Boys" is a treat on both levels, the intellectual and the emotional. The story in itself havi...more
One of the few books about writers that doesn't make me want to throw it across the room. The writers in this group are all kinds, from Grady, our narrator, who is constantly stoned and is unable to sort the wheat from the chaff in his over 2,000 page long novel (oh how many massive novels needed such an assessment!) to his student James who is a habitual liar and thief who writes with verve and intensity if not greatness (and is amusingly the type of novel that will sell) to the guest lecturer ...more
This is the sort of book that makes me want to be a writer, and reminds me why I am not. I could never be this good.
Chabon really is a beautiful writer, and the prose alone in this book is worth the read. The story is also engaging and thoughtful and sad, cute, funny, wry and wise all at the same time. Its surprising that a writer as young as Chabon was at this time could have this believable a perspective on someone so much older and so far gone down the path of fuck-up.
...more
Chabon really is a beautiful writer, and the prose alone in this book is worth the read. The story is also engaging and thoughtful and sad, cute, funny, wry and wise all at the same time. Its surprising that a writer as young as Chabon was at this time could have this believable a perspective on someone so much older and so far gone down the path of fuck-up.
...more
Michael Chabon is a great writer - and I don't mean "great" as in he's really good. Yes, he is really good, but what I mean by great here is that he will be remembered as one of the best, most accomplished authors of his generation. Seriously.
Chabon's second novel "Wonder Boys" under that vague classification of "academic setting droll humor" type good (see: "Lucky" Jim by Kingsley Amis or "Changing Places" by David Lodge), but like...more
Chabon's second novel "Wonder Boys" under that vague classification of "academic setting droll humor" type good (see: "Lucky" Jim by Kingsley Amis or "Changing Places" by David Lodge), but like...more
Although I enjoyed this book immensely, and laughed out loud frequently while reading it, I am glad Michael Chabon decided to write a different kind of book after this one. Wonder Boys is at once the title of the novel by Michael Chabon and at the same time it is the title of the manuscript – the presumptive fourth novel – of Chabon’s novel’s protagonist, Grady Tripp. “Wonder boys” also seems to be a sarcastic reference to Tripp and his friend Crabtree, who are as messed up as Tripp’s manuscript...more
I'm working my way thru Michael Chabon, and since I'd seen and liked the movie of Wonder Boys many years ago, I made this my next read. It's typical Chabon, which means that his wordiness is sometimes beautiful and sometimes, well, just wordy.
Wonder Boys refers to the title of the main character's novel and most the wandering characters that populate his life. Grady Tripp is an aging pothead, a one-time literary wunderkind who has become lost in the maze of his seven-years-in-the-making n...more
Wonder Boys refers to the title of the main character's novel and most the wandering characters that populate his life. Grady Tripp is an aging pothead, a one-time literary wunderkind who has become lost in the maze of his seven-years-in-the-making n...more
It's hard to summarize why this book is as good as it is. Mostly, I think, it stems from the narrator's tone which mixes a gloom that things will never be what they were along with playfulness in accepting that the past is gone.
The crux of this novel is the sliding manner of the relationships between the narrator - a faded author named Grady Little, his publisher Terry Crabtree, and their student/protegée James Leer - whose suicidal exterior and studied eccentricity masks an acute t...more
The crux of this novel is the sliding manner of the relationships between the narrator - a faded author named Grady Little, his publisher Terry Crabtree, and their student/protegée James Leer - whose suicidal exterior and studied eccentricity masks an acute t...more
Quirky- The story is that of three days in the life of the narrator, Grady Tripp, a dope-smoking English professor at a small Pittsburgh-area college, who has had a tough time finishing the novel he's been working on for the last seven years. Grady is 40 and trying to hold on to his youth and its killing him. On the collage “Bookfest” weekend (the English department celebration of past, present and future authors) Grady struggles with several issues- his editor is coming to see him, probably for...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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| one of my favorite books and movies!!!! | 1 | 41 | Jun 23, 2007 01:59pm |
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Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
More about Michael Chabon...
He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
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“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
—
74 people liked it
“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:
too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,
too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,
too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,
too many divorces to grant,
heirs to disinherit,
trysts to arrange,
letters to misdirect into evil hands,
innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,
women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,
men to drive to adultery and theft,
fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. ”
—
70 people liked it
More quotes…
too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,
too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,
too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,
too many divorces to grant,
heirs to disinherit,
trysts to arrange,
letters to misdirect into evil hands,
innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,
women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,
men to drive to adultery and theft,
fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. ”
Oct 11, 2007 02:28pm
Oct 06, 2010 11:15am