Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Sep 17, 2010

Cassy rated it:

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by E. L. Doctorow where he read from “Homer and Langley” and was interviewed onstage. He joked that the story of the Collyer brothers had become an American myth and that, as with all myths, one does not need to research, only interpret.

This book is essentially the rambling of an old, blind man, Homer as he reflects back on his life spent with his trusty brother, Langley in their family’s mansion in New York City. The book doesn’t have chapters More...

4 comments like (12 people liked it)

Feb 05, 2012

Bob rated it:

Doctorow's books, at least the two that I've read, proceed so patiently that you almost get bored. Perhaps in the same way that one might get "bored" watching an elephant or great blue heron: a thing of slow beauty.

So the story doesn't move like an episode of "24." It's OK. Doctorow is eating you all the while, a python novelist wrapping himself around you until one little squeeze will do you in. The last four short sentences of HOMER & LANGLEY, for instance ( More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 18, 2010

Barbara rated it:

It was a pleasant diversion reading this book. Doctorow has created a fictionalized tale of the Collyer brothers, who lived their lives in solitude in a once elaborate brownstone in NY. They were found dead in 1947 and much publicity evolved from the horrifying state of their much decayed living quarters.During their lives there they had managed to accumulate mountains of things, from a Model T in their dining room, to monstrous piles of newspapers and a multitude of incredible objects. Doctoro More...

9 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 28, 2009

Logan rated it:

There's something both alluring and repulsive about compulsive hoarders. Once, a few years ago, I had to help clean out the house of one of my in-laws’ neighbors who had just died. Entering the man’s house was like stepping into an Egyptian tomb; relics from countless eras stacked methodically to the ceiling, knick knacks piled haphazardly in corners and on top of the mantle. Moving around was limited by the small pathways the man had carved through his treasures, though they were not so much More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2012

Will rated it:

The bachelor Collyer brothers, of a respected family, were reclusive hoarders who lived in a Manhattan brownstone. After their bodies were found in 1947 more than a hundred tons of trash was removed from their house. Doctorow has taken the historical pair and put them to other uses. He looks at a wide swath of 20th century American history through the windows of their Fifth Avenue house, extending their lives beyond 1947, swapping some details between the brothers, and tossing in a cast of illu More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 04, 2011

Meg rated it:

This book presses in on me. In a bad way, like walls closing in. I finished it an hour ago, tossed it on the nightstand and turned out the light. And I couldn't sleep; all I could think was how scary and wrong and inevitable the ending was. I close my eyes and see the world through Langley's mad eyes and then my own eyes fly open again. It's keeping me up tonight, this tale of two brothers. I didn't like the story. I didn't like the constant invasion of space that heaped up throughout the book. More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 25, 2010

Jennifer rated it:

Well, this book is absolutely beautiful. I am still thinking about what I want to say about Homer & Langley, while simultaneously composing a letter to E.L. Doctorow in my head. I felt this novel deeply and I am marveling at Doctorow's ability with words and language which activate the senses while creating images that linger.

More of a review to come.

Okay, so after pondering for a couple of days, here is what I have come up with:

This novel was released in 2009 More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Jul 03, 2010

Fatty rated it:

Where is my brother, my keeper?

the writing of e.l. doctorow has always the depth of wells and bears the cadences of those depths. he brings into his prose the bitterness of philosophy and of poetry. in his latest novel, doctorow explores the bitterness of history in its most concentrated form imaginable.

homer and langley has the density of the lives of its two main characters, the infamous collyer brothers (after whom, so i understand, an entire syndrome is named, a synd More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 08, 2011

Debbie rated it:

i really enjoyed this story. it took a while to get used to the rambling narritive; but, i read a review that said it was told from the perspectve of Homer who was getting old and that his memories wandered.

Doctorow extended the Collyer brothers' ages to enable him to have the brothers live through more of the 20th century. i found it a little like Forrest Gump in that the Collyer brothers lived through a variety of historic events [WWI, Enfluenza outbreak, WWI, Korea, Vietnam, h More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 01, 2011

Abby rated it:

Homer and Langley Collyer were real people – notorious recluses who died in their shuttered, crumbling New York City brownstone in 1947, buried, literally, under 100 tons of newspapers and every conceivable kind of junk, including a Model T Ford. Their story has been told or borrowed from before, in novels, on the stage and on film. We should be grateful that E. L. Doctorow, an acclaimed novelist since the 1960's, has decided to tell it again. [return][return]Doctorow has often used historica More...

0 comments like

Aug 09, 2011

Isil added it

I received an advance copy of this book as a promotional program via LivingSocial. Being unfamiliar with the writer and the genre I didn't know what to expect, so I turned the first page.

This book is about "change".

As you read the history of two brothers through Homer's words everything changes: the world, the music, the wars fought...everything.

The change starts with Homer going blind, and continues throughout the novel. The gifted child becomes blind, the hero sent off to the war More...

0 comments like

Aug 02, 2011

Scot added it

I have oftentimes fingered copies of E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate or Ragtime and considered reading them, but for some reason or another passed them by. So in reading Homer and Langley as my first novel by the author, I feel as though I am reading him like Benjamin Button, from death to birth. On the surface, Homer and Langley is the based on real brothers story of two New York City eccentrics, one quirky and insane from WWI trauma and the other blind and thoughtful but led around by his bro More...

0 comments like

Jan 18, 2012

Jill rated it:

Got a copy of the Cornell University Press edition free from the public library in Ithaca. E.L. Doctorow's writing sucks you in. I could imagine being buried gradually in stacks of newspapers and junk. It certainly scared me enough to get me to make several donation trips to the Salvation Army!

From this point on this review is more of a story of how different portions of the story relate to my own life. Fair warning, it may not interest you at all.

I can't help mentioning my More...

0 comments like

Jan 07, 2012

Bembo rated it:

The real Collyer brothers lived as recluses and compulsive hoarders at 2078 5th Avenue until their deaths in 1947. E L Doctorow very loosely bases this fiction on the two men, moving their home south along 5th Avenue to face Central Park, adapting a few facts, changing much and adding a great deal of invention including extending their lives into the latter part of the twentieth century.

Homer and Langley are well educated, and Homer who narrates is an accomplished classical pianist, bu More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 27, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

This novel is purportedly about the Collyer brothers (famous for being hoarders) who lived on the Upper East Side in the first half of the 20th century. It is told in the voice of Homer--the blind brother. But really, that is the jumping off point. Doctorow uses them to investigate Homer's blindness, how he perceives the world, how the "collecting" (hoarding) starts. The brothers in the novel live through the moon walk and the assassinations of the 1960s, whereas in reality they we More...

0 comments like

Oct 25, 2011

Charles rated it:

Doctorow has taken a true story, that of a pair of eccentric recluses who lived in accumulating disorder, and fictionalized it effectively. He extends the lifespan of the real Collyer brothers, who died in 1947, into the 1970s, and tinkers with other details, such as the birth order of the brothers (Homer was in fact the elder) and the onset of Homer's blindness, which happened much later in his life. The story is told from Homer's point of view, evoking the other legendary blind Homer.

More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 02, 2011

Nancy rated it:

Despite the emotion of the last few lines, I found this book disappointing. Homer chronicles his life unwinding over nearly a century. A reclusive life that becomes more and more suffocating even as his brother packs their home with newspapers, collected trash, and broken oddities. Blindness limited Homer's options, but his lack of initiative, reliance on his brother, and eventual deafness left me sadder and sadder. In the end, I was just depressed.

Langley, gassed during WW I, clear More...

0 comments like

Sep 29, 2011

Vasha7 rated it:

I've read enough memoirs to be able to say that "Homer Collyer", the narrator of this novel, definitely doesn't write like someone who was born in 1881 (when the real Homer Collyer was). To be sure, E. L. Doctorow has distorted the timeline of this story in an unrealistic manner, extending the brothers' lives into the 1970s instead of the 1940s. That doesn't excuse the frequent blandness of the writing, though. It's a novel about history, and you'd expect there to be historical specifi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 29, 2011

Judy rated it:

I've always been a big fan of E.L Doctorow ever since I read "Ragtime" the summer of 1976. And of course, I have this thing about hoarding. So here is a novelization of the kings of hoarding, the Collyer brothers. Their once posh brownstone mansion in Harlem was crammed with junk, basement to attic, so much so that it killed them. Langley died when he set off one of the many booby traps he'd installed to protect his treasures. His brother Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death on More...

0 comments like

Sep 24, 2011

Shirari rated it:

Why would two rich kids turn into miserly hoarders, refusing to pay their utility bills and instead using camping stoves and water from Central Park? The answer seems to be that they were American, and privileged, and living in a dangerously self-reinforcing vacuum. Blind Homer doesn't critique his brother's trauma-induced insanity and as a result finds himself taken along for the ride, becoming rather unhinged himself. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for them.

There are a number o More...

0 comments like

Sep 10, 2011

Blake rated it:

I was very intrigued to discover that successful author E.L. Doctorow had written a novel about the infamous Collyer brothers. If you’re not familiar with their story, they were New York City socialites who became obsessive hoarders and recluses, eventually dying in the squalid remains of their once fabulous uptown townhouse.

The author plays fast and loose with the details of the Collyer’s lives – chiefly by letting them survive through almost the entire Twentieth Century - as oppose More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 06, 2011

Todd rated it:

Like Voltaire's great novel Candide, here too we find the encapsulated travails of a lifetime, a consolidated journey of two brothers, one going blind as a teenager and becoming introspective, the other devoutly existential in his manic quest to document the essence of mankind's repetitious plight. A madness that begins when this older brother goes off to fight in the Great War and is damaged by mustard gas and returns home an embittered recluse. Unlike the story of Candide, where the protagon More...

0 comments like

Aug 18, 2011

Mindy rated it:

Just finished this book two days ago and I would not recommend to those that need to have a climax and a plot in the story. This is a novel based on the real Collyer brothers who lived in New York in the early to mid 1900s and became known to be (at least Langley according to the book) to be extreme collectors of pretty much anything. It is written from Homer's perspective, who is the blind brother and while he's really the older brother, in the novel he is changed to be the younger brother that More...

0 comments like

Jul 31, 2011

Meredith rated it:

2.5/5: A unique, fictional story based on the two hermits who lived in NYC and became famous for their hording and subsequent deaths. Well-written and an easy read (and unique), but couldn't relate to the characters AT all - seemed a touch unbelievable at times (sometimes their behavior didn't jive with their character, to me). I think my expectation going into it was (after wikipedia-ing the true story) 'interesting-I want to learn more about these men and the mind of a horder'. But, that's n More...

0 comments like

Jul 29, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

This book was well written, and it's a good thing or I never would have finished it! It's the story of two eccentric brothers living in a mansion in NYC through the 20th century. The elder, Langley, becomes increasingly unstable and hoards all kinds of things, filling the home with heaps of trash and turning them into a New York freak attraction. The younger brother, Homer, becomes blind as a teenager and is dependent on Langley (though he is extremely independent as a person--he just falls i More...

0 comments like

Jul 27, 2011

Emily added it

I received an advanced copy of Homer & Langley from Living Social to read and review, and since I enjoyed Ragtime, I was excited to read this book too. I started to read the book, but could only read a few pages per sitting because of my schedule, so I had problems staying involved in the story. I eventually had to stop reading and start over again when my schedule eased up and I could read for more than a few minutes at a time. The second time around, I enjoyed the story a bit more, but I nev More...

0 comments like

Jul 18, 2011

Chris rated it:

Not what I was expecting at all. I've enjoyed everything that I have read by E.L. Doctorow and was intrigued by this book when I saw it in a bookstore on one of my travels. I later read reviews equating it to a literary version of Forrest Gump, which I hated by the way, and decided that I should let that stop me from reading this based on past experiences with the author.

There is no plot, there is no action, there are characters and there are events. I could sum up the entire book More...

0 comments like

May 28, 2011

Lisa rated it:

I had never read anything by Doctorow while searching a list of recommended books that included Homer & Langley. I listened to the audio version while working in the yard and was easily drawn into the tale of two brothers, one of whom loses his sight at a young age. The narrator does such an excellent job that I felt as though Homer were indeed telling the story himself. And what a crazy story it is, spanning about 70 years in a fairly short novel.

Langley goes off to fight in the Gr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 27, 2011

CMolieri rated it:

This was the first, but certainly not the last E.L. Doctorow book I have read, and I was taken immediately with the mix of the present, the eccentric, and the nostalgia for the past, for what seemed to have been better times for the once honored high society Langley's, but which to the neighbor's despair, has turned away from conservatism in ever decade, held illegal dances or 'teas', collected (hoarded) and lifetime of memories and items from several lifetimes, and on throughout the passing of More...

0 comments like

Mar 20, 2011

Ruth rated it:

This is a nice quick read based on the true story of 2 brothers who live in NYC through a lot of the 20th century. One is blind and an amazing pianist, the other a little shell-shocked from being a soldier, and they live through the all the wars & big cultural & technological changes, see a few domestic employees come and go, host dance parties with phonograph records, let bands of young hippies share their home, make friends with and get kidnapped by gangsters, and go from being rich to poor a More...

0 comments like