Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Nov 21, 2011

Jeanette rated it:

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 peop More...

49 comments like (116 people liked it)

Aug 17, 2011

K.D. rated it:

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-e More...

53 comments like (96 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2011

Greg rated it:

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 hat More...

100 comments like (109 people liked it)

Oct 27, 2011

Lee rated it:

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 ca More...

15 comments like (39 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2011

karen rated it:

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 More...

61 comments like (101 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2011

Joel rated it:

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 More...

53 comments like (83 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2011

Patrick rated it:

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 More...

16 comments like (123 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

Last week, I created three Power Point presentations. I edited one for my boss. I reviewed two from people on my team. I viewed probably a dozen (I lose track easily) in meetings, both in-person and web conference ones. It was a slow week.

This really does have something to do with the book, I promise. A lot of the initial buzz was about the innovation of her chapter in Power Point.

The last thing that is going to make a book appeal to me is adding Power Point to it. It's a More...

57 comments like (43 people liked it)

Aug 22, 2011

mp rated it:

Time is a goon? Not necessarily, I think.

( First of all, I think I may be too un-American to really get this book. The dreams, hopes, expectations, definition of a happy and content life for most Indians are entirely different from all of Egan's characters. These stories won't fit in an Indian context. This may be a reason why this book didn't speak to me the same way as it did to many other readers. )

I can't help feeling that at least some of Egan's characters were respo More...

28 comments like (21 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2011

Krok Zero rated it:

Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a great More...

18 comments like (51 people liked it)

Sep 11, 2011

Aldrin rated it:

Originally posted here.

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 dis More...

6 comments like (21 people liked it)

Jul 03, 2011

Monique rated it:

Six degrees of separation winning the Pulitzer, with twisted characters in various states of senescence, forlorn, gloom, and devastation all at the same time, spanning several decades as time frame. That, in a nutshell, is my assessment of "A Visit From The Goon Squad".

This is no cerebral review of the novel; I do not want to over-analyze any underlying messages or meanings beneath each and every chapter which featured a different character. Instead, these are simple observa More...

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Sep 02, 2011

Stephen M rated it:

I don't think I've ever been this torn on a book. I mean three stars? four? five? I give away so many five stars anyway.... Ah, goodreads star-rating system, you can never fully capture my experience with a book.
So, what did I think of this book? Absolutely beautiful at times. Was it consistent? No. Was it sad? Yes. Was it rewarding? Yes. Did the post-modern gimmick work in this book? I'm not sure.

And that is where most of my grippes come with this one. Because I couldn't help More...

10 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jul 03, 2011

Kinga rated it:

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 like it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. I either 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 ha More...

5 comments like (24 people liked it)

Jan 14, 2011

Kemper rated it:

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 Bernie 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 More...

16 comments like (37 people liked it)

Jun 16, 2011

Lori rated it:

Quite moving. It does jump around, both chronological and different characters, so a bit hard to keep track of who to really concentrate on. But that could also be the point? Anyway, it all came together for me at the end. Made me ponder about the goon itself, Time. So many possibilities, directions, and most of all, stages of life. Even at my age! It ain't over...

1 comment like (11 people liked it)

Oct 27, 2011

Laurel rated it:

While I enjoy writing from time to time, I'm not an author. I wasn't an English major. I've never taken a creative writing course, nor read any books on how to write. Perhaps that's why I often struggle when I give a poor rating to a book that has received high critical acclaim. I mean, what do I know?

But I rate books not so much on their literary merit, but on how much I enjoyed the book as a reader. I rate according to how engaged I was; how much I enjoyed the story, the charact More...

7 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2011

Sarah rated it:

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 tur More...

15 comments like (47 people liked it)

Aug 26, 2011

rachel rated it:

First thought: this is a book that shouldn't work, but does. Why does it work so well?

...OK, I think I'm stealing that observation from another Goodreads review that I read and must have internalized way back when I was working at the bookstore, and I apologize for that if it's your opinion I'm aping. I read a ton of reviews of this right after the store first got it, occasionally stopping in Fiction while shelving to admire the texture of the jacket, wondering, what's the big deal More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 08, 2011

Cate rated it:

EXCELLENT!

This is the first Pulitzer Prize winning book that I actually liked. Very well-written and the story is just so fascinating.

I didn't get the ending much, though. *shrugs*

Anyway, this gave me the feel of "Paris, Je t'aime" or "New York, I Love You". A different story - or at least, a different PART of their story - in every chapter. Also, I admire how well thought out the whole thing is. Everyone is connected to everyone.

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Sep 10, 2011

David rated it:

Aaaah! i can't review this right now. It might end up with two stars, it might end up with four. Need to give it some distance.

OK. here is the review. warning - it's one of those subjective/personal ones.

########################################################################

At 54 years of age, I don’t have a particularly coherent narrative version of my own life. Some of the more obvious events stand out in relief, but there are discontinuities, t More...

18 comments like (12 people liked it)

Mar 28, 2011

Ruth rated it:

What I thought of this book depended on where I was in it. When it started out I thought, "Oh no, another drink, drugs, and gritty sex book. Yawn."

Then when I realized it was going to hop about with multiple time frames and multiple POVs, I became more interested. Trouble was, though, that Egan often didn't give enough clues for me to realize who the hell was talking now. But still, I liked it for the most part.

Then the ending left me puzzled. What was all More...

4 comments like (10 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2011

Very rated it:

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 More...

5 comments like (15 people liked it)

Oct 23, 2011

Denae rated it:

If you've ever watched Archer and heard Lana say "Nope," you can understand when I say that my reaction upon finishing A Visit from the Goon Squad was pretty much that. It's not a bad book, in a lot of ways it's probably a good book. There was just one giant problem for me--I didn't enjoy it. Not in the way of a book that is uncomfortable for its honesty or its tragedy or the humanity it depicts. In fact, all of those elements are present, although too many slip by frustratingly neglec More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2011

oriana is currently reading it

Huh. I would not have expected to care about Jennifer Egan, for whom I've had an awfully low opinion (based, of course, on nothing) for about ever. But I just keep on hearing better & better things about her. Is it possible that (gasp!) I might have misjudged?

***

I have been searching for a proof of this pretty much once a week for the last several months (I refuse to read hardcovers), because I somehow went from "Jennifer Egan? Ew" to "OMG I MUST HAVE THIS More...

29 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 04, 2011

Lormac rated it:

If you are expecting this book to be a novel, forget it. Think of this book as a collection of short stories which happen to have some of the same characters in them at different points in their lives. This sounds confusing, but it is the best I can do. For example, Sasha, the main character in the first chapter is a ancillary character in the second chapter which takes place earlier in her life, and later in the book there is a chapter about college life in NYC in the 80s narrated by a friend More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2011

Rachel rated it:

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 o More...

15 comments like (29 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

Tee rated it:

This will be the only review on goodreads that doesn't mention the book's powerpoint chapter. OH fuck! Well now that the damage is done, I thought the powerpoint chapter was shit. I didn't care much for the book either. I seem to have that kind of reaction when a book is super hyped though - I may have liked it a fraction more if I had discovered it on my own and it hadn't been raved about. Which is probably the streak of hipster in me. I hate myself and I want to die.

I don't know, I More...

5 comments like (13 people liked it)

Apr 26, 2011

JSou rated it:

Sorry Greggers, I have to read this now. It sounds like it would even be better than getting to meet Mary Lou Retton.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

I love to people-watch. Even as a little girl, I remember seeing people in stores, walking down the street, or even in passing cars and be fascinated with the thought that they had actual lives they were living, just like me. I would imagine what kind of house they lived i More...

30 comments like (30 people liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

I think that this book does deserve the praise that it's getting. However, it didn't *completely* work for me throughout and I found it a little confusing at parts due to the amount of characters there was. Some sections I loved. I absolutely adored the first chapter and the slideshow chapter - they were fantastic, very intriguing. Sasha is one of the most interesting and strong characters that I have read about and I would love to read more about her. This book is undoubtedly well written. Each More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)