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Everything is Illuminated
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Everything is Illuminated / Jonathan Safran Foer. 1.5 stars
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Gosh I found this one hard to rate. I loved parts and found other parts a real drag. I can’t remember what I ultimately landed on.
I mistakenly read the 1.5 stars as 5 stars, and I clicked on this review hoping to finally find out what people see in this author. I was forced to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for a college class, but the professor, who was reading along with us, had us stop about a third of the way through because it was so pretentious. This one seemed even more dismal.
I actually loved Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so I was surprised to find that I didn’t love this.
What a relief to see I am not the only person who does not get how highly touted this book is! I read it for the Popsugar reading challenge book by an author under the age of 30 and found the premise to be interesting from the blurb on the book. There were parts where the writing grabbed me but overall it was a mess of a book for me.
Amy N. wrote: "I mistakenly read the 1.5 stars as 5 stars, and I clicked on this review hoping to finally find out what people see in this author. I was forced to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for a co..."LOL!
Susie wrote: "I actually loved Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so I was surprised to find that I didn’t love this."I loved Extremely Loud.... also, but it was a difficult book for me to read.



I don’t even have a summary. There was a Ukrainian translator with horrible English. There was an author visiting Ukraine, who met up with the translator and they, along with the translator’s grandfather were looking for a village that didn’t seem to exist, so it seemed. And, throughout the book, some chapters backed up in time to Jewish people starting in the 1700s, but I never quite figured out what was going on there, as the time jumped forward in other chapters; at some point it was during WWII. Apparently, these were ancestors of the author (the author character, not the actual author)?
This was weird. It is going to be my lowest rated book of the year (I think this is only the 2nd book, ever, I’ve rated less than 2 stars). I couldn’t figure out how the translator could even be a translator with his awful English; the author had the same name as the actual author of the book, Jonathan Safran Foer, so that simply confused me for ages. There were other odd parts written like a play or written like Bible verses. Weird. Not good. At all. It’s too bad – I think the only other book I’ve read by this author (nonfiction) made it on my favourites list for that year.