Incredibly fast read

[Lindsey]

his writing style is interesting- He plays with fonts, composition and imagery. Very effective to have images of 9/11 horrors. Great book-

[Brandon Paul]

it was a fast read. i liked it a lot better than everything is illuminated (which i loved).
it was a lot more condensed but with the same amount of power.

[Neha]

i hear this is becoming a movie... does anyone know details about that? i loved the book. it was amazing how it could be so funny and so sad all at once. really powerful the way he plays with syntax.

[Betsy]

it is becoming a movie but its still in development so no casting yet or timeframe. eric roth is writing the screen play (he wrote the good shepard, munich, forrest gump). scott rudin is producing.

[Aly]

Hm, I thought it not nearly as good as Everything is Illuminated, because I didn't feel that he wrote with as much power about the bombing of Dresden as he did about the liquidation of Jewish communities by the Einsatzgruppen. And I loved the historic feel of Everything is Illuminated, which I thought was somewhat dampened in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I did enjoy Extremely Loud... but I thought it was without the same dreamy lyricism, or that it held it to a lesser degree. I didn't feel as moved.

[Aly]

Hm, I thought it not nearly as good as Everything is Illuminated, because I didn't feel that he wrote with as much power about the bombing of Dresden as he did about the liquidation of Jewish communities by the Einsatzgruppen. And I loved the historic feel of Everything is Illuminated, which I thought was somewhat dampened in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I did enjoy Extremely Loud... but I thought it was without the same dreamy lyricism, or that it held it to a lesser degree. I didn't feel as moved.

[Eric]

I read about half of this, skimming the rest. Foer, a clever writer with clever ideas, needs to learn how to generate narrative tension beyond picking international tragedies as backdrops. I was also irked by the too-precocious 9-yr old. Foer only occasionally established him as a real character for me. This book is really unfairly esteemed, in my opinion. Not very good.

[Allie]

I actually took a very long time to get through the book. It pulled me in so strongly emotionally that if I read it all at once, it would have consumed me. I related on a very deep level to Oskar. The way Foer characterized him was wonderful, in my opinion. From Oskar's point of view, he was an adult in a 9 year old's body and his internal monologue followed suit- something I was guilty of at the same age. Yet when his grandfather first meets him, he's hiding and crying. That's not how Oskar described himself. ;) Wonderful.

[N.]

I had to read this book just like Allie did--in small bites. It was too emotionally draining to do at once, and I also enjoyed flipping back and retracing the web of events as they happened. I love books about precocious children, especially since I am reaching the age where being precocious does not matter at all anymore, no matter how many levels of education one skips. Midway through the book, I actually started worrying that I might have fallen in love with Oskar more than I could possibly fall in love with my own future child, if that makes any sense. I only found Oskar obnoxious a few times, but otherwise, I found him endearing, and I often had to pause just to catch my breath after particularly hilarious, or even especially sad passages.

[Ena]

people who read books incredibly quickly don't know what a book is.