Hillary
Initially, I was a little disappointed by this. Good Squad is one of my all-time favorites and Egan's preceding short story collection was pretty solid. The beginning of Circus in particular reads like a first novel, but by the end I came around. The story is cohesive and contained and Egan is still a great writer, I just hold her to a higher personal standard, so my scale for her is a little more critical.
I had high hopes for this book. It was my best friend in high school's favorite and I had only heard positive things. The plot was pretty disjointed (having read other Hesse, I shouldn't have been surprised by this), but it was still pretty engaging. I think my main issue was I wanted to learn more about plotting from this book and realized very early on that is not where its strengths lie. Still a good read.
A friend of mine recommended this book to me a few years ago. She writes screenplays - I have no interest in writing screenplays. I am now taking a creative writing class and after being workshopped a couple weeks ago, realized I am terrible at establishing a plot and action. I ordered a copy of this after my friend told me, again, that I needed to read it, and am so glad I did. It's a great read, has completely changed how I watch movies and will hopefully make me better at inventing plot lines.
I purchased my copy of Biswas over ten years ago, after reading A Bend in the River for class and finding this on the Modern Library top 100 list. I found this to be a solid story but I never completely fell into the plot or characters, which made it easy to put down. The writing is solid, but the plot felt a bit like wandering and I didn't feel sympathetic toward any of the characters.
DFW is always a delight to read. He has an incredible vocabulary and I always walk away from his novels/essays/short stories in awe of how smart he is. Some of the essays in this book are starting to feel VERY dated - particularly the one about US television consumption. The thesis of which seemed to be: people watch an average of six hours of television per day to feel like voyeurs even though the things they are watching are typically scripted (published in 1990, I believe). With the advent of the internet and reality television, he's absolutely on-theme with general horror that can translate to present-day, but he gets far enough in the weeds that it can feel like a bit much for a topic which is no longer 100% applicable. I didn't like this as much as “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” but it could also be that I tend to prefer fiction. Overall, worth my while and incredibly humbling.
I wanted to like this book. It's short and stylistically unique. I very much enjoyed Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and, after hearing about Invisible Cities at a writers' conference a few years back, I was excited to finally get to it. Generally, I wasn't very impressed. The premise wasn't thaaat interesting to me and the writing was just okay.
I read this having heard great reviews and, on the day I started, anticipated sinking back into my couch and reading as much as possible in one sitting. I spent hours reading a handful of pages, taking a break, going back to the book, taking another break, and found myself making a very small dent by the end of the day.
150 pages in, I started falling into the plot but Hazzard's interesting sentence structure and descriptions kept me from quickly blasting through the book. I went on vacation for a month and left the book at home (library copy and I only wanted to bring books I could leave at various destinations). When I came back, I decided to start again and realized I had missed a third of what was going on in those first 150 pages.
The writing in this book is impeccable, the plot is great and this is easily now one of my absolute favorites. It's not an easy read, but this is definitely the type of book someone could re-read every year or two. Highly recommend.
When I first started reading Manhattan Beach, it took me back to my obsession with historical fiction when I was in middle school. But, throughout the story there were all these nagging details that kept me from being completely swept away into a different world. Instead of looking up at the end and wondering how Egan had crafted the story in the way she did (like I did when I finished Goon Squad), there were a few things that I found annoying: Egan uses the word “skein” four times throughout the book, I didn't care for the father's side story at all, and many descriptions felt clunky and over the top. Egan is still Egan, the prose is mostly very good, the story is pretty tight. I was just hoping for another five-star book.
The message behind this book - that money managers need to be mindful that investments can't be boiled down to a simple model or equation and that the fallacy that one can truly predict markets can be financially devastating - is definitely an important one. The book itself isn't much of a page-turner and took me a while to slog through. There's a chance someone better versed in finance and asset management could have an easier time with this, but I didn't find it very accessible. Still worth reading.
