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gglazer's review against another edition
2.0
Five minutes in and I'm already overwhelmed by his arrogant self-indulgent navel-gaze-y Franzen-ness. He gave a commencement speech on his own failed first marriage? A COMMENCEMENT speech about the DEATH of HIS OWN LOVE? Oh Franzen.
Updated to add: This guy just drives me insane. So egotistical, so utterly irritating, yet such a good writer who's able to get me to care about anything he chooses to discuss. Birds, China, whatever. Quite a feat, really. I repeat: Oh Franzen.
Updated to add: This guy just drives me insane. So egotistical, so utterly irritating, yet such a good writer who's able to get me to care about anything he chooses to discuss. Birds, China, whatever. Quite a feat, really. I repeat: Oh Franzen.
robk's review against another edition
4.0
Farther Away is a collection of essays and book reviews dealing with a variety of topics and written between the late 90s and 2011. I read this shortly after reading How to be Alone and while reading Freedom, and I must say that there is a great contrast in Franzen's thinking from the nineties to now. While I still think he's cynical to a degree, he seems far happier, or at least more content, today. Franzen's themes in this collection of essays seemed to be more centered on love and empathy than the callousness and curmudgeonliness of his earlier essays, though he still expresses many of the same concerns. Even though I haven't finished the latter, this paradigm shift seems apparent in his novels The Corrections and Freedom. I think Franzen's viewpoints are intriguing and his social commentary is valuable. I also think that his commentary on the purpose of fiction and fiction writing would be excellent material for any aspiring writers.
sdbecque's review against another edition
4.0
Just so we're clear, I liked [b:The Corrections|3805|The Corrections|Jonathan Franzen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327935887s/3805.jpg|941200] and struggled to get through [b:Freedom|7905092|Freedom|Jonathan Franzen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316729686s/7905092.jpg|9585796] making it through the later by sheer force of will, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I also like to use Franzen as my post-boy for someone who writes fiction about families and relationships, but because he's a man it's considered "serious - cover of Time Magazine - literature" instead of "chick-lit."
That being said, I really like his non-fiction. There's something way more accessible about it and I just like it more. There's a mix of longer form pieces in here and some literary criticism. Easily worth reading alone for his memorial speech at David Foster Wallace's funeral which left me with a big lump in my throat.
guiltyfeat's review against another edition
4.0
This was a coronavirus lockdown special. I’d bought this book a couple of years ago and I’ve read Franzen’s other non-fiction works, but I don’t know when I would have cracked this if it were not for a situational lack of new choices coming in. Still I’m glad I read it. He’s so good here and there’s loads of stuff here about his ornithological bent. There’s also a ton of stuff about his decades-long friendship (rivalry?) with David Foster Wallace and his feelings following his friend’s suicide. It’s all exquisitely expressed and the little book reviews in between are equally impressive. Fab.
zachkuhn's review against another edition
4.0
I'd read almost all of these in their original forms. Hate him, go ahead; I love the man.
bibliocyclist's review against another edition
4.0
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you're going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you'll hear coming out of your mouth things things that you yourself don't like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you're having an actual life.
You can't deconstruct and undress at the same time.
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but we will die before long.
"They sat down there, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water."
The impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever, the inevitable breaking of some bleak and remorse-filled dawn, is the flaw in nihilism through which humane narrative can slip and reassert itself. The end of the binge is the beginning of the story.
The only adequate summary of the text is the text itself.
You can't deconstruct and undress at the same time.
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but we will die before long.
"They sat down there, remembering how less desperate and much happier, after all, they had used to feel when they sat here the year before, and yet how desperate they had been then too. A few gulls hovered near some refuse floating on the oil-stained water."
The impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever, the inevitable breaking of some bleak and remorse-filled dawn, is the flaw in nihilism through which humane narrative can slip and reassert itself. The end of the binge is the beginning of the story.
The only adequate summary of the text is the text itself.
pivic's review against another edition
4.0
While I think Franzen's part
* One of the best authors to arise in the past 20 years
* A grumpy old man
* A fascinating trove of bird-love
this collection of essays focuses on a few things, namely book-reviews, his love for birding, the life, times and death of his friend and brotherly rival David Foster Wallace and a few travels, e.g. to China and Italy.
His genius shines through his grumpiness at times, for instance, when writing about modern technology, which doesn't just sound grumpy, but is insightful and funny:
Franzen's honesty is at times very striking, both in fiction and also in these essays. While delving into his relationship to his late parents, it is also notable to see his relationship with his current partner - a couple of times referred to as "a Californian" - and his ex-wife.
From a speech on being a writer, where he lists four questions he often is asked during interviews and goes into them on different levels:
He writes on writer's block, on how birds are treated on Cyprus, collates thoughts on his parents in a quite non-soppy way, which is nice, and goes on to dissect a former marriage. It all ties into "Freedom", his magnum opus.
Funny near-luddite things:
From a trip to China:
On the book "The Laughing Policeman" by Sjöwall/Wahlöö, from Sweden:
His love for Alice Munro's writing:
This is great writing at times, and at its worst, too navel-gazing for my own liking, but then isn't that how we find ourselves at our most naked or delve into insanity?
* One of the best authors to arise in the past 20 years
* A grumpy old man
* A fascinating trove of bird-love
this collection of essays focuses on a few things, namely book-reviews, his love for birding, the life, times and death of his friend and brotherly rival David Foster Wallace and a few travels, e.g. to China and Italy.
His genius shines through his grumpiness at times, for instance, when writing about modern technology, which doesn't just sound grumpy, but is insightful and funny:
Consumer-technology products, of course, would never do anything this unattractive, because they’re not people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability, the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
Franzen's honesty is at times very striking, both in fiction and also in these essays. While delving into his relationship to his late parents, it is also notable to see his relationship with his current partner - a couple of times referred to as "a Californian" - and his ex-wife.
From a speech on being a writer, where he lists four questions he often is asked during interviews and goes into them on different levels:
The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.
He writes on writer's block, on how birds are treated on Cyprus, collates thoughts on his parents in a quite non-soppy way, which is nice, and goes on to dissect a former marriage. It all ties into "Freedom", his magnum opus.
Funny near-luddite things:
One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.
I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs.
And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.
Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives.
If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.
From a trip to China:
the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.
On the book "The Laughing Policeman" by Sjöwall/Wahlöö, from Sweden:
“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.
His love for Alice Munro's writing:
But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences.
This is great writing at times, and at its worst, too navel-gazing for my own liking, but then isn't that how we find ourselves at our most naked or delve into insanity?
pixelina's review against another edition
3.0
It's about books and birds really. I got it cause I heard about the essay on Munro and then just kept going and was surprised over how much more sympathetic Franzen is here then in what little I heard about him in media.
I might even try one of his novels after this one.
I might even try one of his novels after this one.
corey's review against another edition
3.0
SECOND READING (APRIL 2018): 3 STARS
Listened to the audiobook on my commute to and from work this week. It still strikes me as very much a mixed bag--"I Just Called to Say I Love You" especially is a very profound and moving meditation on technology and our interpersonal relationships, and the Christina Stead essay is very good as well. Otherwise, meh.
FIRST READING (MARCH 2014): 3 STARS
Like a lot of other people on this site, I struggled to find interest in the essays on birding.
Franzen has gained a lot of credibility with me as a compelling and competent writer, and so I really did try to like the essays. I wanted to like them. I Googled the birds he references in the essays to try and understand what he sees in them, I took care during my cigarette breaks to scan the trees to see the birds and try to identify them (although, God help me, I can't tell wrens from sparrows or blackbirds from crows, and they all sound the same to me). And yet, when faced with 20-page ornithological essays, I found myself spacing out and wishing for them to end.
That said, when Franzen is on here, he's really on. Like many others, I kind of rolled my eyes when Franzen denounced Twitter and Facebook as legitimate societal ills in interviews. With all of the true evil that exists in the world currently, it's hard to see social media as something worth spending any time on. And yet, I'd be hard pressed not to concede the point Franzen makes in "I Just Called To Say I Love You": for all this talk about social media bringing us together, perhaps it's actually driving us apart by filling our lives with cheap and empty sentimentality. Perhaps it's making the world a far lonelier place, and if that is not in and of itself an enormous cultural problem, it's certainly symptomatic of one.
So, in short, I didn't feel that this book was up to par with his first essay collection, but it's worth reading just the same. Just skip over the bird essays.
Listened to the audiobook on my commute to and from work this week. It still strikes me as very much a mixed bag--"I Just Called to Say I Love You" especially is a very profound and moving meditation on technology and our interpersonal relationships, and the Christina Stead essay is very good as well. Otherwise, meh.
FIRST READING (MARCH 2014): 3 STARS
Like a lot of other people on this site, I struggled to find interest in the essays on birding.
Franzen has gained a lot of credibility with me as a compelling and competent writer, and so I really did try to like the essays. I wanted to like them. I Googled the birds he references in the essays to try and understand what he sees in them, I took care during my cigarette breaks to scan the trees to see the birds and try to identify them (although, God help me, I can't tell wrens from sparrows or blackbirds from crows, and they all sound the same to me). And yet, when faced with 20-page ornithological essays, I found myself spacing out and wishing for them to end.
That said, when Franzen is on here, he's really on. Like many others, I kind of rolled my eyes when Franzen denounced Twitter and Facebook as legitimate societal ills in interviews. With all of the true evil that exists in the world currently, it's hard to see social media as something worth spending any time on. And yet, I'd be hard pressed not to concede the point Franzen makes in "I Just Called To Say I Love You": for all this talk about social media bringing us together, perhaps it's actually driving us apart by filling our lives with cheap and empty sentimentality. Perhaps it's making the world a far lonelier place, and if that is not in and of itself an enormous cultural problem, it's certainly symptomatic of one.
So, in short, I didn't feel that this book was up to par with his first essay collection, but it's worth reading just the same. Just skip over the bird essays.