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3.58 AVERAGE
3.58 AVERAGE
a gabba rec! took me a while to get through this one mainly because reading for fun during school just never happens. but picked it back up post grad and WOW! I can’t get enough of the way eggers plays with form and toys with the reader, all while telling a very compelling story. and reading gab’s annotations added another layer of enjoyment
Dear Dave Eggers,
Please Shut the F&!* Up. Thanks
Sincerely,
Susie
Please Shut the F&!* Up. Thanks
Sincerely,
Susie
i remember loving the first half and being quite irritated with the second. the specifics are a little vague in my memory. i asked eggers to sign the stapler once.
I enjoy Eggers' sarcastic style of writing and when he surprises the reader with the unexpected (e.g. commentary in the publishing credits, footnotes, etc...). What made this most enjoyable is that he writes about thoughts that most people dare not to say out loud. Plus some of his stream of conscious comments regarding how his brother, Troph, reassures me that there are other folks out there who have twisted, paranoid, and exaggerated thoughts. There were many moments that I laughed out loud. However, I found the ending/last chapter anti-climatic.
For years I told friends and acquaintances at hipster parties that I *totally* read AHWOSG. And, of course, no, I did not read all of it. I had read passages but fruitlessly gave up because I was studying or found the dialogue extremely intense. The story itself is soooo dark. But reading it was amazing. Just as everyone told me it would be. I'm so in love with the story and I loved traveling with the characters across San Francisco in the same areas in which I live/work. Favorite quotes!
- “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
- “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
- “Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”
- “my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring.”
- “But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons”
- “Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.”
- “That must drive you insa— Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.”
- “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
- “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
- “Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”
- “my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring.”
- “But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons”
- “Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.”
- “That must drive you insa— Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.”
i read this in the bathroom at 40th st. warehouse, until people started using it as toilet paper.
I really enjoyed a lot of this book but....... it's so massively overrated.
I just can't handle his whole attitude of "The world owes me something because my pain is beautiful."
It's such a juvenile attitude, to think you're the only person alive that is feeling pain, or pain that intense.
Interesting read but very presumptuous writing, assuming everyone is interested in you because you want them to be. Be like the rest of us, and only hope people are interested in you.
I just can't handle his whole attitude of "The world owes me something because my pain is beautiful."
It's such a juvenile attitude, to think you're the only person alive that is feeling pain, or pain that intense.
Interesting read but very presumptuous writing, assuming everyone is interested in you because you want them to be. Be like the rest of us, and only hope people are interested in you.
The introduction was hilarous, but I was thoroughly disappointed in the actual book. Eggers himself seemed completely self-indulgent, and the book got dull about half-way through; I really had to force myself to finish reading it. There's no denying he's very clever, but I'm not particularly interested in reading anything more of his.
Man, oh man. Where to even start?
I thoroughly disliked this book. It started off well enough; Eggers added commentary to the copyright page and had a lengthy prologue explaining some of the facets of the book, replete with flow charts and diagrams. It seemed irreverent and fresh - a good start, right?
It's a somewhat fictionalized memoir, based on a true story, if you will. Eggers writes in a stream of consciousness style that was a little tough to get used to at first. I was ready to throttle Eggers by the latter half of the book, though. Eggers' parents both die within several months of each other, leaving him (a senior in high school) and his three brothers and sisters orphans. Eggers coordinates the raising of his 8 year old brother, Toph, with his siblings.
He (Eggers) thinks he's all cutting edge and cool when in fact, he's just incredibly narcissitic. Incredibly. I get that it's written from his perspective and that alone imbues it with a certain sense of "me-ness", but Eggers takes it to the extreme. When his mother is dying, he steals away to the kitchen to write the tear-inducing, touching eulogy he'll write for her funeral. When he leaves Toph with a babysitter for a night out, he worries that the babysitter is actually a serial killer who will kill his brother while he's gone and then what would people think of him? They'd think he's an awful brother; a terrible substitute for a parent. He's so focused and stuck on his own tragic life that he becomes totally oblivious to everything and everyone around him. His friends become fodder for his own life, a paragraph in the woe-is-me story that is Dave Eggers.
I found Eggers to be ridiculous; wanting to revel in the tragic circumstances that are his life to the exclusion of everyone else's feelings. Every conversation and action are only for the cinematic value of Eggers performance. An utterly unlikeable and self-centered character that sucked the life of everything around him. Small things were huge to him; halfheartedly working on a magazine destined to fail became yet another cross Eggers could haul around and show off to anyone who would listen.
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"? You wish Eggers, you wish. "A Heartbreaking Work of a Narcissit's Meaninglesss Musings" would be more apt.
I thoroughly disliked this book. It started off well enough; Eggers added commentary to the copyright page and had a lengthy prologue explaining some of the facets of the book, replete with flow charts and diagrams. It seemed irreverent and fresh - a good start, right?
It's a somewhat fictionalized memoir, based on a true story, if you will. Eggers writes in a stream of consciousness style that was a little tough to get used to at first. I was ready to throttle Eggers by the latter half of the book, though. Eggers' parents both die within several months of each other, leaving him (a senior in high school) and his three brothers and sisters orphans. Eggers coordinates the raising of his 8 year old brother, Toph, with his siblings.
He (Eggers) thinks he's all cutting edge and cool when in fact, he's just incredibly narcissitic. Incredibly. I get that it's written from his perspective and that alone imbues it with a certain sense of "me-ness", but Eggers takes it to the extreme. When his mother is dying, he steals away to the kitchen to write the tear-inducing, touching eulogy he'll write for her funeral. When he leaves Toph with a babysitter for a night out, he worries that the babysitter is actually a serial killer who will kill his brother while he's gone and then what would people think of him? They'd think he's an awful brother; a terrible substitute for a parent. He's so focused and stuck on his own tragic life that he becomes totally oblivious to everything and everyone around him. His friends become fodder for his own life, a paragraph in the woe-is-me story that is Dave Eggers.
I found Eggers to be ridiculous; wanting to revel in the tragic circumstances that are his life to the exclusion of everyone else's feelings. Every conversation and action are only for the cinematic value of Eggers performance. An utterly unlikeable and self-centered character that sucked the life of everything around him. Small things were huge to him; halfheartedly working on a magazine destined to fail became yet another cross Eggers could haul around and show off to anyone who would listen.
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"? You wish Eggers, you wish. "A Heartbreaking Work of a Narcissit's Meaninglesss Musings" would be more apt.