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A review by corey
Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
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.