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A review by pmort
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
3.0
My wife’s book club just read Zeitoun and everyone liked it and afterward the question What Else Have You Read by Him? was raised and the assessment of Heartbreaking Work broke down like this:
All the People Who First Read it in Their 20s: “Great!”
All the People Who First Read it in Their 30s: “Terrible!”
I read this book when it came out in 2000; I was in my 20s and I lived in Brooklyn a few blocks from Eggers when McSweeney’s was getting under way and the book was just coming out. It seemed great! And now I have just read the book again.
Um. It was strange? To read it again? There are books that you need to read at certain ages for their impact to be formative, and I definitely read this one at the “correct” time. But I have no idea if the necessary context is “Being 20” or “Being in Brooklyn in 2000”. But as you know from my linked short story cycle, I Lived in Brooklyn for Ten Years and Literally Can’t Stop Talking About It, oh what’s that? You haven’t read it? No problem, I have it memorized.
Come with me, youngsters, to a time when alt rock was featuring a lot of cello for some reason…
[read the rest here]
All the People Who First Read it in Their 20s: “Great!”
All the People Who First Read it in Their 30s: “Terrible!”
I read this book when it came out in 2000; I was in my 20s and I lived in Brooklyn a few blocks from Eggers when McSweeney’s was getting under way and the book was just coming out. It seemed great! And now I have just read the book again.
Um. It was strange? To read it again? There are books that you need to read at certain ages for their impact to be formative, and I definitely read this one at the “correct” time. But I have no idea if the necessary context is “Being 20” or “Being in Brooklyn in 2000”. But as you know from my linked short story cycle, I Lived in Brooklyn for Ten Years and Literally Can’t Stop Talking About It, oh what’s that? You haven’t read it? No problem, I have it memorized.
Come with me, youngsters, to a time when alt rock was featuring a lot of cello for some reason…
[read the rest here]