Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
For years I have wanted to read this book around the 9/11 anniversary. The further we get from 9/11, the easier it is for me to forget just how horrifying and devastating that day was and what it felt like to have lived through it. My Goodreads review is below.
“This is the sort of book that I wish I’d come to know through lines rather than through pages. I annotated 24 sections that I found particularly striking or beautiful. It is for those sentences that I gave this book an extra star.
I wanted to love the book. I wanted it to remind me of the horror I felt that day and in the time following 9/11. I wanted that because it saddens me to think that at this point, there are now adults who weren’t even alive on the day the towers went down. I don’t want to forget how that day reminded me to live every day as best I could. And I especially don’t want to forget how we came together as one rather than subsisting as fractionated sections pitted against one another. I wanted to love the book but I couldn’t.
The writing style is obnoxious. The plotline is boring. Yes, there were some beautiful passages, but the author failed to bring them together into a cohesive masterpiece.
Mine is only an opinion, and apparently many people disagree with me. My best advice is to read the first 34 pages. If you get even an inkling that you won’t like the book, then trust yourself, because you won’t. I didn’t trust myself. Instead, I forced myself to finish the book, hoping it would get better. Hoping it would take a turn. It doesn’t. However, if in the first 34 pages you feel like you’ll love the book, then you probably will, so read on!”