Author: Jennifer Egan
Length: 275 pages
Genre: literary fiction
Plot Basics: Egan takes the reader on a journey through time in this collection of loosely-associated chapters, rife with music and the forward progression of time.
Banter Points: Reading this knocks off one of my "important" books for 2012 since it won the Pulitzer Prize.
The best part of the book, which I was expecting to be highly pretentiousness, was the section written as a PowerPoint presentation. While ostentatious, to be sure, the content was some of the most poignant in the book, as a young girl tried to use the medium to order her feelings and her world.
Bummer Points: This book was more a collection of somewhat interwoven short stories than a real novel and as such, left the reader with no character to really care about. The plot -- while all dealing with the passage of time -- were disparate and hard to get excited about. The characters were often over-the-top and inaccessible to me as a reader, as very little in my life related to theirs.
Word Nerd Recommendation: It seems like this is one of those books that people either love or really disliked. Unfortunately, I'm in the latter category and just don't get why it won a Pulitzer. Read at your own risk.
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