dave eggers

August 16, 2018

Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Beth and I are still thinking it’s too early to leave Toph with anyone but family, that to do otherwise would cause him to feel unwanted and alone, leading to the warping of his fragile psyche, then to experimentation with inhalants, to the joining of some River’s Edge kind of gang, too much flannel and too little remorse, the cutting of his own tats, the drinking of lamb’s blood, the inevitable initiation-fulfilling murder of Beth and me in our sleep. So when I go out, once a week, on a day Beth and I have chosen together, Toph gets his things together, stuffs them into his backpack, uses both straps, and walks over to her house and spends the night on half of her futon.”

Date read: April 24- May 1, 2017

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

By the time she was my age, my mom had already lost both of her parents. My grandmother died when my mom was just 25, and my grandfather had a massive heart attack in his sleep when she was in her early 30s. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t lose his first parent until he was just about 50 and his second only earlier this year. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to lose two parents by my age like my mom did. My parents are still a big part of my life and there’s so much more still to share with them.

Dave Eggers, though, had it worse than anyone I personally know. He lost both of his parents, to cancer, one just about a month after the other, when he was only a senior in college. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers recounts those deaths and his subsequent guardianship of his 8 year-old brother, Toph. The Eggers brothers leave their Illinois home behind and move to the Bay Area, in part to stay close to their older sister Beth, and in part for career opportunities for Dave as he tries to get a new magazine, Might, off the ground while also trying to figure out how to raise a child.

Before I even picked this book up, I was aware that it seems to inspire strong feelings. Some people HATE it and some people think it’s magnificent. How you will receive this book depends entirely on how you feel about Eggers’ writing. If you think his stream-of-consciousness, wildly tangential, constantly-on-the-verge-of-a-panic-attack style of narrative is great, you’ll think this book is amazing. If, however, you want a straightforward, relatively linear narrative, you will think this is the worst thing you’ve ever read.

It feels beside the point to talk about story structure, because there isn’t really any (it’s very hard to tell how fast time is passing and there aren’t really narrative beats to speak of), or character development, because there isn’t really any of that either. Even for a memoir, a sense of story and character tend to be important, but neither is a priority for Eggers. While I’m usually fairly open to nontraditional narrative, this book is 100% style over substance. The most compelling part, for me, was the relationship between Dave and Toph, and Dave wrestling with both his fierce love and concern for his brother and his acknowledged resentment of being prematurely thrust into a parental role. However, I mostly found it tiresome. It held my attention inconsistently at best, I was usually bored long before a particular side riff was over. Eggers’ flaw isn’t that he’s wildly self-absorbed (I think memoir is an inherently self-absorbed form since it’s literally assuming that your own life is so compelling that other people want to read about it), but that he’s not nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. I wouldn’t recommend this book, but I wouldn’t tear it out of anyone’s hands and I can understand why some people really respond to it. I just didn’t.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think your life is interesting enough to write a book about?

One year ago, I was reading: Mildred Pierce

Two years ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

September 14, 2017

Book 94: The Circle

“Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.”

Dates read: September 27-30, 2016

Rating: 3/10

I don’t know about you, but a lot of my internet presence is tied to either my Google account or my Facebook account. It’s so hard to remember a million different passwords and logins when you can just authorize logging in through Facebook and not have to worry about it anymore. But we all know it’s not quite as innocuous as we’d like it to believe…we see the ads for that cute dress we looked at on our work computer show up on our home computer and know that we signed into the website selling that cute dress through Facebook. Technology and social media are awesome, but they’re also new. If we’re being honest, we don’t really understand the full ramifications of putting so much of our lives on the internet. We’re making a lot of it up as we go along.

In Dave Eggers’ The Circle, we’re ever-so-slightly in the future, and one large umbrella company has taken over most of what happens on the internet: all your social media and e-commerce goes through a TruYou profile, a product of The Circle. When Mae Holland, a recent graduate of an East Coast private liberal arts school who grew up in working class California, is able to get a job at The Circle through her friend Annie, she’s thrilled. The sprawling and luxurious Bay Area campus is beyond her wildest dreams and the company is at the forefront of every breaking new development in internet technology. She’s increasingly drawn into the world of The Circle as it encroaches further and further into formerly private arenas of life, and can’t understand her family and friends who resist the shifting landscape of the world.

Theoretically, this is a really good book, a modern 1984. When you hear about things like the lawsuit in Spain about the right to be forgotten, it really makes you think about how deeply the internet has enmeshed itself in our lives. The Circle illustrates how slippery the slope could be for it to completely invade all aspects of our existence…microchipping and GPS tracking children to prevent kidnapping, very small constantly streaming webcams to open up closed regimes, politicians livestreaming their professional duties to make government transparent. All of these things sound like they’re positive developments on the surface, but it creates a culture of constant surveillance.

Where the book fails, though, is the execution. Mae (short for Maebelline, which I thought was a nifty way to communicate what kind of people her parents were without having to spell anything out) is obviously meant to be an audience-insert character, like Twilight‘s Bella. But it doesn’t work here to the extent it works for Twilight…the characteristics Mae is given, ambition and a certain amount of selfishness, render her mostly unpleasant. She needs to be a compelling character to have us follow her down the proverbial rabbit hole, but she has no real personality. She seems close to her family in the beginning, but drafts away from them easily and without apparent regret. She has “relationships” with peers like Annie and her ex-boyfriend Mercer, but we’re not given any sense of history or any reason to believe that she’s actually emotionally connected to other people. The writing is clunky, with awkward phrasing all over the place. It’s extra disappointing because the ideas behind the book are there, and if it had been rendered better it could have been amazing. I understand why it flopped, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…do you ever take technology breaks?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wolf In The Attic

December 6, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read For The First Time In 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: authors I read for the first time in 2016. I try to read a wide variety of books and so I’ve read a lot of different authors over the years. But each year brings new ones, and so here are ten authors that I’d never read before.

Malcolm Gladwell: On recommendation from my husband, I started listening to his podcast, Revisionist History earlier this year and really enjoyed it. And then I read David and Goliath, and it offered the same kind of interesting perspectives on conventional wisdom. I’ll definitely be looking to read more of his stuff in the future!

Dave Eggers: I know a lot of people love him, but I’d never read him before. I’d been intrigued by The Circle when I read a description of it, so I picked up a secondhand copy and got to it. And while I found the ideas behind it interesting, I actually thought the writing was pretty bad. I’ve got a copy of another of his works already, so I’ll read it, but unless I like it a lot more I’m not going to keep reading him.

Ann Patchett: I’d heard praise for several of her books, but Bel Canto is what I found in a local secondhand shop, so that’s what I read. And it was really good: she creates well-rounded characters who relate to each others in interesting ways. But this book fell flat for me at the very very end. I enjoyed the reading of 99% of it so much that I’ll definitely be looking to read more of them in the future.

Pat Conroy: Conroy writes a lot of books with a military theme, which doesn’t tend to be my wheelhouse. But Lords of Discipline was a Kindle sale book that I bought on a whim, and I was happy that I did. Conroy’s writing is powerful, and I found myself deeply invested in the story about a cadet at a military college simply through how well he told the story. I’ll definitely be reading more of him!

Helen Oyeyemi: I’d heard wonderful things about Boy, Snow, Bird, and that one is on my shelf to read, but my book club’s first read was her collection of short stories What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. I found it to be a more intellectually stimulating than necessarily enjoyable experience, but I did come away wanting to read her novel-length work!

Alison Weir: I’m finding myself drawn more and more to non-fiction as I get older, and there’s no subject I enjoy more than royalty. The Six Wives of Henry VIII has an intimidating length, but Weir writes their stories with such clean, readable prose that it all but flew along. She’s definitely among my favorite historians!

Don DeLillo: He’s an incredibly renowned author that I’d just never come across before. But then I got an ARC of Zero K and while he’s got magnificent command of language and the ability to create a strong sense of mood, I just didn’t get it. I’m still interested in reading White Noise, because I’ve heard it’s his best, but it’s always good to remember that just because “everyone” likes an author doesn’t mean you have to.

Erik Larson: Devil In The White City has a great reputation, and I read that one too, but I actually started with Dead Wake, in which he tells the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. Of the two, I actually prefer Dead Wake, but both are well-researched narrative non-fiction stories well worth the read!

Lionel Shriver: I remember seeing the trailer for the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin and being interested in maybe seeing it someday (I haven’t yet). And then I came across a secondhand copy of it and figured I might as well read it. It’s incredible, and I’ve got a couple other of her books on my TBR now that I know what a great writer Shriver is.

Jhumpa Lahiri: I’ve actually had a copy of The Namesake on my shelves for YEARS…it’s a little torn up in one of the corners because one of my mom’s dogs tried to eat it at one point. But it wasn’t until this year that I actually sat down and read it and I just loved it. I’m far from the only one raving about Lahiri, but she’s worth it, y’all!

On the Blog

Join the Listt