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I have been distracted by life which, in short fits and spurts, can be just as entertaining and engrossing as any good book.
Now that things have settled in again, I went back to the NYT book section to see what I have missed.
Turns out I read 3 of the 5 notable fiction books for 2010.
Freedom, while not as wonderful and life changing as most critics would have us believe, was still fun and I saw many of the people I have known over the years in bits and pieces in the study of post modern, whatever that means, world we are living in now.
One of the other books, The New Yorker Stories, is a collection stories from, where else, the New Yorker and of course that was fun, very fun to read as it has it all.
But the Jennifer Egan book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, was a spectacular book that was presented in several different ways that open up the boundries of the page to show us perhaps what will come in literature yet to be.
This book could have fallen flat and been just a showy example of the dreaded disease that all artists are, or should be, wary of, the Look At Me POV that destroys the art that lies beneath the veneer of style.
Ms. Egan was abe to wind a story around a group of people connected by the entertainment industry. And since that industry is greatly depended upon style, Ms. Egan let it all hang out. But the way she wove her stylish take on the lives of her characters as they slogged through 40 years or so, used that very style as what I can only describe as another character.
Suffice it to say some will not get this book, but if you really want to see a story told vertically, horizontally and through time, pick up this book and give it a read.
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