Did I Like it? Left Hand

I recently finished Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The book was highly and repeatedly recommend to me by one of my former Western Civ Students, who, I will note is eagerly awaiting this blog review of this book. (Side note (and what constitutes a side note in a blog that is nothing but side notes?); what are the ethics of mentioning former and current students by name in a blog post? Is it improper to mention students by name? Is it improper to always refer to everyone in vague terms like "former student"? Would the typical student be glad to be mentioned by name in a professor's blog of seemingly random musings or would said student feel some norm of professional etiquette has been breached to be mentioned by name? Miss Manners is oddly silent on this point.)

The book review: A rather clever and nicely paced book which makes for an enjoyable read after the end of a semester. Foer does the whole "Let's break the traditional norms of a novel by including all sorts of pictures and different page formatting" bit quite well. The oddities do not feel forced, but rather are a natural part of the novel itself. The story was a bit too cute to elevate the book into potential Great Books level--a lofty standard of excellence to be sure--and the plot twists were not all that shocking. There are three narrators in the book, and Foer does a nice job of giving them distinctive voices, in part by formatting the narratives quite differently. There are all sorts of literary touches which may or may not be significant--e.g., one of the narrators has a set of pictures of doorknobs interspersed with the narration--it is not clear to me whether this is merely meant to be quaint and charming or has some hidden deeper meaning. (The same is true of the reference in the title of this post.) That's the problem with a book like this--I enjoyed it, I would recommend it to others looking for a nice read on a plane, but I have no idea if the book merits serious attention to detail.

Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, Maggie.