Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Finished a Great American Novel on Independence Day

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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Read as part of CBR 11 Bingo: TBR Pile Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach is such a brilliant, beautiful book that I’m having difficulty conjuring up words to review it. It’s not leaving me breathless the way 2666 did, more so a state of stark admiration where I feel like words won’t do it justice. There are some writers who have a style that just works for the reader and I suppose Egan’s is one for me. Literature and general fiction are not really my bag so if you told […]

A Visit from the Goon Squad – A study in character development

A Visit form the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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I’m a bit late to this 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner but those prize giver outters definitely know their stuff. Egan’s work is true mastery of character development and a triumph of the non-linear form. It seems there is little method to her madness, as she jumps to different characters, and different points in history. At times you are puzzled as to how someone relates to the story, and you learn that they used to work for a main character, or a former flame, etc. It’s […]

In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for

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Like many of the books I’ve been reading these days, A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011) by Jennifer Egan is on my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40. I had heard of this one before. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and a coworker recommended it to me back when it was first published. However, I think I was turned off by the title. What is a goon squad? It sounded violent and probably not fun to read. So when I finally […]

48: An intriguing new novel

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I’m a sucker for new books, but I don’t often read them, because of time limits, my library tower (graduated from stack), and my enormous TBR list in general. My sister recommended Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, and I saw it available at my library and put it in my basket on a whim (yes, I have officially gotten greedy to the point of getting basketfuls of books from the library—it’s a new first for me!). It was a great book to read on the airplane […]

The past and present was fun, the future was not

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Pulled up the Amazon page for this book and realized it’s by the same author as Manhattan Beach and stuff makes a lot more sense now. It’s an interesting story that falls apart about halfway through and you finish it just for the sake of finishing it. The idea is more fun than the execution. Also immediately after I read this one, I read a book also tangentially about music, so I may get my wires crossed in places. The book is largely about the people […]

“How do you know a gangster?” “Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.”

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Manhattan Beach feels like Jennifer Egan wrote three (maybe even four) short stories and then decided they could possibly be connected so she loosely strung them together and called them a novel. The A plot is Anna, a young woman who works in the Navy yard in New York during WW2 who finds her calling as a diver. She has an overprotective mother, a crippled sister and an absent father. The B plot is about a gangster named Dexter Styles who becomes a bit infatuated with […]



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