A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, 2000 (375 pages)

I think that maybe I should stop reading Pulitzer Prize winning books. I don't seem to have very good luck with them. Maybe I'm just not cool enough or intellectual enough to truly appreciate them.

I had heard some decent things about A Heartbreaking Work, and after seeing it on some list of the "Top 100 Books of the Decade," I bumped it up on my "to read" list. However...I had so much trouble getting into this book! It literally took me a month to read. I did consider putting it down and not finishing it, but by the time I'd thought about doing that, I was already more than 100 pages in, and I felt like I should just plow through.

This book is based on true stories from the author's life, and although he had some interesting stories to tell, the book as a whole pretty much drove me nuts. Much of the book has a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which I don't tend to enjoy. Some of the stories in the book were okay, which is why I gave it two stars (out of five) on Goodreads.

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Total number of books read in 2009: 43

Total number of pages read in 2009: 15233