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ichinichinemasuAfter I finished Mockingjay, I was sad I probably wouldn't have anything else to read that was nearly as addictive. But Jonathan Franzen is coming to the library at the end of September, and I had an ARC of his book sitting on my shelf since June that I decided to pick up again. I'm sure that anyone who's been paying attention has heard about Freedom. Jonathan Franzen was named a "Great American Novelist" by Time, and the New York Times had multiple writeups about the book. I was kind of wary to pick it up with all the press-- since my tastes tend to skew towards genre fiction and the not-currently-popular--but my bosses really liked it, too, so eventually I was guilted into reading it.
Really, I am so glad I did. It starts with a section about this perfect family living in Midwest America that you see slowly dissolve. The mother, too uptight, goes crazy, the father, too nice, doesn't intervene, the son, self-centered, abandons them to go live with the neighbors. You really don't like any of them as characters. But it's a credit to Franzen that you can't put it down. The next section is the one I'm in now, which is an "autobiography" that the mother writes, where you see why she is the way she is. It's sad, but also entirely relatable. And as all the critics are spewing, a great representation of modern life.
So yeah, that's where my headspace has been in my free time :).
Really, I am so glad I did. It starts with a section about this perfect family living in Midwest America that you see slowly dissolve. The mother, too uptight, goes crazy, the father, too nice, doesn't intervene, the son, self-centered, abandons them to go live with the neighbors. You really don't like any of them as characters. But it's a credit to Franzen that you can't put it down. The next section is the one I'm in now, which is an "autobiography" that the mother writes, where you see why she is the way she is. It's sad, but also entirely relatable. And as all the critics are spewing, a great representation of modern life.
So yeah, that's where my headspace has been in my free time :).
