If you pay any attention to the year-end/best books of the year lists, there is no way you could have missed Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad. I am not sure if I wasn't on any list I saw and believe me I see a lot of these lists!
There were a couple of reasons why I hesitated to read it for awhile. While I try to know just enough about a book before going into it, I was well aware that this one had a chapter that was "told" entirely as a Powerpoint presentation. Given that nearly all my reading is now on the Kindle, it worried me that e-readers don't quite "do" graphics and pictures very well (and 96% of the time that's okay). But thanks to getting an iPad for Christmas, I thought that might work out a bit better graphically...
... and then it Egan just seemed to be winning award after award for the book... and then it was one of the 16 books that made it onto the Tournament of Books (aka March Madness for books...that link will take you to the last/current page of tournament action, not to this book... use the right sidebar links to poke around) and it seemed like it was going to be a favorite (a #2 seed), so decided to finally give it a shot. (Side note: As of this writing it's in the finals vs. Freedom -- a book that it had already lost to, but thanks to strong reader response it was revived in the "zombie round").
So... despite knowing about the Powerpoint chapter, I knew little else except gathering that it had something to do with music given the cover and right before diving in, I learned that it was a linked stories "novel." I am hoping that that is not too much of a spoiler, but I find that knowing that going in is a good thing as you are prepared for Chapter 2 and having little, if anything, to do with Chapter 1 (well, at least on the surface). I am not sure if this is a hot new literary trend, but I recalled 3 other novels that I read in the past year that had this same storytelling approach... so it's a good thing I like it.
I won't bother to go into the details of the stories, except that they do peripherally have to do the music industry with the stories linked to two characters: Benny Salazar, musician and record exec and his kleptomaniac personal assistant, Sasha. While either one of the characters are not always present in the 13 chapters/stories that travel in both time and location, there is a link -- which some times are easier to figure than other times. Likewise, it is just a nature of this type of work that you are going to like some stories better than others. Oh, the odd title does makes sense... but will leave that unspoiled.
I am conflicted about this book. It is quite good, but ultimately for me it ended up getting crushed under the weight of the hype, which is really no fault of the book and the author. Perhaps if I read it before all the awards and year-end lists, I would have had a stronger positive opinion about it. Also time continuum related are those 3 previous book I mentioned about that also use that linked story approach -- Let The Great World Spin, The Madonnas of Echo Park, and The Imperfectionists. Again, no fault of Egan's, but at the end of the proverbial day I just preferred each of those three books over this one. So perhaps a bit of fatigue with the linked story approach and again, think I would have been more wow'd by this book had I not read these other so recently (or ever, for that matter).
I find myself in a common quandary of not wanting to discourage anyone from reading this book on the heels of my lack of enthusiasm. As suggested above, I admit I am judging it unfairly against the hype as well as comparing it to other books rather than on its own merit, so it's what I feel given this time and place that I read it (which, funny enough, is one of the themes of the book). Oh, and that Powerpoint chapter which I am sure a lot of people greet with an eye roll was really pure genius. So if it's on your to-be-read list, stick with it!
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