Book: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2006.

This novel has received tons of accolades and good reviews. Ambitious. Inventive. Funny, tender, tragic. Stunning virtuosity.

It was a New York Times bestseller.

It's about a nine-year-old boy who lost his father when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11/01. It is written in a first-person stream-of-consciousness sort of style wherein the reader spends a lot of time in the child's head. There is also a first person account from a missing and then found again grandfather and a first person narrative from a grandmother. Those seem more like letters than inner thoughts.

I hated this book. I felt like I was in the mind of a crazy person the entire time I was reading it. Oskar the nine-year-old, was totally unreliable as a narrator and this was a descent into insanity and depression at a child's level.

Had I not been reading this book for my book club, I would not have finished it. I wouldn't have read past the first 10 pages and I wouldn't have missed anything by not reading it.

I can't remember when I ever disliked a book this much.

No stars.