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Loading... The Candy House: A Novelby Jennifer Egan
  
Books Read in 2023 (20) Top Five Books of 2023 (255) » 11 more Books Read in 2022 (1,656) Best of 2022 (3) Overdue Podcast (551) Netgalley Reads (137) Which house? (106) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) RaynaPolsky | Apr 23, 2024 |  In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love. Was really looking forward to reading as this as I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad. With that said I had read the Goon Squad a long time and didn't remember it as being ripe for a sequel. I think you could easily read this without reading the first one. Overall I really enjoyed this book, fascinating premise, interesting story which has some real relevance to advances in modern life. But the real star of this book is the characters which weave though the book as each chapter unfold as new story told in a new voice. My only knock is that the pace and story drags a little around the 60-80% area, thankfully it picks up again and the ending is quite something I had this book as my book of the month back in March this year on my site https://quizlit.org/book-of-the-month-march-2023 (  ) Quizlitbooks | Apr 20, 2024 | ) froxgirl | Mar 2, 2024 | However, it is true I think that "Candy House" has more of a traditional plot connecting many of the various characters and stories. That plot being the development of a method for people to upload all of their memories and even their subjective conscious states of mind into the cloud to be accessible to anyone, and a concurrent movement of "eluders" who get bots to take over their online personas while they go off-grid. Why people need bots to run their online accounts instead of just deleting or abandoning them, I don't know. I don't pay for a bot to run my mostly abandoned Facebook account after all, why would I? I didn't understand why these characters would either. Which points to a weakness of the book. Egan creates such a vast cast of characters and continually starts over from new perspectives that much of the novel is working on characterization and filling these characters out. Treatment of this plot is therefore somewhat shallow. You're not going to get a very deep dive into philosophies of social media or uploading consciousness or futurism or anything like that. What you will get is a lot of skilled characterization and a couple of nonconventional storytelling chapters, one in email and one in a series of brief aphorisms, sort of like the opening section of Kierkegaard's Either/Or. It's interesting to note that almost every time I've seen someone mention "Goon Squad" when talking about this sequel of sorts, they add that they remember very little about it. I'd suggest that's another weakness of this particular storytelling mode shared between these two books, and that you'll probably remember very little about "Candy House" a few years down the line either. (  ) lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 | Ms. Egan writes well and has sharp insights on contemporary issues, but I just found the structure of the book (many narrators in different modes of “reporting” their story) did not move the narrative along all that well and I was confused by the many characters introduced briefly then appearing later in the story years later; I would have to page backwards to figure out who they were. I have read reviews that call this a “brilliant portrait of intersecting lives,” but to me it was more like scattershot tweets, as opposed to a running dialog. Or maybe I am just old and the technology that permeates this book – this whole notion of uploading your memories and viewing others’ memories in an AI database – is creepy to me, although, I realize, hardly far-fetched given the information people carelessly share on social media. As I said early, I had to struggle to stay with it to the end. It deserves more than the three stars I gave it, but it does not deserve four, in my opinion. ( ) bschweiger | Feb 4, 2024 | no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time , Entertainment Weekly , Vogue , Good Housekeeping , Oprah Daily , Glamour , USA TODAY , Parade , Bustle , San Francisco Chronicle , The Seattle Times , The Boston Globe , Tampa Bay Times , BuzzFeed , Vulture , and many more! From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a "sibling novel" to her Pulitzer Prize– and NBCC Award–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad —an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private. The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own Your Unconscious"—that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are "counters" who track and exploit desires and there are "eluders," those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets. If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music's more disjunctive approach. The parts are titled: Build, Break, Drop. With an emphasis on gaming, portals, and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. Egan takes to stunning new heights her "deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture" ( Vogue ). The Candy House delivers an absolutely extraordinary combination of fierce, exhilarating intelligence and heart. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.73)
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