I love it, love it, love it!!!! I just finished the audio version of the book and the performance is also great. It makes you cry, sometimes laugh, and think…a lot. This book is just simply amazing.

Foer is brilliant. This book is brilliant. I would never have believed that: 1) someone could so quickly weave such a huge catastophic event into a novel without judgement, schmaltz, brutality, or sentimentality or 2) another book could present autism/OCD spectrum disorders as well as (perhaps better than)The Strange Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

I saw JSF give a reading here in Seattle a few months ago. So far, it’s much more interesting than his first book. Which is saying quite a lot!

It’s got me cracking up all over the place.

I’d avoided Foer because of all the hype surrounding his first book, but my library had Extremely Loud... on CD and I had a cross-country trip ahead of me so I picked it up. Loved it, laughing and crying. Excellent voice actors, especially old Mr. Black and Oskar. One of the best books I’ve read this year. I still want to get the actual book because of the photographs and formatting of the text, which (obviously) cannot exist in the audio version.

(completed 6/12/05)

I devoured this book the way I did Everything is Illuminated. After hearing over and over that Everything is Illuminated wasn’t as great as everyone said it was, that it was nothing special, I started to believe it. Reading EL&IC reminded me that Foer’s style works for me. Although his topics are intrinsically tragic and touching, he adds a level of creativity that I haven’t found in many other books.

It was odd to pick it up so shortly after The Tin Drum where young, percussive musician Oskar struggles to fit into the world around him. I couldn’t help but see similarities.

This book is outstanding. Comparison to Everything Is Illuminated – they have some basic similarities in the structure and plot outline, and the same blend of the comic and the deeply felt, and both tackle incredibly traumatic events without being either trite or brutal. This book is more complex but nothing gets lost in the complexity. After finishing this I went out and got A Brief History of Time. Does that make me a dork?

In Jonathan Safran’s Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close we are introduced to 9 year old Oskar Schell, a highly intelligent, inventive, precocious boy coming to grips with the loss of his father who died when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9-11. Oskar discovers a mysterious key in his father’s closet with the word “Black” written on the envelope that holds the key. He decides to interview every person in NYC’s five boroughs with the last name of Black, and sets off every weekend, on foot to find them. At the same time a parallel story is unfolding with Oskar’s grandparents, their diary entries and letters that help them come to terms with their own fractured lives, having lived through the bombing in Dresden.

Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close is wildly creative. It reminded me at the beginning of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But Extremely Loud is much richer, and the characters’ lives in more need of repair. There is a parallel too, in the Twin Towers and the destruction of Dresden, two generations apart. This book is sad and wonderful, funny and despairing, and vibrantly alive. Highly recommended.

First up, I think this is a far better book than his first, “Everything is Illuminated”, and that’s really saying something. EL&IC has everything I enjoy in a book – sharp writing, literary games, playfulness, honesty and strongly voiced characters.

Like “Everything…” this new book tells the story of several generations of a family using a wide variety of devices: diary entries, photos, letters… even numeric keypads. It’s a little overwhelming at times but fortunately Oskar Schell – the 9 year old precocious protagonist – has such a nerdy charm about him that you (and several characters in the book) can’t help but be dragged into his adventure. Also fortunately, all of the books disparate references and characters are neatly yet satisfyingly brought together at the end.

This is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a while.