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May 24, 2010

Desperately seeking Black

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Heartbreaking and funny about nine year old (or so) Oscar, a precocious Upper East Side boy trying to find a secret of his father (who died in the 9/11 attack), interwoven with the history of his grandfather and grandmother, who survived the Dresden bombings.

Inventive and funny - I don't normally like books that try to be creative with typography and pictures to tell a story, but it works here. And Oscar is a hoot, vaguely related to the protagonist in The curious incident with the dog in nighttime, with his idiosyncratic messages "José!" and convoluted, yet strangely logical thinking. My favorite sentence: "More people are live today than ever lived. That means that if they all wanted to play Hamlet at once, there wouldn't be enough skulls."

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Posted by Espen at May 24, 2010 6:57 PM

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Comments

offtopic: I was browsing the courses list from mother site and noticed it's not really updated :-) was curious about an updated curricula, new cases, topics, etc - is there any other place i could have a peep? thanks

Posted by: dragos at June 1, 2010 11:26 AM