It's a bestseller. It's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It's highly recommended, both "on the street" and by personal recommendation, but try as I might, I just can't make it past the first few chapters due to personal reasons. I hope someone else can enjoy the reputedly fine book.

Travelling, by request to "inquirer." Enjoy!

Just recieved this in the mail today ... I think I will try to start this tomorrow. Thank you li-kao for sending it on, and I hope I have more luck with it than you did. According to the reviews this is something I should love.

I thought this book was truly amazing and refreshing. Eggers voice is lyrical, and he manages to make his words come alive on the page. I love reading when the act is truly that - an act. I often felt like I was watching the action unfold before me.

I love what the LA Weekly said, "Like Kerouac, Eggers could inspire a generation as much as he documents it." Perfect.

I had already started Eggers 2nd book, "You Shall Know Our Velocity," from my brother when I recieved this one from Bookcrossing. I can't wait to finish it either. I guess the TBRs on my bookshelf will have to wait.

Now, what to do with this copy?

Sending to carolyn81 as an RABCK to fulfill a wish.

A dream come true, thanks to Bookcrossing! I have been wanting to read this book for over a year. Thank you, thank you!

Edited to give my synopsis: the first part is a harrowing description of Dave's mother's decline and death due to cancer (and peripherally mention's his father's concurrent death from the disease). Dave digs out everyone's fears of the "big C" and exposes them to the light.

His life as guardian to his little brother Toph is full of incidents to which most people can relate. Dave leaves Toph with a male babysitter and spends what is supposed to be a fun evening out imagining the worst (Toph kidnapped, sodomized, murdered).

The anomie that overcame his dream of publishing a magazine is honestly recounted and fair warning for other dreamers.

His use of graphics, such as the floorplans of his apartments complete with wall colors and sock-sliding diagrams, add to the uniqueness of the book.

My favorite part was when he opined that if he and his girlfriend were happy for a moment (having sex), their experience would add permanently to the happiness of the world and subtract from its misery. He expressed this much better than I did, of course.

His ending was a rather unpleasant stream-of-consciousness that he says in the footnotes was inspired by Joyce's "Ulysses".

Altogether an important book about family, friends, and work that I feel could become a classic and be taught in literature courses.

Just received this today. I also (coincidentally) received another copy from someone who sent it to me as a RABCK - on the same day!!! So I will go ahead and PM the next person in line and get this right back out again. If I finish the other copy soon, I will come back and journal my thoughts. Thank you for sharing!!!

I just noticed that goatgrrl is next. I already have her address, so I will send this out right away.

Mailed to goatgrrl today.

This arrived in the mail today -- a big surprise, as it appears to be a bookring, and I barely remember signing on for this one (!?). I'm delighted, as I had just finished Crabwalk on my way home from work and was wondering what to read next. And I've been wanting to read A Heartbreaking Work for years. Thanks so much! I'll start this right away, and will send it on to Rrrcaron within the next couple weeks.

I must have picked this book up ten times over the past four years, when it was new in 2000, and many times since then. Each time I looked at it, I discarded it -- deterred by the fine print in the dense, over-clever preface (I even remember a friend who was trying to talk me into reading it arguing "you know, you could read AHWOSG without reading the preface!"). A die-hard Chris Ware** fan, I was attracted by AHWOSG's look (especially the back cover), but it didn't look like anything I particularly wanted to read.

How surprising, then, to find out this book is (a) non-fiction; and (b) tremendously accessible -- a kind of literary Party of Five with all the elements of a great junk read, but with genuine sweetness and insight beneath the surface. As in Po5, the authors' Parents Have Left The Building, so this is a book about the independence, groundlessness and adventure that comes with being young and on your own (think Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, Harry Potter or Nancy Drew). Eggers is funny, gross, hip and painfully candid about his experience as a single Dad, and any criticism of his admitted self-absorption on this front (as in -- he's far from the first person on the planet to have attempted single parenting in his early twenties!) is offset by his lack of pretense.

Unfortunately, Eggers is right about one thing. He warns the reader (in that dense and offputting preface) that the book will lag a bit between pp. 239 and 351, and that's true. I found the part of the book dealing with his experience auditioning for MTV's Real World - San Francisco, and the struggles of Might magazine, kind of dull. So -- to the extent this is a book about life and death and the moments in which the two intersect, Eggers turned my head and impressed me. To the extent it's a memoir of life as a bratty twenty-something Californian during the Kurt Cobain years, umm, yawn ...

Links: Dave Eggers is editor of the "nice quarterly journal" McSweeney's. Reviews of A Heartbreaking Work have appeared in online and print newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Village Voice, January, Salon; and ironminds.

**About Chris Ware -- I knew the similarity between Eggers' style and Ware's couldn't be purely coincidental. Ware edited Issue 13 of Eggers' McSweeney's (see cover art at top left).

I took AHWOSG on a little junket to Canada's capital city, Ottawa. At left, a photo of AHWOSG visiting Parliament Hill :^). I think the book enjoyed the trip, 'though I can't be sure (it was a little quiet ...).

Mailed to Rrrcaron in New Hampshire from a post office in Ottawa (see photo at left -- AHWSG is propped against lion's right paw) on Wednesday, July 28th. This should be a shorter journey for the trip than mailing it from New Westminster would have been -- hope it won't take too long to reach you!

I received this book yesterday. I will be starting it soon.
Ruth

I'm so glad I had the chance to read this book. I felt so much for the main character. All his thoughtswere exposed, as well as the things he went through. We all do that, have these weird thoughts that take place at very serous events. Sending on to Kali297 as soon as I receive her address.
Ruth

Thanks, I received this in the mail today, along with another bookray book. I'll try to read both as soon as I can and pass them along. (Love the bookmark!)
UH-OH!!! CAN YOU DELETE THIS DUPLICATE ENTRY?? I CAN ONLY EDIT IT. I HAD TO CLICK SO MANY TIMES TO SUBMIT IT BEFORE THE SITE WOULD ACCEPT IT THAT I MUST HAVE HIT IT ONE TOO MANY TIMES.

Thanks, I received this in the mail today, along with another bookray book. I'll try to read both as soon as I can and pass them along. (Love the bookmark!)

I just finished reading AHWOSG a few days ago and have PM'd the next person, who had to pass on it, so I'm waiting to hear from the NEXT next BX'er, who probably has been having fun on New Year's weekend instead of sitting around on the computer like me. I'll be mailing this ASAP when I hear back.
This book didn't really engage me until page 72. When he vividly--and yes, heartbreakingly--described a life of altered circumstances and the sudden and increasing responsibility for a young life (trying to find a decent home for a kid in low-rent neighborhoods), it became all too real to me again after all these years--I could relate! The guilt, the trauma, of single parenting!! In his case, the parents were dead, and balancing the care of his young brother with the demands of his own life required strategizing with military precision, as every single parent knows. Eggers has a wildly creative and facile brain, and a way of thinking about thinking that can drive a reader insane at times. His constant obsessing and second-guessing soon became tiresome but I stuck it out. I think this book was conceived out of loss not only of his parents, but of a comfortable existence in Lake Forest, where he grew up, before tragedy struck. I lived in a neighboring Chicago suburb once and know the snobbery and competiveness of those enclaves north of Chicago. Lots of people lose a parent, and some lose both, in circumstances similar to Eggers'. But he had farther to fall than many. And the fluency to articulate the experience. To elevate oneself above the superficiality and snootiness of a community of people you grew up with, feeling that you didn't measure up in level of affluence, requires a certain kind of courage and bravado, and Eggers strutted his stuff like a peacock, developing his own kind of pride, arrogance and vanity, though often tongue-in-cheek, as a survival mechanism. To his constant amazement, the heartbreaking work that was his fate gave him confidence, an awesome confidence, as he conquered one problem after another that would have crushed lesser brothers -- Look at us! Aren't we something? Us against the world and winning and withering everything in our path!
So for me, reading the book wasn't much different than reading the back cover (yes, I actually read the back cover--an exercise in total futility, almost like reading the perplexing amount of tiny print squeezed on the label of a bottle of Dr. Bonner's "magic" peppermint soap--hmmmmm, I wonder if maybe that's where Eggers got the idea....). The back cover is a preview of the--again, the operative word--staggering--volume of words, words, words. This man loves to write, lives to write, will never stop writing, is a writing machine, has produced a 437-page newsfeed, clickety-clackity, ticker tape spewing....angry, hilarious, energizing, exhausting....I loved this book, but I can only say that now that it's behind me.

Sorry it took a few days longer than expected but I'm putting this in the mail to gerenggat today. Enjoy!

It's finally arrived :-) It must have stopped a few times along the way to admire the sights ;o) Will try to read it very soon so it can continue its travels.