yay! friends read books togeeeether! and now i can finally link our reviews!i wish i had read this when it first came out. and i am mad at myself for not loving this book as much as everyone else seems to have - when i read other reviews of it, i am jealous that it didn't grip me as much as it did others, as much as her other books have gripped me. there are definite strengths here. she demonstrates an uncanny and impressive cultural prescience; the way william gibson predicted the internet, she...

Karen and I read this book at roughly the same time. Read her review here.Look at Me I'm giving a weak four stars, if there were half-stars it would be a three and a half. Right after I finished reading this I started Egan's collection of short stories Emerald City, and I'm happy I gave Look at Me four stars, so that I could give the story collection three stars and feel like the three Egan books I've read are clearly rated according to my enjoyment of them. I don't know what will happen if I re...

I wish I had given up on this book at the halfway point. I kept waiting for something to happen. . .something that I cared about. . . but nothing ever did. I found the book overly dramatic and I didn't care about any of the drama. I didn't care about any character in the book and had no way to relate to them. The characters I cared most about were not really in the story, i.e., Anthony Halladay's estranged wife, maybe even Halladay himself, the students Moose terrorized at Yale, the Korean child...

I didn't want to like Jennifer Egan; I wanted to love her. I wanted her to be my new favorite writer, but due to some profound personal failing, I can't stand her books, which does pose something of a challenge there. I really don't know what's wrong with me and why I can't love this book like everyone else (i.e., Mike Reynolds); it has something to do with feeling really unimpressed by her prose, and by this feeling that nothing about her writing ever surprises me. I remember this from when I t...

When I was first introduced to this amazing novel I was in no position to appreciate it. This was some four or five years ago, when, as a sophomore English major, I took a well-intentioned but somewhat premature course on 9/11 and the novel. I say premature because the number of novels that dealt directly with the attacks was pretty small at the time, and was further limited by the whims of the professor, who elected to eschew at least two of the more well-known eligible titles; the Foer and McE...

Ever wanted to read a philosophical novel with all the philosophy taken out? Here's your beast. I'd thought, since she's been in the news for a recent novel, that Egan was alive and well, but this novel makes it quite obvious that she died sometime around 1914, and is in fact a Victorian novelist disguised as our contemporary. Why is it obvious?* slightly poetic but otherwise totally banal prose style.* huge numbers of plots that never actually get joined together. * fascination with characters,...

Jennifer Egan has got to be one of the most ambitious writers of fiction working today. I loved both The Keep and A Visit From the Goon Squad, and I'd been looking forward to Look at Me for a good while. Finally I gave myself the gift of time with it. The themes Egan deals with here are dynamite: our hyper-visual culture, the blurred dichotomy between a person's "inside" and "outside," double and triple lives, mutable identities, identities that crumble due to madness. She's intuited the connect...

Jennifer Egan is, to my mind, one of the finest storytellers writing in English today. Look at Me is an extraordinary accomplishment. It's an intricate tale, weaving two main narratives and handful of other voices into a fictional firmament of breathtaking intricacy and eminent believability. It's also a philosophical consideration of identity, persona and the kinds of truths we're unwilling to admit even to ourselves.I don't want to give too much away; immerse yourself in the beauty of the pros...

In my summer quest to read some of the titles that have been languishing on my TBR for years, I picked up Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel, Look at Me. Egan is an author I should love. Her books (of which I’ve read four now) contain all the elements I love to read: non-linear storytelling; complex and damaged characters; and the exploration of a big idea. Look at Me is no exception as it explores the idea of how we see – ourselves, others, the world, truth – through the shifting perspectives of four v...

Video reviewSo prescient it's scary, it features an unforgettable cast of characters headed at breakneck speed toward certain doom. No need for that title, it's impossible to look away.

I couldn't wait to finish this book. I just wanted it to end with every turn of the page. Despite the book turning into a perpetual monkey on my back, I was resolute on not giving up on it. It's just not in my genetic make-up to give up and be defeated, even by a densely crap book. Despite the pain, I wanted to keep on reading, not because I wanted to discover what happened, but because I have this 'thing' about half-finished projects, or anything in life, really, and this also goes for books. J...

I am surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Reading during one of those godawful endurance tests when works spills well beyond the professional boundaries I've established long ago to keep my job's ruinous hands off the things that make life enjoyable almost always spells disaster for whatever unfortunate book is the victim of bad timing (and often absolutely no free time at all), as late nights and occupational frustration leave little brainpower and less desire to read things I'm not paid

At the end of Look at Me there is an afterword from Jennifer Egan, explaining that she finished the final revision of the novel in January 2001. She goes on to say that the character of the terrorist who appears in the book, and the book itself, would have had to be entirely reconceived if it had still been a work in progress on September 11 of that year. No doubt this is true; after that, all writers became post-9/11 writers whether they wanted to or not. But the slight whiff of apology that em...

"After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see."Where to begin. I read Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning book and was not impressed at all. Having decided to give her a second chance, I could not be more satisfied with my decision. This book is all about identity. But that statement seems quite over-simplified, given the number

Given it up. I'm reading A Tiger for Malgudi which is wonderfully written and a genius idea that incorporates a good story, pretty low comedy, philosophy, an unclothed sadhu and a tiger that needs to change its ways. I honestly can't see how Jennifer Egan's writing, at least in Look at Me can be considered excellent and on a par with Narayan's. It's true I've only read about a quarter of the book but it is written as if the heroine (and everyone else) has no inner life other than worrying about

A massively over-written novel which would have benefited from a less wordy author and/or a competent editor. Egan never bothers to use one word where sixteen flowery, uber-lyrical, overblown words will do. Convoluted sentences and showy vocabulary add little - indeed, they become nugatory and self-defeating. Odd, really, given the snappiness of Goon Squad (that horrendous, anal Powerpoint nonsense excepted) but perhaps Egan has now learned to refine and streamline her style - or found herself a...

Our book club usually meets at a restaurant, but one of our members is a newly minted Mary Kay rep (ask me about my eyeliner!) so we decided to meet at a member's house and have a combined meeting/Mary Kay presentation. In the spirit of beauty and identity and over-thinking everything, we decided to read a book which discussed those issues, so I asked Goodreads to recommend something, and this book is what it (you? we?) came up with.I'm sure there is a great novel out there which deals with issu...

I actually have a lot of complaints - well, maybe not complaints - about Look at Me. It's a big mess of a book, but it's a smart mess. Egan is wildly imaginative and she has a lot of great ideas, but they don't cohere satisfactorily in the end.

Re-reading!***I am so hot for Jennifer Egan right now. As I read this book (about a whole lot more than a model who gets a new face after a car accident, by the way), I often had to stop and admire the fluidity of Egan's narrative, how she moved in and out of action, in and out of flashback, in and out of a character's head. This book seemed so effortless, yet complicated, and I learned a lot about novel-making from reading it.There was a chunk of about 60 pages near the end when I suddenly was