April 12 - 18

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
This book is kind of like the t.v. show The Office. It's just a story about a bunch of people who work at a job that they sometimes hate with people who they sometimes hate. It took me a while to get into it at all---just like it did with The Office. The interesting part of this book is that it's written in... uhm, plural person? I don't even know what to call it because I've never encountered it before. It's written entirely as "we." "We always knew..." "Those of us who wanted bagels would have to wait to hear Benny's story." It's very strange. The story is very heavily focused on dialogue, and is written in such a way as to encourage that group mentality to the point where sometimes you might need to backtrack to figure out who is saying what and at what point chronologically it occurs. The plot is also constructed in a really strange way, because it's a story that's almost entirely stories related by other people being yet again related. There are times where it will be Benny telling Marcia a story, and it will turn to the scene played out between Benny and Chris and suddenly Marcia will say something, apparently having entered the scene between the two men, and it will then simply resume. It's very realistic, but I can see it being confusing at times. I'm still a little baffled by this book. It's like I'm reading a diary that a whole group of people wrote together, or took turns writing in but did so in third person so no one knew who said what. The characters are developed in a roundabout way since everything is largely he-said-she-said. I didn't know it was even possible to write a book this way.