Book

I loved this book. I bought it because I thought it would be funny to read a book called Book, then I started it and I really couldn’t put the book down. It was incredibly written, engaging, funny, and entirely consuming. It could be dense at parts, but it wasn’t superfluous, it just had that much to say.

One of the best books I've ever read. Brilliant. Funny. Ironic. Both serious and funny, genre and parody, surreal and genuine. I just finished reading it for the second time. (Gotta love those rebellious footnotes!)

If you have sullied your shoes in the quagmire of academic politics, you will find this book amusing. (If you haven't, it's still pretty darned funny, although it does require an appreciation for in-jokes of the academic kind.)

I read this book when it came out, 7 or 8 years ago, and enjoyed it hugely. I'm online now to order a paperback copy--I've always intended to own it but never got around to it. One measure of how good this is is that a great friend of mine hates it. He's bright enough, but often a bit thick-headed if he feels out of his depth contextually (as a teenager in the early eighties, he didn't laugh at Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because he felt its humor presupposed a familiarity with science fiction which he lacked). So rather than enjoy Book as the glorious lampoon that it is, he preferred to see it as a frivolous 5-finger exercise with too many in jokes. The mark of a good funny book: over-literal types shouldn't like it! But it's the best medicine for the rest of us!!

Who says that you need to have a computer to have an interactive book? This novel, at once a thriller--with psychopathic killers and deranged college professors and literate cops--is also a romance--with an author fantasizing over his wild untameble literary creations and angelic publishers. Grudin writes with the verve and sophistication of a jazz improvisationalist and still manages to manipulate the plot to keep me turning page after page. And I haven't even mentioned his satirical approach to deconstructionist literary theorists yet.For satire, a good fantasy, and a literate poke at the literati, pick up this Book.

It will be a sad day when this novel goes out of print. (Read Book and you'll understand.) The satire is specific to English departments, but anyone who hates pretension or who has dealt with the inside politics of higher education will really savor it. The writing is clever and inventive, a pleasure to read from the very first page.