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Onvan City of God Nevisande E.L Doctorow ISBN 452282098 ISBN13 9780452282094 Dar 272 Safhe Saal e Chap 2000

I wouldn t wish this upon my most vilest of enemies It reads like a 600 page collection of sloppily unpretty mixed media too bad it doesn t make one SINGLE IMPRESSION Doctorow takes on very heavy stuff RELIGION gives us an even heavier account rife with questions questions YUCK Sad I can now safely vouch for this sad and misdirected and confusing was the mindset of 9 11 victims Here is a testament on how f ed we truly were as a result of 2001 crashing down upon an already overpopulated overindu [...]

City of God is mosaic in structure and polyphonic in narration City of God is a piece of postmodern theology and theosophy or of heresy and sacrilege if you please Lord, there is something so exhausted about the NY waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease The place is New York City Movies are using up the cities, the countrysides, the seas, and [...]

I m a grumpy looking, successful author who has ideas for 2 or 3 stories but not enough character development, what do I do I know, mash em up, and don t even try to meld the separate storylines fact, don t use commas or quote marks when characters speak Throw in some Einsteinian Physics, heck throw Einstein in as well So what do we have An Episcopalian Priest about to be defrocked, A new school female rabbi, a philandering bachelor, and a Physicist We also have some historical characters Einste [...]

The obscure story telling style of this book actually comes off perfectly for the story matter In this book the author is looking for God And it is a great discussion Partially through some narrative threads, partially through thoughts and observations taken from science, not so pop culture The book is broken up into little vignettes, from a half page to a long one around 8 pages The narrators change constantly, and are only sometimes clearly identifiable Frankly, if I knew all this, I would pro [...]

You know how Seinfeld was a show about nothing City of God is a book about everything I am now the first person to have put Seinfeld E.L Doctorow together in the first two sentences of anything And having started off with my own big bang there, next I shall steal from someone on who wrote about this book that it will provide you with retrospective gratification I couldn t possibly think of a way to put it better City of God is not always fun while you re reading it, but it s amazing once you ve [...]

I was torn as to how many stars to give this one It is a five star on literary merit, but only a two star on the did I like it scale Since this is my review, I went with the two stars.Foremost, this is a thought provoking and interesting book What I found unsettling about this book is that, in my opinion, the author is proselytizing his own sociopolitical agenda As E.L Doctorow has strong leftist political opinions, my reading of this book is obviously going to be affected by my own opposing vie [...]

About the novel 1 It is a bit of everything and whole of nothing.2 There are themes in the novel and they are either undeveloped or underdeveloped or overdeveloped No theme is well developed.3 The premise is good But the execution is floppy.4 There are characters But there is no deep understanding into a character The characters are wooden.A Small Explanation The novel contains a real appreciable premise the search for a believable God in the times of great scientific discoveries on the one hand [...]

I read City of God by E.L Doctorow over Easter It is one of the books on the 1001 list So, how did I find it Intriguing, thought provoking, frustrating, confusing but I really enjoyed it A word of warning the plot is pretty much secondary to this book In fact large portions of the book are tied fairly tenuously to the main plot and there are various threads Part of the difficulty is that there are several different narrators but it is not necessarily straight forward to work out who is narrating [...]

i keep reading this quotation over and over ere are billions of galaxies with stars beyond number, so that even if a fraction of stars have orbiting planets with moons in orbit around thema few planets, at least, may have the water necessary for the intelligent life that could be suffering the same metaphysical crisis that deranges us So we have that to feel good about what draws me to it it s a concise, perfect, indirect summary of the human psyche what do you want then this our oceans are pul [...]

I won this book in a giveaway And it s a difficult one to read The threadbare plot of this novel involves the theft of a cross from a rundown Episcopal church in downtown Manhattan only to appear atop the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue The church s rector, Reverend Tom Pemberton, meets the synagogue s rabbi, Joshua Gruen, and they decide to play detectives and find out the who and why surrounding the mystery of the stolen cross Gruen s wife, Sarah Blumenthal, is also a rabbi The author rel [...]

I cannot believe a how terrible this book is and b that I read it This is godawful garbage from top to bottom The entire thing is smug, self indulgent stream of consciousness unburdened by things like plot and characterization The writing is terrible the type of meaningless word salad generated by the mentally ill or those who have suffered traumatic brain injury This book thinks it is really deep It reads like Doctorow pulled a muscle patting himself on the back for all his supposed deep philos [...]

I will say this stay far away from this book if you can t tolerate ambiguity There are multiple story lines and narrators that weave in and out with no warning at all There are no chapters I spent the first 20 pages thinking I forgot how to read But once you find your groove, it gets pretty easy.I did not finish this book, but that doesn t mean I didn t like it, because I did for the most part Doctorow s musings on faith and religion were really interesting and gave me a lot to think about I thi [...]

A stand up fun read if you re a spiritual person not religious and in the context of this book I d probably lump atheist with religious I m not usually a big fan of things being interestingly written wonky margins, aimless perspectives, radioplays, whatnot but this book kept all its zany ness in focus and created a kind of lexicon or inner dialogue with its various speaking parts And even though I could have guessed the ending, I still really liked where it went and how Doctrow brought it there [...]

Finally, a Doctorow I can really like I knew keeping at him would pay off.Multiple plot lines and stories, and all the pieces matter Love this kind of story.

3.5 starsI loved parts of this book, highlighted quotes and passages throughout, and found it deep and thought provoking The first half would have been 4 5 star book but after a while I found the switching narratives and piecemeal approach somewhat tedious I m not sure why this happened since I appreciated this at the beginning and I thought that structurally it was brilliant.This is the sort of book that is a very slow read and requires that you really digest the material in order to understand [...]

Rating this book was hard for me I really need two rating systems As an overall story, and with my ratings of other books in mind, it lands a solid three which does not mean it is bad in any way However, in considering Doctorow s writing itself, his approach to this book, and the pseudo philosophical and theological nature of the work, it s in the 4 5 range This is the first Doctorow book I ve read and I really enjoyed it, even though I strongly disagree with the overall message of the book Them [...]

This book is a puzzle A puzzle, where you didn t get the box with the picture on it but just had to figure it out for yourself.For quite a few pages I sat wondering what was going on, how are these fragments related and is this book a work of genious or a work by a man, who couldn t write a decent novel But then it slowly grew on me The story of the boy in the jewish ghetto during WWII really drew me in and slowly, and stories started to make sense and the missing picture started to show.This [...]

Some great writing, but the book failed to come together for me Took longer to read than DFW s Infinite Jest Felt no impetus to keep reading only a vague curiosity and bullheadedness allowed me the complete the book in 8 months A collated collection of fragments with no attempt to create a waking dream through narrative one is continuously being shoved awake Not a huge fan of that I already know I m reading a book, you needn t keep reminding me.Trying to understand what he was getting at cosmolo [...]

Hmma musing on the state of society, our modern cities, through the eyes of a priest who loses one faith to convert to another for the love of a woman This is another of the books to drop off the list, and I can easily see why I m sure if you know things about narrative structure and rhythms and all that kind of stuff then this novel is interesting, it skips rapidly between ideas, philosophical musings and recent history, falling out of standard narrative paragraphs into what I might tentatively [...]

I put this right up there with Don DeLillo s Falling Man as one of the greatest contemporary American novels It s epic and Faulknerian, comprised of the voices of an Episcopal priest, two rabbis, the priest s father and uncle, one of the rabbi s Holocaust survivor father, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a narrator who may be the author, a filmmaker, and a covetous, murderous lover It tackles the big stuff God, religion, love, suffering, the nature of the universe And it s written in a wide [...]

I was completely blown away by the first 50 or so pages of this book Doctorow s prose is beautiful and his description of living in New York City was strikingly accurate As the book unfolded, however, I couldn t quite tell what he was trying to do There were many different narrators, some of whom were never identified Although the many different stories Doctorow incorporates into City of God are interesting in themselves, the book did not seem like a cohesive whole That said, the ending tied up [...]

Not sure I understood this book, it does jump around a lot and I was not always sure who I was reading about or when I found the making of the earth got a bit scientific as well I did however enjoy the story of the jewish runner during the war and was disappointed this was cut short and you never really found out what happened after the train journey.

I love reading brave, bizarre books like this I don t pretend to have understood it all, but I really, really liked it To see my review please visit anzlitlovers.wordpress 201

For whatever reason, had never read any ELD Probably because of the boring sounding titles, honestly Overall I found this book stimulating and a nice, casual smackdown of, say, Infinite Jest.

The most quotable book I ve read in a while Even now I still don t know who was talking or what its even about but wow, one helluva ride.

Mi piaciuto, ma ci ho capito poco.Questa prima lettura servita solo per capire la struttura del romanzo a grandi linee.Credo me ne servirebbero altre due o tre

I think that his ideas are interesting but the flow is off due to the structure off the book in not allowing us to find out what character is speaking to us The book started to be good towards the end when Everett, Sarah, and Pem begin to ask what constitutes religion, tradition versus a group of people spirituality I think Everett is correct in his assessment whereas fiction can tease out moral ambiguities, film has a straighter simpler narrative that lends itself to better action.The book star [...]

First of all, I have to state that is the kind of book that could only be published by an established author A book this unfocused and pointless would be laughed at if a new author were to present it to a publisher Despite the fact that this book has very little in the way of plot or character development, there is a logic behind it Doctorow uses the paradigm of a novel set in modern day New York to present his ideas about religion and how it influences Jews and Christians in the modern world Do [...]

Thoroughly enjoyable While a bit tedious in some passages, the overall feel and gist was one that struck me a thoughtful and introspective examination in novel form of some high and low points of the 20th century.