Rating: 
Summary: Hours of my life that I will never get back...
Review: OK, so what did I miss? I hated this book!! Actually, I can't think of many books that I hated more than this book. Perhaps I am not quite as avant-garde as other readers,or perhaps my childhood was just too functional to understand this piece of work. I enjoy suspending belief as much as the next reader, but this is asking for too much. I felt like no plot was ever really established and that the author never really got a handle on his characters - he tried to portray them in too many dimensions and ended up making me hate all of them (particularly Enid), with the exception of Alfred. As I said, this book represents wasted hours of my life that I will never get back...but it represents 7 years of Mr. Franzen's life that he will never get back. Better luck next time.
Rating: 
Summary: The dark side of the human heart
Review: I tried to like this book; however, I found the plot to be bleak and sad and the very opposite of noteworthy. There is not one likeable character doing one kind, charitable or generous act during the entire plodding book. I am not looking for an uplifting book with a "message" or a puerile happy ending, but I would like to think that there is more to life and living than is characterized in this book. I like books that make me think while I am reading them and, if I am fortunate, when I have finished reading them. Jonathan Franzen has created a group of greedy, self-serving characters who never deviate from our initial introduction to them. The author has talent - the characters are well defined and the plot makes sense within the confines of the structure created by Franzen. The world is surely peopled by persons who belie his definition of living within a family. This book saddened my heart.
Rating:
Summary: I Should've Known Better
Review: With all the hype surrounding this book I should've known better than to buy it. I read half of it and finally had to put it down when I realized it wasn't going to get any better. There is nothing enjoyable about this book. I couldn't care less about the characters - I didn't like them, I didn't hate them - they're pathetic and uninteresting. The author goes off on meaningless tangents that add nothing to the story. It seems as if he took ideas from many different stories and threw them together. I find it hard to believe that Oprah liked it. I've read most of the books on her list and while I didn't care for some of them, at least they were cohesive stories. Don't waste your time or money on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Meet The Lamberts
Review: The Lambert family consists of five people: Enid, her husband Alfred, and their three children, Gary, Chip, and Denise. Alfred has developed Parkinson's disease and his physical and mental health is steadily and tragically deteriorating. Enid wants the entire family to get together for one last Christmas at their home in St. Jude, presumably before Alfred dies. Enid originally wanted Gary to bring along his wife and children for Christmas, but it is apt that he eventually goes by himself. After all, this book begins and ends with the immediate family._The Corrections_ concerns the interrelationships of these five characters. The books also gets into the individual lives of the three grown children and with Enid's increasing inability to cope with Alfred's illness. What I found particularly interesting were the various individual relations and alliances that form within this family, including the expectations each family member has for the other. Gary is Enid's favorite, and as a child endeavors to work hard to please his mother. Chip, the intellectual and later errant middle son, is Alfred's favorite, and the only one that Alfred is able to trust after he becomes ill. Alfred is seen calling Chip's name for help, even when Chip is not present. Both parents are concerned for Denise, who is the youngest and their only daughter. Denise becomes a talented chef and restauranteur. Enid is afraid that Denise is having an affair with a married man and that she will never marry. Denise has other ideas. This is not just another book about a dysfunctional family with quirky characters. Each family member is well-drawn, three dimensional, and flawed. I got to know and love each of them for their faults, with the possible exception of the money grubbing Gary. I especially liked Alfred, whose plight, although quite sad, is also inadvertently funny, as his illness gets him into a number of serio-comic situations. Alfred is a very bright man with the potential, unfortunately unrealized, to be the tool of his own cure. By the book's end, I was convinced that any of the Lamberts could have been a member of my own family.
Rating: 
Summary: Is That All There Is?
Review: I wanted to see what all the hype was about - like most people - and couldn't believe my eyes when this book was on the shelf at the library. I snatched it up and dove in. The story is engrossing, the prose is excellent, the feeling is there, but I was disappointed with all of the unnecessary prattle. I did not care about the molecular structure of the drug Corecktal. I did not need to know the most minute detail of the operations in the Ukraine. This slowed the story and interrupted the flow. I think a good 150 pages could have been pared and the book as a whole would have been better for it.
Rating:
Summary: What is all the fuss about?
Review: Overall this book was not worth reading. The writing is excellent but the characters are unsympathetic and there is no plot. A little more than half way through I gave up and gave the book away. I didn't care what happened to any of the characters. This surprised me since I can finish almost anything. Don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: two words- talking feces
Review: Do not feel the need to read this book unless you are a pretentious bore so earnest to prove that you are literary and current that you look and talk like Jonathan Franzen himself. This book would be "quaint" in five years if it weren't so detail-addled and completely devoid of humor. In its desperate quest for relevance, it creates completely unbelievable characters and embarrassing attempts at existentialism. After reading this, I felt much the same way I felt at the end of Titanic... what were those reviewers smoking? Did they pop some Mexican A-? I'm mean, I'm usually a big fan of reading about old guys with incontinence and hallucinations about excrement, but this piece of doo-doo not only talks too much, it stinks.
Rating:
Summary: Get over yourself Franzen..you are good but not THAT good..
Review: I was really, really, looking forward to this book. I thought, by reading some of the reviews that this guy was going to be clever beyond clever.
But in reality, this book is overwritten, to the point of absurdity. This guy makes Cormac Mcarthy look like Robert Fulghum. I didnt like the fact that the characters were not believable, and in some cases that would be fine..but in a book about the craziness of family, I have to really be into the characters. I also find it hard to take authors that are just to cool for the rest of us. He tries to hard to let us know that he is a smart alec..elitist, know it all. This one was not for me.
Rating:
Summary: Dullsville
Review: The Corrections with or without the hype is the most boring book I've ever read. It's about a dysfunctional family who continues being dysfunctional until the very end. I didn't feel compassion for any of the characters. Jonathan Franzen gives too many details about using the bathroom, exactly what everyone ate, how they ate it, why they ate it. If you want to fall asleep, read this book. It's too long and extremely boring.
Rating:
Summary: Correct Me If I'm Wrong But...
Review: ....is this book boringly pedantic or what? I think Franzen needs a spanking for putting his readers through paragraph after paragraph, page after page of extraneous details. I simply skipped these passages until I got back to the main thread of the narrative. Alas, I must admit I did keep reading because of *all the hype* I had read about this book. NONE of the characters is likeable! I think that's the main thing that stuck with me. He's a good writer. He has a way with words, I'll give him that much. But, overall, the book is much ado about nothing.
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