Friday, January 12, 2007

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

Sometimes, after reading a book like this, I wonder if maybe I'm just not as intelligent as I think I am. Maybe I'm simply too dense to "get it". I picked up this book because it was on several "best of" lists at the end of last year, and I liked the title – Twilight of the Superheroes.

The book is a collection of several unrelated short stories. Overall, I didn't feel like the stories had much substance.

When I read something, I want to be entertained or informed, surprised or amused, I want to be taken to a new place, a different world, or I want a connection with my current state of existence. I felt none of that with the stories in this book.

The stories never revealed much about the characters, they touched on the ideas of family and relationships and the breakdown of such. They all felt if they contained the potential for something more, but never quite got there. If anything, after I read the stories I felt like, "why did I just bother reading that if I wasn't going to learn anything more about these people?"

If someone else has read this and loved it, feel free to let me know what I missed, because I was fully expecting to like this and am disappointed that I didn't.

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