Interessant maar erg complex boek. Veel verschillende personages met hun eigen verhaallijnen die elkaar allemaal doorkruisen. ( )

Not sure why this clicked so much with me despite rating A Visit from the Goon Squad so low, I might need to revisit that one and actually log my thoughts. In any case, this was just packed with heart and great character exploration using a lot of different methods and jumping around in time, so it was hard to get overly bored with any particular delivery method. I actually probably would have rated it a 5 but I had the nagging feeling I could have more context if I had read Goon Squad more recently, so I may have to read them back-to-back sometime in the future. ( )

I have very little interest in reading a book that contains the phrase ‘suckling at her breast’ in the first few lines. Flipping through the first chapter, it got worse and it’s a nope for me. ( )

I wish there had been more showing, less telling, and fewer mock playful exclamation points(!).

A nice explanation for the book's title and the role of older individuals in society: "The only route to relevance at our age is through tongue-in-cheek nostalgia, but that is not--let me be very clear--our ultimate ambition. Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them." ( )

Genius, genius, genius. ( )

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

Was really looking forward to reading as this as I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad. With that said I had read the Goon Squad a long time and didn't remember it as being ripe for a sequel.
I think you could easily read this without reading the first one.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, fascinating premise, interesting story which has some real relevance to advances in modern life. But the real star of this book is the characters which weave though the book as each chapter unfold as new story told in a new voice.
My only knock is that the pace and story drags a little around the 60-80% area, thankfully it picks up again and the ending is quite something
I had this book as my book of the month back in March this year on my site
https://quizlit.org/book-of-the-month-march-2023

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It is an acknowledged fact that writing book reviews based on the audio version is most frustrating. Not having a hard copy as reference makes it nearly impossible to recall the essential details such as character names, the order of events, and connections between characters. That said, I really enjoyed this novel just for the action, which glides back to A Visit From The Goon Squad and forward to new nightmarish AI inventions. The multiple readers are uniformly excellent. I know I will have read reviews written by others to help me to identify all the complex bonds between all the interconnected personnel and their mutual commission of so many mistakes, but it was still a perfectly enjoyable eleven hours, eleven minutes. ( )

As Bennie Salazar might hum to himself: "oops, I did it again..." Egan uses many of the same characters as "Goon Squad" and, as noticeably, the same structure, including a 'unique' way of telling a story in one of the last chapters/stories of the novel. If you liked it the first time you'll probably like it the second time while if the first time had some issues for you, well, so does the second!

However, it is true I think that "Candy House" has more of a traditional plot connecting many of the various characters and stories. That plot being the development of a method for people to upload all of their memories and even their subjective conscious states of mind into the cloud to be accessible to anyone, and a concurrent movement of "eluders" who get bots to take over their online personas while they go off-grid.

Why people need bots to run their online accounts instead of just deleting or abandoning them, I don't know. I don't pay for a bot to run my mostly abandoned Facebook account after all, why would I? I didn't understand why these characters would either. Which points to a weakness of the book. Egan creates such a vast cast of characters and continually starts over from new perspectives that much of the novel is working on characterization and filling these characters out. Treatment of this plot is therefore somewhat shallow. You're not going to get a very deep dive into philosophies of social media or uploading consciousness or futurism or anything like that.

What you will get is a lot of skilled characterization and a couple of nonconventional storytelling chapters, one in email and one in a series of brief aphorisms, sort of like the opening section of Kierkegaard's Either/Or.

It's interesting to note that almost every time I've seen someone mention "Goon Squad" when talking about this sequel of sorts, they add that they remember very little about it. I'd suggest that's another weakness of this particular storytelling mode shared between these two books, and that you'll probably remember very little about "Candy House" a few years down the line either. ( )

I just don’t know about this book, even though the New York Times Book Review listed among the 10 best books of 2022. I bought it last year on the recommendation of the bookrista at my favorite independent book store. (Yes, I am coining that “bookrista” word.) I know Jennifer Egan is a literary darling, but even though her A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize, I did not love it, and this book, while not exactly a strict sequel, reintroduces some of the characters in that one. I found this book even less compelling and had to struggle to not discard it. However, you don’t have to have read the previous book to read this one; it can stand alone.

Ms. Egan writes well and has sharp insights on contemporary issues, but I just found the structure of the book (many narrators in different modes of “reporting” their story) did not move the narrative along all that well and I was confused by the many characters introduced briefly then appearing later in the story years later; I would have to page backwards to figure out who they were. I have read reviews that call this a “brilliant portrait of intersecting lives,” but to me it was more like scattershot tweets, as opposed to a running dialog. Or maybe I am just old and the technology that permeates this book – this whole notion of uploading your memories and viewing others’ memories in an AI database – is creepy to me, although, I realize, hardly far-fetched given the information people carelessly share on social media. As I said early, I had to struggle to stay with it to the end. It deserves more than the three stars I gave it, but it does not deserve four, in my opinion.
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Borrowing the sf premise of uploading your memories, Egan gives us a near-future alternate history. Much as I love sf and fantasy it's all about suspended disbelief but I don't think bodily time-travel (though it's possible other ways might be) will ever be a thing nor this, but whatever - accept it and move on to enjoy a story that encircles a group of people who through marriages and work are loosely connected. Brings to mind David Mitchell who has done this successfully. I read attentively and of course some of the people interested me more than others. Egan uses some different modes than straight narrative too, a sort of compressed note form, email, but mostly it is classical narrative. Her insights are often powerful.
Good solid read. ****1/2

These passages struck a chord with me.
"Back when he was the only Black PhD student in NYU's engineering lab, Bix had found himself laughing hard at other people's jokes and trying to make them laugh, a dynamic that left him feeling hollow and depressed. After getting his PhD, he cut out laughing at work, then cut out smiling, and cultivated instead an air of hyperactive absorption. He listened, he witnessed, but with almost no visible response. That discipline had intensified his focus to a pitch that he was convinced, in retrospect, had helped in outwit and outmaneuver
the forces aligned in readiness to absorb him, co-opt him, shunt him aside and replace him with the white men everyone expected to see." p.11

And this:
"Gregory gazed, transfixedm as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk, like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery--of rapture--that seemed to lift him out of the snow."

Lovely homage to Joyce (last paragraph of "The Dead") and lovely on its own too. ( )

If there’s not a real plot because the book is a nonlinear collection of interconnected parts, either the parts have to be interesting or you have to care about the characters, and neither was the case for me here. ( )

In the near future, everyone is either obsessed with technology obsessed with avoiding it. Chapters feature different loosely connected characters. I didn't love the story, but as always with Egan, the characters are beautifully developed. ( )

This one, I loved. ( )

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan was a miss for poor old Briar's Reviews.

I like trying new authors and books whenever I can. I had a book store clerk tell me that this book was THE BEST EVER and that I absolutely had to pick it up. So I figured, why not? Rarely do I ever get book recommendations so I bought the book and let it sit for a while. I decided to pick it up and was highly disappointed.

This book just wasn't for me. I didn't like the author's writing style and the story just didn't connect with me. I was completely and utterly confused with what was going on in the book - it changed to every point of view possible and then was a journal or a tweet and... I don't get it. The stories and timelines didn't match up and felt like it wasn't connected at all. I'm sure there is a way it's connected but my poor brain couldn't do the math. I don't get the point.

This book is well loved so give it a try yourself, but I won't be trying anymore books from Jennifer Egan for a while. It's just not my thing, which is perfectly okay. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-candy-house-by-jennifer-egan-brief-note/

Started quite well, a novel about people in an extended family living their lives increasingly online, but I did not feel it stuck the landing, and rather lost the run of itself before the end. ( )

In this near-future sci-fi, they have invented a technology that lets you record your memories. Just as would no doubt happen if the likes of Zuckerberg had access to this technology, people can upload their memories to the cloud and other people can view them and corporations can mine the memories for data. The book focuses on the man who created the social media company that sells the technology, and an extended circle of people around him. The book can be confusing at times (particularly as an audiobook where you can't flip back to remind yourself who people are) because the story is told out of order, and all of the characters are connected to each other but often in very tangential ways, so it takes some effort to figure out how everything is connected.

I'm not quite sure the book was worth the effort? I enjoyed this more than Goon Squad, but I am not as enchanted with Egan as a lot of other readers are. She's a good writer, and creates some compelling characters, but it felt like she was trying to accomplish too much in this book and I'm not sure it really held together. ( )

I liked parts of this book, where compelling characters emerged and the writing was enjoyable. But those parts didn't -- for me -- fit together into a cohesive whole. Were it not that many other reviewers have said the same thing, I would blame my age, disconnection from social media, preference for a story, etc etc etc. To damn with faint praise: Interesting. ( )

This is an interesting book not least of which because of the way Egan tells the story. Or rather, stories, as she has essentially written 14 short stories, one about each character, and tied them all together in an intricate weaving. She begins with Bix. His Mandala technology and the social media he builds based on it are the context for these character studies. In the first chapter the narrator says that his original vision of the idea was to create a "luminous sphere of interconnection." He does this by uploading people's memories and conciousness so that they can access them anytime. But so can anyone else. The idea of interconnection through social media is explored in the structure of the book as all of the characters are interconnected in some way - some directly and others indirectly. It is truly an exploration of both the good and bad aspects of social media in our lives. What we share, how we share it, and what happens to it after is has been shared are explored through the lives of her characters and she takes a critical look at what is both good about it and what is negative. The idea is well conceived but the story, at least for me, bogs down in a few places. Still, overall it is a very thought provoking and timely read with good writing and wonderful characterizations. ( )

Jennifer Egan could make a plumbing manual riveting. I am so fond of her writing style and creativity. When I heard there was a Goon Squad #2 coming I was immediately jumping to get my hands on an advanced copy. Lucky for me I did get one and devoured this book over the course of a few days. This work is a beautiful mish-mash of styles and flips points of view and characters weave in and out through the chapters. I found it fun to connect the dots as to how the characters were related. Non-linear, abstract and complex, this requires some work for the reader, but I found it delightful. I laughed at parts and also was moved by others, but through it all I was in awe of the writing. Here’s one of many examples: “The bedroom we shared with our mother faced a canopy of fronds like the fingers of a dozen hands. Even on sunny days, it made a sound like rain.” Heavenly writing that I could praise for days. ( )

The novel has 14 chapters each told by a different character. The characters are all related in some way to each other. The underlying plot premise is that some of the characters were involved in the creation of a product that lets you externalize and capture all of your memories. Some people choose to let their memories become part of a globally accessible database of memories, so that a subscriber can, for example, review an event in their life from the point of view of the memories of all the participants - living and dead. Some, initially eccentrics, choose to exclude themselves from the system. The analogy to the internet and social media is obvious. The different character’s stories explore various aspects of the author’s imagined consequences of such a monstrosity. It seemed to me that these explorations were overall a little superficial and that most of the novel concerns interpersonal relationships that were independent of the main plot premise. I didn't do it, but you might want to write down the relationships among these characters as you go, so when you get to the middle of the book you don't find yourself asking, "She is the friend of whose next door neighbor?" As in her previous A Visit from the Goon Squad, Ms. Egan has tried to achieve a sense of non-linear time by using both different narrators and different writing techniques, e.g. a series of e-mails or text messages, in each chapter. The novel bored me at times, perhaps because I’ve read A Visit from the Goon Squad and I’m so easily jaded. My favorite chapter is the last one about the memories of a little boy’s experience playing baseball. It makes a few different points in a subtle and moving way, and I think it shows what the rest of the novel could have been, but isn’t quite. ( )

This is so engrossing and well-written and intricately detailed. Short stories woven together through the people in them being somehow connected. I don't know if I kept up with all the connections, but characters were always reappearing in unexpected ways. It creates a picture that literally shows the ways people want to be connected to each other and will go to great lengths for that connection - or disconnection. The introduction story took me the longest to get through, but once you meet more characters and start making connections, it's hard to put this down. My favorite story was formatted like a Bible chapter with verse numbers and double column text about a citizen spy, written in second person observations.
I want to re-read Goon Squad now to see what connections there are between these two books. ( )

Maybe it's the format. It could be that a print version might have been more comprehensible.

The premise sounded so intriguing: the ability to upload one's consciousness to a collective online platform, making it available to others.

The first chapter, which was the most coherent in the book, held out promise that we might be following a main character. Most of the remaining chapters were tolerable as other characters, either present in or loosely tied to the small cast introduced in Chapter 1, were explored in more depth. I listened and waited for the author to show me how each character/story/subplot fit into the larger puzzle.

The later chapters, though - one, an interminable 2nd-person narrative of how to be a spy, and another a long string of epistolary droning, were just noise. I was baffled, but also so close to the end that I figured I would keep going.

If this had been presented as a short story collection rather than a novel I might have had different expectations and been more comfortable with a lack of cohesiveness; I would have discounted at least two of the short stories as not worth my time, and moved on. I might not have been quite as disappointed and irritated at myself for wasting my time.

I didn't realize until after I had finished the book and this is the 2nd book in the Goon Squad world. Maybe if I'd read the first book (which I won't be doing anytime soon) I might have appreciated this installment more. I might not feel that I somehow missed the point and lost the story. ( )

The candy house is a metaphor for social media, and its impact on our lives. Like unsuspecting children in a fairy story, we enter the attractive house, unaware of the malign influences that it hides, seeking to take advantage of us.

Bix Bouton invents the Mandala Cube, a device that allows you to store your entire memories to that time, and use a service called Own Your Unconscious to upload it to the web, where you and others can access it. This proves to have massive benefits for some purposes, and provoke massive criticism from other sources.

My problem with this book was that the big number of characters, the complexities of the relationships between them, and the chronological shifts left me at sea as to who was who and what a particular chapter signified in relation to what had gone before. There were also clear tie-ins to A Visit From the Goon Squad, a book that I read so long ago that I could not recall it at all. I ended up treating each section of the book as a vignette on its own, as I could not make the book cohere into a whole in my mind. I would probably have rated this much higher, if not for that.

I sometimes wished that Own Your Unconscious was real, in order to make sense of this book. ( )

After Visit From The Goon Squad I thought I'd be up for anything of Egan's, but this one didn't gel for me. Too many interchangeable characters. Maybe I've scrambled my mind with too many toppling plethoras of books lately; has anyone officially designated Goodreads Syndrome? Egan's themes of authenticity and transferable memory sets are ones I'd like to have drilled into more directly. Could she have gotten overconfident about some of her readership's ability to match her pace? Or has somewhat lazily bought into SF-style allusive beating-around-the-bushness in showcasing her leading ideas? ( )

I was a huge fan of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but it was published in 2010, and I personally finished it in 2018. If I had know that The Candy House was truly a sequel and used many of the same characters, I would have re-read Goon Squad first.

Unfortunately, I didn't.

And since I was reading an ARC, I didn't even have Kindle's handy dandy X-ray to help me keep track of the myriad of characters.

All that being said, I still love Egan's writing style and creative mind. Each chapter does have the feeling of a stand alone short story, which is a format I really enjoy. But in this book, I was distracted with thoughts of, "Wait, have I met this character earlier? How is he/she related to these other characters? Is that even important?"

So, my recommendation to other readers is re-read Goon Squad and read the books back to back if you really want to get the most out of The Candy House.

I will probably buy this book after it is released (and X-ray is available), and read both books in a row . . .I felt like I missed out on the best of a writer I truly admire. ( )