City of God through p.64 - Matt

This book is terrible.  If you are considering buying and reading this book, I advise you in no uncertain terms that you should not.  This is the first book that I am reading on the Nook, and for several pages until I touched base with Jake and Ryan, I was under the impression I did something wrong or the download malfunctioned and I only received portions of the book, or a parts of couple different books, or something along those lines.  That is how disjointed and nonsensical this novel is.

There are several competing plot lines that on their own are difficult to follow, and they have no connection at this point.  There are seemingly many different narrators, though they are all the work of one author, who is the real narrator, which is difficult to understand even when stated here, never mind when tossed into the already dense, unclear and disconnected prose.  Doctorow offers no guidance or clarification as to what is happening, and most of what I know about the plot I read online or from Ryan’s original post.

There seems to be a promising examination of modern man’s relationship with God and religion in here somewhere, but it is totally lost under piles of nonsense and bad writing.  Doctorow offers no clues on who is talking, what is happened, and to what end we are working through his drivel.

Doctorow should be embarrassed, as should the publisher and everybody else involved, that this pile of verbose gibberish is being passed off as literature.  Amongst some books of supposed “literary merit” ambiguity and confusion are permitted to run rampant, masquerading as complex subtleties or questions for contemplation, and suffice to say that I am not a fan of it.  Good writing is clear writing, and that goes for literature as well as anything else.

I have struggled through 63 pages, and I could forgive a slow start, but this is too much.  After reading Jake’s review through 140, and seeing that Doctorow has still not produced anything concrete or understandable to that point, I am throwing in the towel on this one.  I am not one to give up on books; I have finished countless bad and marginal books just because I started them.  In that regard, Doctorow has performed quite a feat, writing a book that is bad enough that I refuse to go on.

I understand that Doctorow is quite old, and if not for that, I would very much like to punch him in the head.