Not at all-it was like being inside someone else's train-of-thought, but without the claustrophobia. Thought this would make for a sort of avant-garde, 'performance art' experience.

Also, the reader Dion Graham really is superlative-I bought the book on a Salon recommendation that praised his ability to capture in his read the way an Eggers page is 'composed' (with eccentric spacing, elisions, etc.). All this is accomplished without being preachy, or prescriptive. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from. mean for a man trying to survive in the world today, (and so we return to the question of murder, rape and torture.). Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Tom Hanks, Tom Skerritt, and Sarita Choudhury. It's a 'backstory' item, but Eggers returns to it again and again-the whole book's really a rumination on just what the heck went wrong, and what such failures of modernization/corporatization/globalization/etc. At the center of it all is a tale of the decline and dissolution of Schwinn Bicycles (yes!). I didn't expect to like the setting in Saudi Arabia-but Eggers skips the easy exoticisms and creates a world at once unlike anything I expected, yet totally recognizable. But each scene is drawn with purpose and originality.

How? It's a very spare book-an 'easy' listen. Yet here's a book that's been haunting me for months now, and it didn't contain a single scene of murder, rape or torture to do it. You hear people say, '(blank) novel haunted me.' But dig a little deeper, and it's usually some writer's trick of outrageous violence (or some other offense against humanity) at the center of the sentiment. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure.

A hologram for the king novel