Purity

This has been in my queue ever since it was published and I was leery of tackling it. Sorry I waited so long. I read it in one weekend though I do have to say that I was more interested in the story line then I was in a lot of what I considered unnecessary fluff. I enjoyed the way he introduced each character and saw they all were connected at the end. The first (primary) character was at the center of them all and I enjoyed her evolution through the story. All the characters were very compelling, some in a good way and some in a bad way. Highly recommend.

Lots of people love to hate Franzen, but I don't really care one way or the other. What matters is the work, and this book is brilliant. Long, yes, but brilliant. It's the story of Purity Tyler and also the story of purity–mostly in the false sense because of universal moral ambiguity. Purity, nicknamed Pip, changes deeply over the course of the novel, in the way a reader ought to find satisfying–all of that against a backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the rise of the great leakers of our time.

This is definitely the most high-brow book Worst Bestsellers has done. There were parts of this that were enjoyable and well-done, but overall Franzen's Woman Problem cannot be ignored...

For 90 anguished minutes on this book:

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-35-purity/