Bloggers weigh in on Generosity

As I find them, I'll add extended comments and reviews, positive and negative, from the blogosphere to the list below. Quite a conversation developing here, with familiar themes as to the varied takes on Powers's abilities as a novelist. You can check on in-print reviews on the main Powers Generosity reviews page at richardpowers.net, which frequently includes hotlinks to the reviews themselves.

Book Sherpa

Brainiac responds eloquently to Peter D. Kramer's Slate review.

The Complete Review

Conversational Reading: "James Wood's Richard Powers Takedown."

Ed Champion's Reluctant Habits entry, also looking at the Wood review, but from a differing perspective: "Needless to say, as I anticipated, Wood has again demonstrated his predictably vanilla failings with idea-driven novels. He is once again hysterical, starving and naked in a sad but interesting way, about a novel that is not always intended to be explicitly realist."

The 941

Ted Gioia on BC Books

Anne Trubek on the Good.is blog. Takes apart a specific aspect of the James Wood argument, regarding Powers's use of speech-recognition software.

Paul LeFarge at Barnes and Noble weighs in with a review.

Mary Whipple on "Seeing the World Through Books": "Once again, Richard Powers has created a novel which reinvigorates the concept of the 'novel of ideas,'"

How To Furnish a Room

Mostly Fiction

Tony's Book World

bookeywookey: "Three very important words: new Richard Powers."

Salmagundi: Newport, Oregon, Public Library

Laguna Dispatch: "I love this writer. He makes me think, he makes me laugh, and sometimes cry, but never manipulates my emotions. No escapist fiction, rather an intelligent exploration of human potential, and failure, ever so much more meaningful than the harsh reality of harsh reality."

Picks of the Week

Evan Selinger's "Philosophy of Technology" blog: "His most accessibly written work, the text breathes fresh life into the basic questions concerning the nature, scope, and desirability of enhancing personal and collective forms of experience."

Rockaliser Baby: Best fiction book of the decade!

Food For Thought (in Dutch)

Emerging Writers Network: "But the best novel I’ve read in this overwhelming crop of new fiction is Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. Powers is always good, always a heady mix of good storytelling and extravagant ideas, normally having something to do with science and its ethical dilemmas. This is one of his best."

Chazz W. "...a work of fiction qua non-fiction, that is so dense, so full of ideas, so miraculously constructed, yet so joyous to read, that a normal “review” simply cannot do it justice. Certainly, I can’t do it justice in the normal way. Perhaps I’m doomed to fail with any approach. But I’ll soldier on." An unusually ambitious web review.

"Unignorable Possibilities" on LabLit.com: review by Jon Turney.

Puck, by Brian Charles Clark.

The Faster Times. Review by Vincent Rossmeier.

The Last Word.