Customer Reviews

Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a wonderful,well written novel,I could not put it down until the last page. Mr Conrad interweaves the lives of 20 plus characters that make you feel and care for them and hope things work out for them. Exactly what a good book should do, make you think about things, people and our own place in the world. His characters are smart, funny, attractive and just the kind of people you meet every day. A wonderful story with a slightly melancoly ending that left me wondering what happened to the rest of the characters. Check this out if you like contemporary fiction, it's Great.

Not only is this book a smart and sharp take on the world of academic poetry, it is also a lovesong to Chicago. The city has never looked so lovely and so real on the page. It made me perfectly homesick.

I bought this book because it was written by a local author, but I soon discovered that it's so much more. Conrad's characters are real, complex and fascinating -- and often hilarious. It's a dead-on satire of two disparate worlds that are both, nonetheless, ripe for satire: academia and nuclear science. While much of it will make you laugh out loud, it also possesses great depth, and the type of gorgeous sentences that stay in your head long after you've finished reading.

Witty, Bitchy, insighful, romantic. I LOVED this book!

Good work, James. An impressive first novel, but it could have been tightened up a bit. The story is in slight danger of bogging down under too many details. Still, a good, fast read with an interesting premise.

I saw hints of good writing hidden beneath a lot of drivel in this book. Conrad really really needed someone to objectively edit this novel - it would have been so much better. I felt that the book really lacked any definite structure and that superfluous descriptions dragged on for pages. I was bored and frustrated for most of the novel. Good title, though.

Once I started reading this book, I had trouble putting it down. The plot is intricate, but engrossing. It appeals to a very wide audience, from gay to straight, old to young, poets to fiction writers. It is extraordinarily well written, and I enjoyed the characters until the very last page. I wish that it had never ended!

I'll have to admit when I picked this book up, I had my doubts, love and nuclear waste don't seem to be the best of combinations. My doubts were shortlived. It was with supream surprise and delight that I devoured Conrad's prose as swiftly as possible.

The cast of charactors in this book borders on epic. Conrad works a kind of magic as he gently weaves the stories of each of the many charactors into an interconected whole, leaving you wondering if life has an almost ironic order after all.

A fascinating, often hilarious, look at Academic life. Great characters and an unpredictable, involving plot make this a must-read. Would make a good film, too.

Conrad's debut has the confidence and steady prose of someone writing a fiftieth, not a first, novel. The story is a timeless one, however - the debut meets the mogul - in this case poet, in the academic world. The book is rich with taut, lively characters, who inhabit a world so many of us have traveled, trying not to choke as we did. This is a can't put down sort of book, and Conrad the most promising and delicious sort of writer. Get it and crawl into a big chair somewhere. I did, and didn't get up until I was through.