Ragtime by EL Doctorow REVIEW

[@carlosbranca8080]

I am just 60 pages in Ragtime and so far it is very good. I recommend The Waterworks which is a great novel too. In the future i will be reading more Doctorow.

[@TheBookchemist]

Thank you - I've noted it down, I should read more Doctorow too!

[@booksandallthatjazz1654]

I have read Ragtime and The March and agree wholeheartedly with your comments. I have also read Billy Bathgate. It's about a young man who becomes part of a gangster outfit in the 1930s. Great character development and the plot keeps you hooked, much like Ragtime and The March. I aim to read his other novels. Doctorow is a very good storyteller who has an original way of presenting issues well worth thinking about. On youtube there are some short interviews with him that are worth watching.

[@andrewrussell2845]

Just finished Ragtime and loved it. Doctorow paints a lush, textural, socio-historical landscape that I found incredibly immersive. A great read.

[@ChristyLuisDostoevskyinSpace]

Great review! I Ioved Ragtime, too. Somehow, I didn't make the connection that the boy must be narrating. I'll have to check out The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I've had Andrew's Brain on my shelf for a while.

[@Elena-zw3ub]

Homer and Langley is a gem too

[@varunramadhyani2184]

Phenomenal read! Always recommend this one to friends. Glad to see your review of this.

[@SeizureToday]

Doctorow's entire bibliography is worth exploring. The Book of Daniel is also phenomenal and, like Ragtime, World's Fair is a stunning portrait of a place in a particular time.

[@williamrobinson6059]

Has any book ever won all four? The only one tha' I know won even two, besides The March, is Gravity's Rainbow (I guess it didn't technically win the Pulitzer, but it was selected as the winner).

[@williamrobinson6059]

And The Color Purple, I think.

[@TheBookchemist]

Not to my knowledge - besides The March, Franzen's The Corrections also was up to win all 4. As for winning two, Proulx's The Shipping News (never heard of it) apparently did get both Pulitzer and NBA, as did Colson Whitehead's excellent The Underground Railroad recently!

[@rjd53]

Doctorow's City of God (that's how he calls New York) is one of my favourite novels of all times, and I never understood why it is not regarded as one of the most important of the last thirty or more years. With this book he stands side by side with Bolano, DeLillo etc. Some critics did not like it because it is not an easy read. Indeed, it is the only novel of which I also had to get a translation to make sense of the passages where he writes about battles of the second world war in the style of a Greek epos. I know of no other novel that is digging so deep to try to understand our contemporary world, how religion, science, history relate. Christa Wolf wrote her novel City of Angels (Los Angeles that is) as a kind of symmetrical complement to Doctorow's, trying to make sense of her function as a writer in communist East Germany while living in L.A.. Her novel is just as good as Doctorow's which she refers to in hers several times.

[@TheBookchemist]

Thanks for the suggestions man, both with Doctorow and Wolf - I've noted them down!

[@drummerlovesbookworm9738]

I am a big Doctorow fan. Xojenny

[@druepetoski2787]

Have you read his last novel Andrews brain? Very strange

[@katyak4073]

интересно!

[@ernestschultz5065]

World's fair

[@slavichavoc397]

One of the shittiest books ever written

[@johnalbert5786]

Stick to your fan fiction.

[@zoinks8868]

@@johnalbert5786This book is literally glorified fan fiction

[@mynameisnotjerome1803]

I find the narration a bit too shallow, some deeper description would no doubt make it truly come alive for me.