Weekly Reads: The Interestings

I started listening to this book on audiobook a couple of weeks ago.  I tend to keep my audiobooks around 8-9 hours of listening time, because any longer and I get mega distracted/bored/etc.  I took a chance on this one which is 18 hours long, only because the hold list for the book is so terribly long.  The book delves in to the lives of a group of kids who dubbed themselves "The Interestings" while at performing arts camp in the 1970s.  The story follows their lives through adolescence and beyond, and showcases the group shattered by controversy.

More from goodreads:

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.


 While I don't know if I would recommend the audiobook (I usually have to LOVE a book on audiobook to even continue it, but as I said, I'll have to wait forEVer if I don't listen to it, and I'm not willing to do that) I would highly recommend the book so far.  Fingers crossed it continues to hold my attention over the next trillion hours of listening. :)