"And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about"
I find it really hard to construct lists of "All-time favourites". I'm too indecisive, and my tastes shift constantly depending on what mood I'm in. I can fairly confidently say though that if I had to decide on an all-time, top 5 favourite books list, this would be in it.
Two things strike me about people's reactions to this book:
Its a Marmite book. You either love it, and are consumed by it, or it leaves you totally cold and you can't understand what all the fuss is about. I know a lot of people who read it hate the characters and hate spending time with them, and really can't get into the frantic pace of it.
People who love it tend to describe reading it in the same way. When the film came out, I went to the Tyneside Cinema's book club screening of it. In the discussion afterwards, it was amazing how similarly the people who loved it described how they read it. "It hit me like a train" or "I was knocked over by it" or "it was like hitting a brick wall" or "It stopped me in my tracks" or "I read it constantly over two days and I just couldn't stop reading". My friend Ian says in his Goodreads review: "I tore through it, unable to put it down for two days". I've heard similar things over twitter and in conversation too.
