Up today: Freedom , by Jonathan Franzen. Summary: this insightful and well-constructed work ultimately did not live up to the hype. Freedom is the story of one family, the Berglands, a typical four-member unit, and their musician friend. Their lives are drawn in exquisite detail; the richness that Franzen manages to create (reflecting what must have been a massive amount of work) is the best part of the book. I won't go into much detail about the plot. Like a lot of modern novels, the plot is almost beside the point; backstory makes up about half the book. The defining feature of the Berglands is that they are mostly miserable failures. The book is saturated with awkwardness, anxiety, and resentment; with competition, hatred, envy, and dishonesty; and most of all with sheer bloody-minded foolishness. This litany of failures (which barely lets up throughout the book) are mostly of the small, pathetic variety. Though there was some reconciliation towards the end, was a har