Moo
Written by Jane Smiley
Narrated by Suzanne Toren
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.
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Reviews for Moo
588 ratings26 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Not a lot to like rambling rubbish that had little sense to it
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I had read other novels by Smiley and thought, given the (again) political anti-university stance taken by WI governor, that it would be interesting to read this tale now. I understand that in a spoof of reality you want your characters to be characterizations and stereotypes, but I still do not enjoy reading novels with such superficial characters.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Enjoyable. A comic novel ending in some marriages. Many characters - thirty or so by the first 100 pages. Many story-lines, all related if only by place. Everything happens over an academic year at Moo U, a midwestern state college, in the early 1990s. -Jane Smiley, Moo, 1995, 414 pages
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I don't know what book other people are reading but this was truly awful. Poorly written, too many cardboard characters and too many plot lines. What a mess!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moo is an agriculture university somewhere in the midwest (my guess would be Iowa). Characters range from four in-coming freshmen girls to administrative bigwigs and everyone in between. Moo is a satire that is incredibly silly in places. Superficial relationships collide and somehow become meaningful. What makes the story so interesting is the drama, the scandals, and mischief the campus seems to promote. Everyone has a secret. Everyone has someone they would either like to kill or screw. The word everyone uses to describe Moo is "wicked" and it fits.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Smiley has a way of empathizing with the most ordinary, flawed people. This book, set at a state ag. university (I was at Iowa State when Smiley was, and the setting is unmistakable) does a nice job of portraying the compromises and moral dilemmas of ordinary people, self-centered but wishing to "do the right thing" whatever that is. An enjoyable read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My favorite novel: a must read for potential academics.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5it felt like it desperately wanted to be A Confederacy of Dunces and hilarious (especially to academic types like myself) but just couldn't bring itself to be so. new character introductions never seemed to stop but that didn't stop me from stopping reading this book. it should have been titled Meh.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For everyone who is aspiring to a life in academia - a must read! Hilarious and yet a very accurate portrayal.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A measured and dryly witty campus comedy, highlighting just how execrable Tom Wolfe's take on it is.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The type of novel described as being "the antics of a large cast of colorful characters". Maybe if I worked at a university, I might care about this sort of satirizing, but I want my comedy to have rather more laughs per minute than this provided, and beyond that, I really had no interest in the lives of the characters. Even I am Charlotte Simmons was more interesting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A desperately funny take on academic life in the Midwest.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love satires & satires about academic institutions are among my favorites so I wasn't surprised to find myself enjoying this one. However, perhaps my expectations were too high after reading the powerful A Thousand Acres last year -- this novel doesn't reach that same level.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Disappointing. Nowhere close as entertaining as Russo's "Straight man".
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Substance: Humor in academia and the Midwest. Not sure what she intended satirically and what literally.Style: Literary narrative. Too many characters introduced too quickly, took 100 pages to get all of them differentiated and recognizable by name. Characters were interesting and she kept them distinct in their behavior and thoughts.NOTES: see book
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful academic satire set in the midwest. Better than David Lodge.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Moo is about the goings-on at an agricultural college in Iowa. It took me about 6 months to get through this. There were way too many characters to remember, and most of the time, I just wasn't interested. With all the different characters, it was constantly switching focus from character to character. There were glimmers of interest, but as soon as something got interesting, we switched to follow a different character. I did like the hog, though. We did get Earl the hog's viewpoint a few times, which I enjoyed. Overall, though, not good. When I set it down, I had no interest in picking it up again. I finally told myself I just wanted to somehow fit it in before the end of this calendar year and finally get it done!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Academic satire is admittedly one of my favorite genres, so it's easy to call this book well-plotted with occasional feats of humor brilliance. Smiley has a stand-up comic's feel for repetition, leaning on a few phrases that become funnier and funnier every time they appear (only, of course, by permission of the CIA, the FBI and the big ag companies). She also has fun with character names, including Bartle the secretary and the three roommates Keri, Sherri and Mary.Moo has more of an edge on portraying the weird and circular feeling of racial/cultural isolation than other academic satires. Mary's journey through the last half of the book portrays perfectly both the poison of cruelty and indifference and a teenaged inability to get past current events and focus on long-term goals. Smiley's subject is The University, however, so each character demands only short-story-sized attention from the reader. Straight Man is much more personal, and therefore much more powerful.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Moo is a satire about university life, covering the course of one academic year and many scandals, large and small, at a Midwestern state university. The large cast of characters includes all the usual suspects: the self-interested creative writing teacher; the aging, angry idealist who can’t let go of the 60s; the matronly secretary who controls campus affairs with an iron fist. In fact, the cast is so large that it’s often difficult to keep straight who is who, much less figure out who we’re supposed to be rooting for or sympathizing with. Nevertheless, Moo is often funny, and even if many of the more sympathetic characters come to depressing self-realizations (the others aren’t capable), two chapters at the end — titled “Deus ex Machinas” and “Some Weddings” — signal that this is intended to be a comedy after all.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is my first read by Jane Smiley and it certainly won't be my last.Moo U. is the classic midwestern state university; with all its politics, flirtations, lies, and budget cuts.For anyone who has read Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons and fondly remembered (fuzzy and drug-hazed as they may be) their beginning student years of university, this is the administrator and facultyversion. If you've worked on any college campus, you'll recognize the intimidating power of the dean'ssecretary, the lame tenured faculty, and the corrupt money that runs the whole show.Smiley has one non-human campus character: Earl Butz, the hog. His story is so tenderly sweet andcompletely grotesque - a perfect blend of working in the higher education system.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Awful!! I really disliked this book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This novel was recommended to me as one that reflected true life on the campus of an American college campus. The novel was fine, but nothing about it really interested me.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I liked the concept - 1990 culture of a small liberal arts college. But the actual book was more about mediocre descriptions of relationships, and not enough about the college details. And the big pig - WTF?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An interesting and entertaining novel though, curiously, there was not one character with whom I felt any empathy.There is no extended narrative - the novel is episodic, flitting from one character to another, but it is so tightly plotted that it holds the reader's attention effortlessly.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wickedly funny academic satire on a par with Richard Russo's Straight Man and the works of David Lodge, but not without a heart. I have an especially soft spot for it in my own heart because when it was first published I was working at an independent bookstore in western Massachusetts and had a grand time producing a window display featuring this book (the process involved felt, a glue gun, a sawhorse, a lot of hay borrowed from a neighbor's rabbit hutch, and much amusement on the part of my family and co-workers). Like all Smiley's novels, this one draws you into a particular world and turns it inside-out for your edification and delight.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This has to be one of the funniest and truest books I've ever read. Highly recommended to anyone who works at a Midwestern university, particularly one with an extensive agriculture sequence.