Waggle
Product Description
An inordinately beautiful day surprises Chicagoland in July, 2003. No searing heat. No humid haze. Perfect. Real estate appraiser Conny Bromenn has recently turned 40, and the new fresh breeze has pumped him with a magnum of lucidity, though it struggles sometimes to sift through the gauze of befuddlement compiled over 40 years. Conny’s ready for a serious change. He needs to confront his long-standing lethargy in the community and search for deeper meaning in… More >>
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This could have been a good book. Really. It has a story that could have been really entertaining.
Unfortunately, the author has a quirky, sometimes ridiculous writing style. As long as he sticks to the golf, we’re fine. He does a good job explaining things for the non-golfer without boring people who already know what he’s talking about. Still, things get odd when he tries to get clever or funny.
You won’t laugh when a golfer suggests that we should have spent money from the space program on teaching people to be like the Amish. If you’re like me, you’ll reread the section thinking you missed the joke somehow. It won’t make sense the second time either.
Likewise, you’ll be reaching for your dictionary trying to figure out words like ‘aurae’ and ‘stamen’ both misused over and over again throughout the book. To get an idea what I mean, use the Amazon search function to find ‘aurae’ in this book and check out the bizzaro sentences you get back. You can’t even use contextual clues to figure out what word the author meant to use. Sentences with ‘stamen’ are downright indecipherable. Joe Redden Tigan needs a dictionary.
At one point, without any real connection to the story, the author writes, “Trees are not humid blue but are actually green and bright green.” Huh? Get used to it.
This should have been a fun golf book but it is not. Use the couple of hours you’d have spent skimming this novel to work on your short game. You’ll be happy you did.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’ll admit, there were times in this book where I wasn’t quite sure what the author was driving at, yet I still got a kick out of what he was saying, if that makes any sense. And the book never got off its track, keeping with the message of how to improve upon things if you’re not that happy with the status quo. Some of Joe Redden Tigan’s ideas I get, some I don’t, but the humor of the book kept me coming back. The golf bet I thought was a clever way of getting this message across, and I’m a golfer so that helps, but I wouldn’t call this a “golf” book. Tigan’s descriptions of golf are definitely spot on and then some, but they are mostly background. Other than some parts that are a little out there, I enjoyed reading it.
Rating: 3 / 5
As soon as I got to the end of Waggle, I immediately started reading it again. I’ve never done that with any other book before. Why did I do it with this one? It’s hard to describe exactly, but I guess I wanted to relive it again, to go through Tigan’s incredible descriptions of all kinds of golf swings. And to go through the dialogue. Possibly some of the funniest dialogue I’ve seen. For such a short book about a (supposedly) limited time span, Tigan has packed an entire world in 200 pages. I don’t know of another book like it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Waggle doesn’t merely set out to describe suburban complacency and say “See how awful suburbia is?”. This book has remedies, not only for suburbia, but for anybody that still gives a dam. Joe Redden Tigan has used the backdrop of a far western suburb of Chicago being ravaged by commercial and residential real estate development to set the stage for consumerist blindness and all it can come with. His set-up is winding and subtle, but convincing, and very funny. Things have finally hit Waggle hero real estate appraiser Conny Bromenn in a deep enough spot to where he may want to actually do something about it. Like get involved. Seek enlightenment. His challenge is to convince his long-time friends and golfing buddies that they should join him in his quest to do things like participate in preserving the environment, beat back commercialism, outfox governmental bureaucratic oppression, and learn how to play musical instruments, just to name a few. Conny knows the only way he could get these guys to participate is if they lost a golf bet. And that’s Tigan’s ploy for driving his message and his book to a temporary resting place. The ploy may work for some but not all readers. Ditto Tigan’s writing style. But they did for me.
Rating: 4 / 5