Dyer is a talented writer who shared his experiences as a young man. I thought this was a good read, fun experiences, and there was good humor in this book. 3.5 stars rounded up.

Geoff Dyer's formative years are very enjoyable even though his childhood is incredibly normal and nothing really happens.
That's the beauty of it.
I especially loved and recognised Geoff Dyer's descriptions of his father's cheapness and willingness to argue over money.

An evocative and colourful memoir of growing up in provincial England in the 1960s and 70s. The account is full of detail and incident but I found the narrative tended to drag towards the middle and only picked up towards the end. Perhaps it could do with more editing or the use of themes rather going strictly chronologically?

I picked up this book because I enjoy coming-of-age stories, memoirs, and I wanted to get a feel for a time period I haven’t personally experienced. Growing up in Britain, I thought that despite being born in the early 2000s, there might be some common ground. However, I ultimately struggled to connect with this book and decided to DNF at 80 pages. While there were moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout, I found the pacing far too slow, with many of the details feeling unnecessary or overly long-winded.

The author clearly has an impressive eye for detail, but passages like the one about toy soldier collections or old television shows were so long that they felt like tangents. For instance, multiple pages devoted to describing Action Man outfits or bath-time submarines didn’t add much to the overall story—for me, at least. Nonetheless, I can imagine these details being nostalgic for some, particularly readers who grew up in the same time period.

That said, the writing style itself is enjoyable. There were moments of humour, insight, and brilliance that I genuinely appreciated. I would absolutely read more from this author in the future, as I suspect this particular book simply wasn’t the right fit for me.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to read this advance copy, and while I regret not finishing, I hope my feedback proves constructive.

Homework by Geoff Dyer

Dyer has painted a picture of a young English boy (himself) growing up in England in the 60’s and 70’s. Some of his descriptions will ring true for any person who experienced child hood in England at that time. The references to games with “conkers” (horse chestnut wars), outside toilets, front rooms that were never used, threepenny pieces and shillings and half crowns, salmon sandwiches and mince pies, are just a few notes of nostalgia. There will be some adventures and hobbies that overlap with American boyhood in those days, card collections, model airplane building, ferocious boyish games, to name a few.
However, for some readers the details of the card collections, the beer drinking from an early age, the memories of English school and university exams may hold little interest and provide no common ground.
Homework will be of interest and pleasure for a selective audience of people of a certain age and with similar backgrounds to Mr. Dyer.

‘Homework’ is a beautifully written memoir of the author’s experiences of growing up in the sixties and seventies. The ‘shiver of silent excitement’ that Geoff Dyer experienced as a book loving teenager was felt by me on the many occasions when his recollections mirrored my own childhood recollections. I laughed aloud at some of his anecdotes, but was particularly moved by his descriptions of his parents and his retrospective appreciation of the same qualities that had brought him into conflict with them as an adolescent.
‘Homework’ has a ring of authenticity about it and is thoroughly recommended.

I've read quite a few Geoff Dyer books, so I was interested to read his memoir, which is primarily the story of his childhood and early adulthood in Cheltenham, England in the 1960s and 70s. There's a lot to love here for those readers nostalgic for this era--Dyer's passion for collecting cards in albums, for putting together model airplanes, and for playing conkers with schoolyard friends feels refreshingly analog in our own iPhone age--but this nostalgia comes with Dyer's wry spin: "Writing this,...I am struck by how much rust there was in my childhood; was it, more generally, a rustier epoch or has it only become rustier in retrospect, part of the active corrosion of memory?". Dyer's eye for the piquant details of his remembered youth kept me turning the pages (even if I could have done with less detailed memories of his early sexual escapades) and the book as a whole reminded me a bit of "Little Heathens" by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (which I also recommend) in its ability to paint a clear image of a particular time, place and era of society using only the brushstrokes of one person's childhood.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

Interesting memoir of growing up in post-war UK. The author captures the time well in this memoir. It will definitely appeal to Anglophiles and those looking for a coming of age memoir.