How I love this book!I have been meaning to read it since it was first published, but never got around to it until a few days ago when I saw in featured at my nearby branch library. I also remember when it came out: the uproar it caused (as I remember it.) I think even the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a review or an article. Certain academics, it seems, were sure she was writing about them. I mean, who would want to admit being Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek? I worked at Ohio, State for 17 years,

Everyone keeps telling me I should read Jane Smiley and they’re probably right. With biting humor, sharp satire, a wealth of fascinating characters, and even some touches of tender affection for people, place and environment, Moo is a slowly rising storm of a Midwestern University vs. the world, and vs. itself. Readers are guided into the heads of professors, administrators, students (successful and otherwise, plus those still trying to figure what constitutes success), lecturers, secretaries (w...

A deeply enjoyable diorama of a Midwestern university over a year. I very much enjoyed the wry humor which was suffused throughout with genuine affection and a honest reality that raises this book over other campus genre novels. A very fun read and highly recommended.

What a very funny book. Complicated and very lengthy cast of characters, so I did occasionally have to check back to see who was sleeping with whom, or trying to get tenure or whatever. But that is exactly what it is like in a university, so many people, so many committees, so many forms, so many who think they are in power and are not. So many who manage to get to the conferences in the nice places, to deliver papers that add nothing to the sum of human knowledge....all too true.

I laugh out loud every time I reread this book. Smiley is one of the great masters who writes about systems as much as about people. In Moo, each character’s point of view comes alive with an incredibly specific weltanschauung — economic, religious, zoological — and it's a joy to move around the kaleidoscope of these different sensibilities.

I actually abandoned the book. I've been trying to read it since early March or late February, and I'm barely past page 100. I just can't get interested. The first 50 or more pages seem to do little more than introduce character after character after character. By the time all the characters have been brought in, I can't remember who the first ones are, and at page 100, I still can't figure out if there's plot. I considered the possibility that the book is more of a collection of vignettes than

Listen, Jane Smiley is a fucking straight-up genius, and MOO is a hilarious, intricate and brilliant send-up of academia. She effortlessly weaves together dozens of character viewpoints, all while keeping a sort of empathetic humor at a slow boil throughout all of it. It's really impressive.It's also very interesting to me to see the very polarizing reviews of this book - on one hand, I can see how it's not that interesting to some people (it is, after all, set in an agricultural college in the

A while back I went on Facebook and listed my three favorite novels set on a college campus -- Richard Russo's "Straight Man"( which made me laugh so hard I cracked a rib), Randall Jarrell's "Picures from an Institution" (which begins, "Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Mies van der Rohe . . ."), and Kingsley Amis' hilarious "Lucky Jim." I asked people to suggest other fiction set in universities.I do this from time to time with different kinds of books to broaden my rea...

Wow, can I give less than 1 star? This is going in to that rare list of "books I cannot even get through." It makes me very sad that this woman can get published (and apparently won an award at some point in her life!) and I have friends who can actually WRITE who cannot. Imagine if the author of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" had written his 150 pages of character development, but hadn't actually been able to make you care about any of the characters. Or, in fact, been able to convin...

Anyone who has worked or taught in a university will appreciate this satirical novel set in an unnamed land-grant university in a Midwestern state with a strong resemblance to Iowa. Smiley, who manages to find the entire world in the cornfields of her native region, gets the personalities, idiosyncracies and bizarre internal politics of American academe exactly right in this book.

My response to Smiley's novel was contradictory. On the one hand, I liked her ambitious attempt at depicting the entirety of a college campus, covering students, faculty, and administration. On the other hand, there were just too many characters for any of them to be sufficiently developed. I could never keep straight the four female students sharing the dorm, in part due to the cutesy rhyming-names thing, but mostly due to the fact that Smiley didn't do a great job of distinguishing them from o...

The description "Dickensian" is often given to Smiley's books and in the case of MOO, I think it is merited. MOO is the abbreviated name of a Midwestern State University, where Animal Husbandry and Horticulture have equal status with Maths or Modern Languages. The book demands concentration as, chapter by chapter you are introduced to perhaps a hundred significant separate characters, with new ones appearing until you are a third of the way through - and such characters - idiosyncratic, opiniona...

After reading 'Straight Man' I was in the mood for another satire of academic life, so I can't help but compare Russo's book to Smiley's. Moo was funny enough, enjoyable enough but so inferior to 'Straight Man' I never could get into it. It's very satirical, above the fray, ironic--you just never come to care about any of the characters. Whereas 'Straight Man' has heart, as all good comedies should.

What a delightful read! Hilarious, poignant, great characters. This is a satire of Midwest American academia, written (and set) around the time of the fall of the Soviet empire.

Jane Smiley, a former academic, is pitch perfect in this subtle yet scathing account of academic life in a small Midwestern town. As a former graduate student who had more than his fill of graduate school, this book was both wonderful and horrifying to read. I recommend this book to anyone thinking of attending graduate school, or as a medicine for those still recovering from the absurdity of it.

These days I am working mainly on the group of print books that I picked out to reread while I was sorting through my library. Some I don't remember anything about, although I have read all of them in the past. I'm concentrating on them because I want the shelf space and I know some will be taking a short hike to the library donation bin. I've read at least one other by Jane Smiley and I remember I bought this one because of how much I enjoyed the other. And name recognition, of course. That's i...

I was just reminded of this book by my friend Susan. Now here was a hilarious read. Never was there a more true back picture of academia. They are all NUTS!!! Even the ones who aren't will agree they are a bit around the edges. Please read this, and laugh.

This book had a lot of potential. A great storyline; an interesting setting; a talented writer. But, it was entirely disappointing. The problem is with the characters: NO ONE IS INTERESTING. And yet, the book contains detail after detail about the characters. (There are a lot of them.) One could anticipate this from the book's jacket: "Never raising her voice, giving everybody his or her (or its) due, Jane Smiley lets no one escape..." That is an understatement. Each character is just as dull as...

Jane Smiley's farcical depiction of a Midwestern agricultural university is very funny at times. But there are too many characters to keep track of, certainly too many to care about. Many characters and two hundred pages could have been deleted from this novel. It was a chore to plow through (no pun). Smiley was a college professor for 15 years at Iowa State and she utilizes her experience to construct a humorous and cynical book that pretty much skewers her brethren. Teachers at Moo University

The only other Smiley I have read is 1000 Acres (and that back in the 90s when it came out...despite my husband lamenting the theft of the Lear story). I have had this on my list forever.. as a former grad student of UW and still resident of Madison WI as well as a graduate of Grinnell College (small college in small IA town) AND a high school grad from a small town in IL, I can claim some knowledge about the midwest, the rural farming communities, and academia.Unfortunately, this is slightly be...