1. I just finished reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I didn't love it, but I did like it. Here's the thing though. The book uses creative typesetting to convey a lot of what's going on. Blank pages, pages with one word on them, four pages of numbers, a page where the text becomes closer and closer set until it's ultimately overlapping and illegible and is then followed by a few dark pages. There's different typesetting for different characters - for example, the grandmothers writing has more space between words and letters, each thought has it's own line... more like poetry really. When the grandfather writes, there's little punctuation, seldom even indentation or separation for paragraphs. There's even photos. It's an interesting idea - typesetting in a way that's extremely graphic to further convey what the author intended.
2. I am suddenly extremely confused about the people I know who "read" this as an audiobook. I bet they don't even know that a big chunk of the book was graphic.
3. Does that matter? Is it still a good book? Is it as good as the author intended? What's missing? Is it even remotely the same experience?
4. I should really be knitting the blanket.