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October 10
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New comment on Jennie's review of
Vellum: The Book of All Hours
(see all 3 comments)
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October 09
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Jennie
is on page 80 of Cryptonomicon
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Jennie
marked as to-read:
Spirits in the Wires (Paperback)
by Charles de Lint
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Jennie
marked as to-read:
Moonheart (Paperback)
by Charles de Lint
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Jennie
marked as to-read:
Someplace to Be Flying (Newford)
by Charles de Lint
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Jennie
marked as to-read:
The Big U (Paperback)
by Neal Stephenson
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Jennie
marked as to-read:
Vellum: The Book of All Hours (Paperback)
by Hal Duncan
bookshelves:
considering,
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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October 04
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Jennie
read and liked
Jax's
review of The Pillars of the Earth:
" A massive tome with a spine thicker than Arnold Schwartzenegger’s forearm, Pillars looks intimidating enough to make even the most avid readers wary; its 973 pages are densely packed with unforgiving walls of 8-point text with nary a line b...more
A massive tome with a spine thicker than Arnold Schwartzenegger’s forearm, Pillars looks intimidating enough to make even the most avid readers wary; its 973 pages are densely packed with unforgiving walls of 8-point text with nary a line break in sight. Before I was more than a hundred pages in, however, it became apparent that length was among the least of this behemoth of a book’s problems.
Follett's concept—a medieval, generation-spanning epic built around the construction of a cathedral—is exciting and full of potential (as are the illustrations, which are far too beautiful to serve as bookends to such trash); but the snaillike pacing, nonexistent characterization, and stilted, robotic prose ruin whatever potential the book might have had. Things start off on a sour note as we must bear witness to a painful prologue in which Follett tries to establish some sort of basis for an intersection that we are led to believe is soon to come – only to abandon this plotline for so long that we’ve forgotten what the point of the book is by the time it comes around again.
Then we fast-forward a decade, ending up in a rolling green valley alongside a totally different cast of characters. Before even a single word of dialog has appeared, Follett has described in exhaustive detail the lives thus far of Tom Builder (guess what his profession is), his moderately pregnant wife, Agnes, and their children, Martha and Alfred. Here we run into one of the most irritating faults of the whole book—a descriptiveness that borders on—and then completely transcends—the excessive. One wonders what on earth Follett’s editor was off doing when he should have been cutting Pillars down by several hundred pages’ worth of unruly tresses and twinkling eyes.
A thorough editor, armed with a hacksaw, could have perhaps fashioned this mammoth mishap into a passable pulp page-turner; but left as is, Pillars proves infantile, taxing—and oftentimes just plain disgusting. Fight and torture scenes are pointlessly gratuitous; descriptions of the architecture are historically accurate but impossibly long and boring; attempts to make the solidly one-dimensional characters charming only render them crass, impulsive—and, frankly, kind of gross.
It’s all downhill from there—with the exception of plucky prior Phillip, who could have been the novel’s saving grace if not for Follett’s iron resolution to curdle what little cream rises to the top of this mess. Phillip is smart, tenacious, and intensely likable, and his involvement in Tom’s life (being the prior of Kingsbridge Priory, where the cathedral is being built) gives the impression that he’ll be a key player for a long while. We are sadly mistaken; Phillip barely has time to settle in to his newly-acquired prior’s quarters before he is cast aside like a ragdoll. Oh, sure, he’s still around—but he does little more than pace hallways, issue stale anecdotes, and wring his hands over his inability to keep Kingsbridge safe after it is attacked again and again and again by the bad guys—who, in typical Follett style, would not have looked out of place twirling their moustaches and cackling maniacally. Waleran Bigod (I kid you not) and William Hamleigh fill their roles of ‘cold-hearted evil mastermind’ and ‘sadist thug’, respectively, with menacing glares, cold, unsmiling eyes, and appropriately villainous hubris all around. Follett abandons all pretenses with these two and instead goes for pure shock value, thereby rendering even his silliest characters uniformly unlovable.
This is all well and good (well, truly, not)—but what really had me sputtering with disbelief was the author’s warped sense of justice. Does he honestly think that making William fat and gouty by the book’s end will bring closure? If anything, I found it a little extreme; Willy and Wally (as I took to calling them) were the only ones who even tried to relieve the suffering for the reader brought on by Tom’s (literally) witchy girlfriend (yes, girlfriend) Ellen, her funny-looking son Jack, and his improbable beau Aliena (I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried); the men deserve pats on the back!
For that matter, so does anyone who managed to overcome the temptation to throw this bloated Colossus out the nearest window halfway through. Congratulations. Now how about that sequel?...less
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Jennie
read and liked
Francine's
review of The Pillars of the Earth:
"I did not hate this book (hate would be too strong a word, and I can't hate it because I applaud the fact that Ken Follett attempted to write an epic novel). But I did not like it. I didn't like it from the start; his writing style hit me li...more
I did not hate this book (hate would be too strong a word, and I can't hate it because I applaud the fact that Ken Follett attempted to write an epic novel). But I did not like it. I didn't like it from the start; his writing style hit me like a brick, but Jim thoroughly enjoyed the book that I kept trying to convince myself that I ought to give it a chance, hoping it would get better. When I was about 500 pages in, he saw how miserable I was and asked why I didn't just stop reading it, but at that point, I was invested in it; I had spent all that time getting that far, that I needed to finish it, and I couldn't wait to come to the end. I kept counting down: "Only 450 pages left; only 300 to go; last 200 pages...yay, I have 50 pages left!" Those fifty pages were the toughest to get through. By the time I was at the end, I thought it was a wasted effort - both on his part and mine.
It's so much easier to explicate on what I did not like because there were so many things:
- I loathed the writing style (he vacillated between pages and pages of highly complex architectural discourses to third-grade level simple sentences grouped into short paragraphs). Sometimes it was bearable. Other times, I wanted to pull my hair out. There were times when I felt the only time he came alive as an author was when he was discussing architecture, but these parts were so didactic in nature that it couldn't hold my interest for long periods of time.
- I did not like the author's narrative style. He had to tie everything together (causality was so prevalent throughout the text that I wondered how he didn't work in how the killing of a fly affected events 60 years later). Every single storyline was wrapped up - too neatly for my liking, in some cases. Everyone was tied to someone else (it was like playing Six Degrees); every single character had to have a denouement; every little plot twist had to be explained; closure had to be achieved, no matter how preposterous the circumstances, over time and space.
- The characterization was poor. In fact, it was appalling how two-dimensional these characters were. Good people were good. Bad people were loathsome. As time went on, the good were always suffering one thing or another; they were put upon; they were harrassed; they were constantly challenged and put to the test like Job (something Follett actually used as a sermon!). The badfolk became more oppressive over time; they were not only detestable, but they had absolutely no redeeming qualities. And to go with a typical medieval stereotype, the good were always excessively beautiful, honorable, intelligent (geniuses or savants, even!) - and if they weren't rich, they would be at the end (I half expected Havelok the Dane and his refrigerator mouth to pop up somewhere, proving once and for all that in the medieval period, to be good was to have the purest light shining out of your mouth each time you opened it). Nevertheless, the bad became uglier, became more despotic, scheming throughout life to get the better of their enemies (the goodfolk). But in the end, good always triumphed over evil; those who could, repented and were forgiven. Those who couldn't, were killed off somehow, because apparently, death is the only way an evil person gets his (or her) dues. And then everyone had a happy ending. I hate happy endings when they're so obviously contrived. And this work was so elaborately, exhaustively, thoroughly contrived. (Maybe it's not too late for me to change my mind and say I hated it. *grin*)
- Historically speaking, there was so much left to be desired. Granted, this novel was written two decades ago, and there have been new discoveries about the medieval period since Follett started his research. But he got it all wrong anyhow. His idea of medieval life was so...off, that it hurt my head to continue reading sometimes. I had to pause periodically and rant to Jim about what I currently found off-putting (for example, there weren't many literate people at the time; at the time this novel was set, there was still a distinct divide between England and Wales; reading and writing were two separate skill sets, and people who knew how to read did not necessarily know how to write and vice versa; orality was a prevalent part of storytelling back then and books not so much and yet somehow, he conflated much of both; manuscript writing was either orally dictated or copied tediously by the monks - his concept of a scriptorium was incomplete, defective - and there has been so much written about this that it saddened me; he used modern translations of medieval poetical/verse works and couldn't explain even alliterative verse form effectively - I even wonder if he knew what it was; his understanding of the languages of the period - Old English, Middle English, Latin, Norman French, Old French, Middle French, etc. - and what was spoken by the aristocrats vs. the peasants vs. the growing middle classes disgusts me; he showed a lack of understanding of medieval law, medieval rights, the social classes, gender roles, even the tales and legends of the period, in both England and France; priests were quite low on the totem pole, in terms of the religious hierarchy, and were quite disparaged yet somehow, that didn't quite come across in this novel...I could go on and on, but I won't).
And the historical part of the novel I just found lacking. There are enough histories and chronicles, contemporaneously written, of the time, that he did not have to deviate much from history. There is so much written about the period between the death of Henry I through the civil wars between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen, to the time that Henry II ascended the throne (including the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett), that I don't quite understand how he couldn't have mined the chronicles for better material. I understand that this is why it's called historical fiction, and that there will always be some element of fiction interspersed with historical fact. But the fictional aspects usually have to do with surrounding characters and situations that bolster the history. The fiction is not necessarily to the history itself. Many times, when writing historical fiction, the author has to beware the pitfalls of creating a revisionist retelling, interspersing his or her own ideals or beliefs of what should have been to what was. If this novel had been marketed as a revisionary narrative, it would have been okay. But it wasn't. I'm just glad that the historical aspect of the novel just served as the background and not the real story. Because then, I probably would've stopped reading.
The premise was a good one and held a lot of promise. It could've been a great historical epic had it been handled by a more assured writer. By someone who was more of a visionary, someone who had the patience to do exhaustive research or who knew how to craft richly developed characters. It needed an author who understood the epic genre, who knew how to mold the epic, who knew how to keep the narrative going, seemlessly binding time with narration and the human condition, without resorting to stereotypes and grating drama. And most importantly, it needed someone who understood when the story had been told; that while there will always be other stories to tell, that each book has its own natural end, and that these stories may not belong in this book.
Ken Follett may be a bestselling author of suspense novels (and even historical fiction such as Pillars of the Earth and World without End), but he is no writer of epics. Compared to writers of historical fiction such as Edward Rutherford, James Michener, Bernard Cornwell or Margaret George, Ken Follett has a long way to go....less
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Jennie
gave
to:
The Pillars of the Earth (Paperback)
by Ken Follett
bookshelves:
i-give-up
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in October, 2008
Jennie said:
"I can't take it anymore! I've gotten through 540 pages (550 to go; had to resort to skimming just to get this far) and I still can't figure out what this book is supposed to be about. Building a cathedral?
So...much...agonizing...detail, from F...more
I can't take it anymore! I've gotten through 540 pages (550 to go; had to resort to skimming just to get this far) and I still can't figure out what this book is supposed to be about. Building a cathedral?
So...much...agonizing...detail, from Follett's descriptions of every single frickin' building (inside and out) to every single rape and other act of violence committed by one of the brutish villains. Don't need to see it on tv, certainly don't need to see it in my head. I'm going to throw it - with great force - into the Goodwill bag!...less
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