Book 3 of 52: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

I really loved this book.  It was everything I didn't find in Anna Karenina  and The Alchemist.  It had an interesting plot.  It had subplots.  All the characters were well developed.  It caused me to pause and reflect on my life.  All told, it was probably the best piece of literature I've read in awhile.

This 985 page book tells the story of a group of families and people in medieval England.  The overarching story is the building of a cathedral in the village of Kingsbridge, but there are lots of little detours into the lives of the people involved.  There are intrigues and love affairs, marriages and deaths.  Since the story stretches out over a period of 35 years, by the end of it you really feel like you know the characters better than you know some of your neighbors.  You find yourself hoping that they'll succeed in life because you've been watching them since they were 12 or 13 years old.

Unfortunately, something happened about halfway through it that will keep me from buying the book.  My mother-in-law saw me reading it and asked me to let her know what I thought about it when I finished the book.  Once that happened, I realized one very glaring problem with the book--the author is very... how should I put this... very open about his characters' sexuality.  Not in that any of them are homosexual, but he's very open about the physical relationships between different people.  I kept thinking about whether or not I could recommend this novel to her (or anyone else for that matter).  The explicit scenes are fairly rare and you usually have ample warning that they're approaching so that you can skip over them.

Ultimately, I kept remembering the poster below.  It really summed up my feelings about the book--It's great except for the bad parts.  Do I think it's a good novel?  Absolutely.  Do I think it's worth reading?  More or less... if you're stuck having to choose between Anna Karenina and The Pillars of the Earth, the later would win every time.  Would I ever recommend it to anyone though?  No.  The sexually explicit scenes are for the most part gratuitous (I'm sure the author would vehemently disagree with me on that though).  They could have easily been shortened or taken out without losing too much.  Due to that, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this book to someone.  There are some instances (such as in the book Deerskin by Robin McKinley) where the explicit scenes are absolutely necessary to move the book forward.  This isn't one of those books though.

Where do you draw the lines in terms of what books you'll recommend or buy?

Next Book: The Little Prince