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

Book 2 of 52: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This is actually the book that made me decide to get back into writing in my blog.  It was a thought provoking book, but probably not for any of the reasons the author intended.  After reading it I felt like I needed to rage and storm to someone... a week later and the violent reaction has left me, but I still feel like I need to share my side of the story.

Let me start off by saying that this book was the perfect book to read after Anna Karenina.  It was everything Anna Karenina wasn't--it was short, thought provoking, and had a very limited cast of characters.  I read it in one day (and I even went to work for 8 hours that day)!

Let me also say, that this book has a great message.  Long story short, this book is an allegory about the importance of finding and fulfilling your life's work.  What I like about this message is that the author recognizes that not everyone's life work is something big and grand and he says so fairly directly.  Sometimes people get it into your head that if you are a mother and a homemaker you must have unfulfilled dreams.  That may be true for some people, but for other people, being a wife and homemaker is fulfilling all their dreams.

Now that I have all of that out of the way, I have to get into my beef with this book.  Part of the premise of the book is that those who are striving to fulfill their life's work stand a much greater chance of having their heart broken because they have more emotionally invested in their work compared to those who are just slogging through life.  I believe this is a true concept, which is why this book bugged me.

For me, there is nothing more satisfying than finding some little gem in a book.  I feel about reading the same way other people feel about running or starting a new business and succeeding in it.  You could almost say that my life's work is to read all the best books in the world (I'm quite aware that this is impossible in this life, but that's why I'm hoping that if I'm really good Heavenly Father will call me to work in that big library I feel quite certain exists in heaven).  This book is an allegory, but it's a very thinly veiled allegory.  Unlike The Chronicles of Narnia which are enjoyable whether you read them as a child's fantasy novel or an allegory of the history of the world, The Alchemist is only enjoyable if you agree with the author's message.

As a result, I was a little disappointed when I finished the book.  Sure, I felt like I had gained something useful, but I can think of half a dozen novels whose messages will stick with me for far longer due to the work I put into understanding the message.

Is it a book I'd recommend to people?  Absolutely.  I think it's a book worth reading and I think that most people aren't going to be bothered by the things that bothered me.  Would I ever want to own a copy of it?  Probably not.

Can you tell I'm anxious to get back into an English program?

Book 1 of 52: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Word to the wise, don't pick an 800+ page Russian novel to kick off a goal to read a book a week.  It will take longer than a week to read.  I heard a theory once that the reason Russian novels are so long is that the authors had all winter to write their books and the readers had all winter to read the books.  As a result, they could write incredibly complex, long novels and still sell them.  After reading this book I totally believe that theory.

It literally took me a month to finish this book.  Sure, I read the entire Percy Jackson series for one of the weeks in there, but really... it took me a month.  To be perfectly honest, it didn't really inspire me when I was reading it and it doesn't really inspire me now.  Maybe it's just that the bar was set too high.  Anna Karenina is one of those books that you always hear about in connection with Literature.  The kind you know you're supposed to read and think about and then write a 20 page paper about.  You imagine that you're going to learn the secret to life by reading this book because heck, if it's so thick it had better have the secret to life hidden in its pages. 

Unfortunately, I felt like this book was the opposite of everything that it was supposed to be.  The story dragged on and on.  I felt like the author was so busy telling the story that he couldn't go into any depth about what was going on--it was a mile wide and an inch deep.  As a result, I didn't feel like it raised any thought provoking questions.  I was just glad when the book ended and I could check it off my list.  I can now say I've read Anna Karenina.

Don't you hate it when books disappoint you like that?