Well, it’s some time since I caught up with my reading reports. Many weeks ago I waded through Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. I say wade in both a positive and negative sense: it’s a long shallow book, with lots of good bits and a fair bit of meandering, rather like wading through a river via warm pools interspersed with cold.

I first read this book a long long time ago, and liked it enough then to keep a copy. However, the copy I read this time was yet another Christmas present, and this read was probably enough to convince me that my groaning shelves can probably do without either copy. Don’t get me wrong, this is a pretty good book, but it’s not a monumental book, and the issue for me now is not the quality, but the length: I don’t have the patience and time for 1000 page books that I had anon.That said, when I finished it, I was way happier with having done so than the previous book. If you’re reading this to decide whether to read it yourself, then I suspect if you’re looking to read “literature”, finding a book with less characters and a smaller canvas could be your thing. But if you want medieval entertainment (without ever quite being enthralled), for night after night, then go for it.

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Reading in 2009, 6,7,8 - The Language of the Stones Trilogy (from “Bryan’s Blog” on (on Wednesday 29 April, 2009))

… compared to these three, Pillars is vastly superior in pace and prose, so perhaps I was just a wee bit more enthralled reading that than I thought at the end.