World Without End, by Ken Follett

Yessssss! I'm done! It's done! I never have to read this book again! Woohoo!

Ahem. That... that didn't sound right. Hold on. Let me try this again.

Did you know that thousand-page books turn into 36-disc audiobooks? Thirty-six. Three six. That is a lot of discs. And a lot of audio. And considering it took me two months to get through Pillars of the Earth while actually reading it, I'm happy it only took me five weeks to get through this sequel.

The problem, I find, with Ken Follett's books (well, the two I've read, anyway) is that sure, they are huge sweeping epics of time and place and they are quite beautiful in a big-picture sense. But. On a chapter-by-chapter basis? Soooooo repetitive. I summed up this book to my husband approximately like this:

Stuff. Sex. More stuff. More sex. Treachery and betrayal. Stuff. Awesome uses of logic and reverse psychology. Rape. Betrayal. Logic. Psychology. Sex. Psychology. Dude being flayed alive. Stuff. Sex. Plague. Etc.

The dude being flayed alive bit, I had not predicted. The other stuff? All the same from Pillars of the Earth. Well, not the Plague.

And so the plus side of the audio is that I can zone out while listening and pretty much not miss a thing, because few specific scenes are terribly important and if they are, Follett will, I promise, repeat whatever happened at least six more times, sometimes in the same chapter. The minus side is that I hear repetitions more easily than I read them, and so I couldn't listen to this book for more than a couple hours at a time, hence the taking forever.

Anyway, what's this book about, you say? Um. Well. It's this sweeping epic, right? And so it starts off with these kids and ends with these same kids as old men and ladies. One of the kids is the raping and pillaging and murdering type, two are creative and ambitious but one's a girl so she can't play with the nice toys, and one is of low self-esteem and comes from a ridiculous home life. And... they do their things.

Follett does an excellent job with the characters and how they interact and grow and change or not change, and I cannot say he doesn't bring the action or the drama, see Man Being Flayed Alive. I just wish he could be a bit more concise about it!

Recommendation: For fans of Pillars of the Earth and other sweeping epics, or people who need something to fall asleep to at night over the next several weeks. Definitely best read in small pieces.

Rating: 7/10
(TBR Challenge)

Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (19 October − 27 December)

Good job, Alison! I finally (finally!) finished this book, which, as you can see, I've been working on for two months. Now, obviously, I've read maybe a few other books since I've started this one, so two months is not terribly pathetic, but it certainly feels like I've been reading this forever.

Pillars of the Earth tells the stories of a whole bunch of interconnected people — Tom, whose life goal is to be master builder on a cathedral; Phillip, a monk in a small cell who hopes to make his priory strong; William, whose marriage to a girl called Aliena is called off by the girl herself and who decides to take revenge on, well, everyone; Aliena, who vows to right the wrongs done to her family; and Jack, who loves Aliena from the moment he meets her. It's all set over many years in the 1100s and brings in a lot of history, like the fighting between King Stephen and Empress Maud and later the murder of Thomas Becket.

It's really very good. The problem I had with it is that it's just so long! At 983 pages, it's definitely the longest novel I've ever read. I just could not focus on it for more than an hour at a time when I started it, so I relegated it to my at-work bathroom reading since the book is surprisingly small and easier to fit in my bag than many of the books I read. Hooray mass-market paperbacks.

Brilliantly, though, and as I would have hated had I read this more quickly, Follett spends more than a few sentences of the novel reminding the reader what has happened in the past. I caught myself a few times going, "Oh, right, Ellen did curse that fellow at the beginning of the novel!" and such.

You should read this if you have a few months to spare, or a long weekend with nothing to do.

Rating: 7/10