Hey, It’s That Book!
I’m usually not a big fan of long books. But recently I found that all the books on my nightstand were over a thousand pages (although I managed to slip some short ones in, Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys and Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea, which I finished in no time). It started with Against the Day which I decided I couldn’t concentrate on long enough to actually make some sense about what the hell was happening, so I switched to Follett’s World Without End, which I liked more than I expected.
That gave me the perfect opportunity to finally read The Pillars of the Earth, one of those books that everybody has read but me (mostly because I usually shy away from books that everybody has read, I figure that these books don’t urgently need another reader).
There’s two things I have to say about The Pillars of the Earth: One, it’s either not as well written as World Without End or I actually have reached that stage where reading English feels more natural to me than reading German (which is a bit scary). Two, it’s basically the same book as World Without End. Or actually the other way round, but since I read World Without End first this is how it feels to me. You basically switch out a few characters and slightly alter some of the storylines and jump a little bit in time and there you are. Same book. I haven’t figured out whether I really care, though. I guess not. It’s still a good enough read.