Books2Movies Blog

Marvelous fantasy fiction, although sometimes too dirty for my er... gentle tastes. It was sometimes almost unbearable to accept the way the women in the book are portrayed. If they weren't highborn, they were just pieces of flesh on disposal for... well, everybody. That's the world of G.R.R.Martin - values and honor are mostly just the words and religion has only ornamental function. Well, he depicts that world perfectly and I definitely intend to read the sequels. I still deem Tolkien's Middle-Earth a better place for living, but the Seven Kingdoms and beyond are more realistic. The characters are really interesting and fully developed. I highly enjoyed the descriptions from their points of view, especially Arya's and Jon's. That's the thing I like in SoIaF's narrative -- for an example... I know that rain falls. It's easy to say only that. I want to know what the character feels when it falls and what he/she thinks how that will affect his/her prospects. That's what Martin manages to pull. To make us a part of his story.

This story is a treasure of ambiguous words, symbols and interpretations, intriguing as much as annoying. I read this looking in vain for tangible facts – the only ones I got were against the main character, who seemed totally irrational bunch of extremes not only in descriptions but in actions, which made the whole reading experience worse than everything I've read so far. Henry James must have felt proud of himself for making such a piece of work, open for many different interpretations (which means you hardly can make a mistake in revealing one of yours). Some observations and actions of the main character must have had something with the victorian stiffness and its false morality in the days story was written, because I sensed there's more to it than it looked like, but at the moment it seemed to me simply dimwit and illogical. The way the governess behaved with the poor kids, and how she interpreted their words and actions, no wonder they were out of their wits.Anyway, The Turn of the Screw is a delight for an English class, even a title is a story for itself, but if you want to simply enjoy the narrative, this one you won't. It's irritatingly slow and indeterminate interpretation of the events from the person you wish to slap more than twice because of constantly blurring and twisting the facts that were anyway scarce and debatable, and especially because of avoiding the concrete purposeful actions that would make sense of the whole story.

Such a sad tone overwhelming the whole novel I haven't seen before. And yet, you come to terms of understanding why, and above all the horrors you read about, you surrender to that sadness just the same as the characters in the book.

Really remarkable and disturbing book, not a science fiction in the strict sense of speaking but an alternate reality. Even that notion of the category doesn't matter at all - it was only a perfect setting that enabled the author to bring to life so valuable characters you would really like to have for friends and lovers because they feel so close to you, and yet there was very high barbed wire put forcibly between them and... us. This book makes us to ask ourselves, who would in such a world be more human, them or us? I know what I think and what I would do. But I am not among the ones who decide in our name... And they rarely do read and ponder about such questions.

It's hard to make comparisons between the first book and this one - both were amazing, but the stories are so different. I might complain that Lisbeth from the first book is completely different person than Lisbeth in this book. The character really isn't consistent, but I do not care. Maybe because the whole story is completely different and might be read separately from the first part, so no great harm done, if you are not too picky. I usually am, but in this case, I really do not care, because, honestly, I had doubts about Lisbeth from the first part, so nothing could really surprise me in this one.
Anyway, I definitely intend to read the third part.

The book is remarkably well written, fast-paced, intriguing and very easily adaptable into the movie, which I am now very keen to see. On the other hand, I can't give it the highest score, as the novel raises some questions that actually cannot be answered as the story has to be accepted the way it is, if you intend to enjoy it, but they bugged me anyway and made the whole story somehow unconvincing. I also do not feel enough attached to the characters, so overall I do not intend to read the sequels (yet).

In short, this is the novel about the gruesome story behind the disappearance of one member of the wealthy Swedish family and the investigators' ethics, considering their knowledge, how they obtained it and what should they do with it.
This is the novel really worth of your time. Not usual, certainly, there will be some shocking scenes and descriptions. The style is also unusual with a lot of references to modern technology (and brands -- IMHO, that should have been cut out - it isn't really important, it just irritates, as any kind of advertising does). But overall, really interesting read, and definitely not undermining the intelligence of the reader.
I've heard a lot of admiring remarks about main female character, Lisbeth. She indeed has unique personality, but I felt some inconsistencies regarding the way she is described, as I've read and seen some things before, about such issues as she has - probably the story about her develops better later, in the next two novels.
I liked very much the descriptions of Swedish countryside, actually all the descriptions of such nature - I could understand what the author was talking about, I could feel myself being there on the spot. And that's what I regard the real value of the writer and of the novel - to be able to transfer the reader (for a couple of hours or days) into another (fantastic or realistic, doesn't matter actually) realm.

I've read this book two days ago, and I still do not know what exactly to think about it. My colleagues at work are delighted by The Pillars of the Earth, while I am not, not really. I'll list three... no, four main reasons why, but before that, if you haven't read the book, I must say novel is perfectly OK as entertainment, therefore read it as such, and skip my rant below if you do not want to spoil the pleasure of reading.
One... The story, the idea itself is good. The way it develops throughout the book is neat, it's obvious the author took great effort in keeping the story in the line, BUT it seemed more like Spanish soap-opera than anything I have seen before. Here we have good and evil characters, that do not change not even a little bit, no matter what happens, that it sometimes bordered with stubborn idiocy, for both sides. Although I must admit I loved the character of prior Philip.
Two... The descriptions. I accepted that the author doesn't know to describe more than a blushingly red cheek of the character, but it annoyed me after a while. Also, the author tended to repeat himself quite a lot, describing the events that happened before again and again. I know that the purpose of them was to depict the character's reminiscences of them, but hell, every time it looked like the intro to the TV-episode - What happened before... Those paragraphs simply were superfluous, because his writing was simple enough that the reader doesn't need to be reminded of anything again. And again...
Three. The explanations. One thing really irritated me. The tendency of the writer to EXPLAIN everything that seems to be unusual to the modern reader, while it was quite common in the middle ages. For an example, he felt the need for explaining why one carpenter brought whole his family to work on the cathedral. What a surprise - they were all some kind of carpenters, woodcutters, etc, and that was outrageous evidence of nepotism. The very idea of the word nepotism was I believe unknown back then, as this was the way things worked then -- it was more rule than an exception that the sons inherited the business of their father, or went to work on something similar, so as to obtain the job available as soon as possible. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I should have been taught by the author that it was not normal even in medieval times. But I would rather prefer that he left it unsaid, as some other things also said, because I think that the comments from the modern perspective destroy every effort of the writer to transfer the reader to the times he is writing about.
Four. The sex and religion. Yes, both in the same sentence, because those are two subjects the author specifically mentions in his foreword. He admits that he doesn't know much about the religion. Indeed, that was painfully obvious while reading the book. First of all, the main bad guy kept doing really evil things because the priests kept forgiving his previous evil doings. And he felt the fear of hell only after being reminded of it, but anyway forgot it after the confession. WTF??? No one, however big idiot might be, can believe in such a thing. There's no priest who can erase such huge sins as he committed. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Also, the writer randomly depicted the bad priests as god-fearing, although they did very very bad things. That's contradictory in itself, and one do not have to be a man of faith to know that such acts definitely do not lead to the stairs of heaven. Ah, I almost forgot sex. Celibacy is something the author does not understand, and he even said in one sentence that the priests cannot understand what a love is between man and woman, because they do not know what is it. That's foolish to say, although the priest wouldn't literally know what it means, he is not blind nor entirely void of the emotions love can cause. Love has many forms, not only sexual ones. We are today too often witnesses of what happens when the sexual tension between partners wanes. Therefore, I consider it foolish of the author to base the love between main characters on the physical looks and the sex.
Oh dear. I never wrote such a long review before, I must stop here. Sorry for ranting.

I was completely at loss after reading this book. Was it supposed to be funny or serious? I did laugh at some parts, but that laugh was more incredulous, in the way -- is author really trying to tell us that the weapons (and more importantly, decisions) of any kind of destruction are in the hands of... idiots?
The results of his research (more or less accurate, you can't be certain that no one didn't just play games with one silly ignorant journalist as he sometimes seemed to be) are presented inconsistently, the only thing connecting them was some idiotic idea of new age invader army delivering flowers with smile to scared local peasants-would-be-enemies, from which it seems that all the evils in the book took the original inspiration.
This kind of journalism, non-fiction, whatever, does more harm than good. Sometimes you have only one chance to say what you have to say, because people tend to not listen anymore once you ridicule the issues they think are important. And I really hope that this book won't outweigh other books that tackle these issues more seriously. Otherwise we won't be better than those dangerous armed id-- err... 'military officials' in the book.

Amazing read - who would think that the story about rabbits can be so overwhelmingly interesting? Kids will enjoy it definitely, without looking deeper in, while grown-ups may enjoy the analogies with the world of humans, how it should (not) be organised, especially if aware of the circumstances in which the novel was written.
Really excellent book, recommended for every age!  

This book was way too smart for its own good.
Story was great, narration and intertwining of the plots perfect, but the choice of words and the characters themselves (all of them) were so scholarly perfect, cold and distant.
The author tried so painfully hard to show her eloquence and her meticulous knowledge about the Victorian era and poetry, that I couldn't really fully enjoy in the book.
In short, I felt like I was reading some extraordinary long lecture conveniently packed in a form of the novel.