"Fall of Giants"

Fall of Giants (Ken Follett)

I made it 300 pages into this before giving up. This is a historical novel about a bunch of different families starting just before World War I, and it turned into a real slog rather quickly. I couldn't put down a different Follett book, The Pillars of the Earth, and I really feel the difference is a simple one: Pillars of the Earth has one, single overarching narrative thread that may touch many people and subplots, but keeps everything tied together; Fall of Giants is missing this, and is instead very, very loosely woven from five or six threads that barely rub up against each other. Almost every character's thread is interesting, but jumping away from them to dive into another, almost totally unrelated one kills all the momentum, and eventually makes the book a chore to read. I'd recommend taking a pass on this one.

Grade: C-

"Journey to the West"

Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, translation by WJF Jenner) [Second look!]

Second on my hit list of the four classics of Chinese literature. Unfortunately, I couldn't really get into this the way I became absorbed in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I put this down to two factors: The first is that our hero, Sun Wukong, never really grew on me the way he apparently did with most readers. I just found him to honestly be kind of a dick and not very likable, and given that he's the star and main attraction of the story, this was a rather major impediment to my enjoyment. The second issue is that where Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical novel, Journey to the West is pure mythology, and a bit of a slog to someone like me who is not very familiar with Chinese religion and culture. It's tough to recommend this book for that reason; it's a classic story and a good translation, but I just couldn't make reading it feel like anything but a chore.

Grade: @_@

"The Pillars of the Earth"

The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

This is a massive novel set in England in the 1100s. I wouldn't describe this necessarily as a historical novel - there's none of the obsessive accuracy of, say, the Masters of Rome series. I'd describe this as more maybe historically-flavored. In either case, I believe it can also be described as a real page-turner; Follett juggles multiple story arcs and sets of characters in the 40+ years the novel covers, mostly centered around the town of Kingsbridge and its attempts to build a cathedral. It's all very entertaining, and Follett is great at juggling a big tale with multiple story threads. At first, even the small-scale ones are quite gripping - very early on in the book we're following a family that's cold and hungry in the woods who gets their pig stolen, and it was very difficult not to flip pages because I was so worried about them getting that pig back so they don't starve to death.
It'd be easy to slap an A+ on this book if it was all this good, but unfortunately the second half begins to drag and at times become quite tedious; at one point the focus leaves the more interesting storylines to focus on two young lovers, and I had to stifle some annoyed yawns after one of them was like "I love you so much that I'm never going to speak to you again," which kicks off a truly irritating batch of pages that doesn't really go anywhere or tie in to the rest of the story. The book does pick up again after that (although at this point Follett starts recapping earlier developments for some reason), before coming to a somewhat abrupt and bizzare conclusion, so you're probably looking at about 800 great pages and maybe 200 that you should feel free to skip. I'm looking forward to reading some more Follett books; even with the occasional stumble in this novel, I devoured over a thousand pages of it in five days because I didn't want to put it down.

Grade: A-